"[Ricky] This is Carrie Ricky." "Welcome to New York, New York." "I'll be joined by director Martin Scorsese to talk about his film." "1976. 31 years after V-J Day and fresh off the success of Taxi Driver at the Cannes Film Festival," "34-year-old Martin Scorsese left New York to make a musical melodrama on the MGM sound stages in Hollywood, USA." "Scorsese's film is a meditation upon, and criticism of, the Hollywood musical." "It's downbeat rather than upbeat." "Even the double title, New York, New York, reflects that duality, perhaps the contrast of artificial and real." "Scorsese didn't invent this genre." "It had been in movies he loved as a child." "Films like The Man I Love, whose music you can hear on the soundtrack, and My Dream ls Yours, a bouncy Doris Day musical about a flat love affair." "In Europe, it's the stuff of opera." "But in America, this potent mix of song, love, rage, envy and those other outsized emotions are the province of the violent musical." "Movies like A Star ls Born, Love Me or Leave Me," "Coal Miner's Daughter and What's Love Got to Do With It." "All have a female vocalist who survives an abusive mate and sings about it." "I think deserving a place among these legendary films is New York, New York, a movie that divides audiences today as it did critics then." "Upon its 1977 release, Pauline Kael called it "an honest failure"." "She was half right." "The film's emotional honesty, played out amid stylized Hollywood sets, is as off-putting as it is ground-breaking." "By exploring the dark side of a typically sunny genre, this daring critique of Hollywood musical romances is about conflicts but not their resolutions, about divergent characters whose lives resist that convenient happy ending." "World War II may be over, but the new battle is that between man and woman, bebop musician and swing songstress." "Scorsese's downbeat film debunks Hollywood's time-honored upbeat happy ending with a satirical production number, Happy Endings, which one antagonist correctly dismisses as Sappy Endings." "[Scorsese] Previously, I'd made pictures coming out of the only tradition I knew, an independent filmmaking tradition out of New York, in my case it had to be New York, where I lived." "It was more in the line of being inspired by a John Cassavetes film, Shadows." "Then, of course, having it even more entrenched in me when I saw Faces, his picture of the late '60s, I believe." "The only film I could possibly make was a film on location." "First of all, the studio system was pretty much gone." "I didn't know that." "As a film lover and student, I realized the studio system was going." "The great directors of the golden age, and writers and actors, were going." "Everything was changing in the '60s." "There was the "Hollywood on the Tiber"." "In other words, The Bad and the Beautiful became" "Two Weeks in Another Town, the two Minnelli movies." "In Two Weeks in Another Town, they're in Rome." "The same crew, actor and producer/director as made The Bad and the Beautiful, only now they're shooting in Rome, and they're at the end of their lives." "Samuel Bronston did films in Spain." "Pictures were being done in Europe." "The European film was much more popular and influential than American movies." "Basically, it was really a great time to start making films because there was so much inspiration, there was so much input from different areas." "The pictures that inspired me to make movies in the early '60s, the ones I really loved, were mostly from the golden age of Hollywood." "Then tied to that is the way Orson Welles showed what a director really does." "I mean, in his style." "In other words, what they call more of a self-conscious cinema where you see a camera placement, you feel the camera movement, you feel the impression of an edit, of a cut, sound cuts and things like that." "You begin to look at the films over and over and see how he got his effects." "The other director I was most inspired by was John Ford, where it seems seamless, you couldn't tell." "All it was was these images that came out of a kind of Celtic poetry, in a way." "You throw that into a mixing pot, then you add John Cassavetes' Faces, where the actors don't seem to be acting, they seem to be behaving, and the only way I could've made a picture" "was to take the cue from Cassavetes, get a camera from New York University, and some film, and start to shoot a picture on location in New York." "What I had tried to do, however, was to combine..." "I didn't realize at the time, but I was combining the elements I'm talking about." "Combining the life, I hoped, of a Cassavetes "behavior", in a way, with the actors, and a style that came more in the line of..." "precise camera placement, specific movement, more like Orson Welles, mixed in with Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard, all the other things that were happening at that time." "And so, pretty much, when I started making pictures, they were already revisionist, already revising genres." "My first real movie that I think about as a real movie is Mean Streets." "But that is very clearly, I always felt, a film that came out of the "gangster tradition" of Warner Brothers." "When Warner bought the movie, I was delighted 'cause it's in that tradition." "However, it was purely semi-autobiographical, shot on location, mostly, and combining, I guess, the expressionism of Welles and some of the other people I liked, with this upfront style of acting which didn't seem like acting, it seemed like documentary." "And this all led to refining that into Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, my first studio film, a year later." "Mean Streets was 1973, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore was 1974." "And in Alice, you get a real sense of what I was trying for in the Cassavetes style of working with and developing the actors, and documentary-like aspects, mixed with traditional American narrative cinema." "Alice came out of the Joan Crawford vehicles at Warner Brothers or the Bette Davis vehicles, pictures by Curtis Bernhardt, or even Douglas Sirk, which I've just now begun to like." "[laughing] After all our arguing!" "I've suddenly realized, Magnificent Obsession is really good. [laughing]" "It really is moving." "Anyway..." "And All That Heaven Allows." "In any event, I had seen them when I was young." "There was a tradition of a "woman's picture"." "Alice was my version, trying to combine it and bring it up to date." "And that led to Taxi Driver which was something, in my mind... 1975, from Paul Schrader's script." "...in which the style became more clear in my head." "And that was more like a combination of... a New York noir film, but really more like gothic." ""New York gothic" we were calling it." "Like a horror film only in a noir, in a way, and yet modern." "At that point, I remember reading in The Hollywood Reporter that Earl Mac Rauch had written New York, New York, about the big band era." "I told Irwin Winkler, who became e friend after he saw Mean Streets, that I'd like to direct this picture." "I'd just read about in The Hollywood Reporter." "And what I meant was, at least now when I look back at it, what I must've meant was, [chuckles] that I wanted to do a film to do with that period." "Because I was born in 1942, and the first music I heard, the 78 rpm records that my father had, were big band music, and my uncles." "I learned a great deal about music from him and my mother's brothers who were in the army and brought back lots of stuff and would teach me the differences between" "Tommy Dorsey and Jimmy Dorsey, and Benny Goodman, of course, and Gene Krupa and Artie Shaw." "All the way down even to Kay Kyser and people like that, which has become a staple on American Movie Classics," "Kay Kyser films." "Interesting for the time is all you can say." "But with that interest, the music was the key." "That's what got me interested in making the film." "But then I decided I really don't like films of the late '60s, early '70s." "Films that were period pieces made at that time, the female characters always wore hair." "If it was supposed to be 1870, the hair was from the '60s." "You can tell immediately." "Then in the '70s, something else happened there, where, even if the films were supposed to be shot in the 1920s, they still had a '70s flavor in terms of clothes and hair." "I felt this was very inaccurate, and said I'd love to try to make a picture that encompasses the music of the '40s, which is the first music I heard," "but the movies of the '40s, that is, the look of the '40s." "Even to the aspect ratio of 1:33, which is what we started with, Laszlo Kovacs and I." "We shot Happy Endings in 1:33." "But after the second day of shooting, we realized we couldn't continue because the sound stages had changed, everything had changed, and it was easier to shift to 1:66 and give a compromise there." "But what I really was interested in then was to recreate the look of the musicals of the '40s." "That is, postwar, because the film begins on August 15, 1945." "Post-war musicals." "[Ricky] When making this movie, Scorsese tried to follow the example of Vincente Minnelli's films." "He wanted to keep a continually moving camera, but to take it further." "Since it was about musicals, he let the music orchestrate how many times he cut and how he moved the camera." "The musical rhythms go with the music." "He would later apply these techniques to The Last Waltz and to Raging Bull and the fighting sequences he choreographed, and even to the pool games in The Color of Money." "As in all great dramas, everything we need to know about the characters is revealed in their first meeting." "Robert De Niro is Jimmy Doyle, advancing." "Liza Minnelli is Francine Evans, retreating." "New York, New York would be De Niro's third movie with Scorsese." "It was Liza Minnelli's first." "De Niro was accustomed to Scorsese's improvisational style." "Minnelli comes from the scripted tradition." "She felt very secure about her musical abilities, less so about being able to stand up to an acting heavyweight like De Niro." "Both Liza Minnelli and Scorsese had said that this beginning scene is a movie unto itself, that everything we needed to know about the characters is revealed." "After the nocturnal monochrome of Taxi Driven" "Scorsese was interested in color." "The almost painted-on color of Liza Minnelli's scarlet lips." "Jimmy Doyle's turquoisey shirt." "To get these effects, he hired cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs and the legendary Hollywood art director, Boris Leven, who had done movies as diverse as Alexander's Ragtime Band and West Side Story." "Leven was an old hand at creating simplified sets so the colors and the characters could stand out." "[Scorsese] Technicolor." "Here was the other big shock I didn't realize." "When I got to LA, I'd imagined that three-strip Technicolor was being used." "I'd forgotten, I didn't understand, that the old three-strip cameras were now museum pieces." "And it all shifted over to single-strand Eastman Color." "A lot of films shot on Eastman Color negative were printed Technicolor Imbibition, IB." "And those prints looked gorgeous." "Now, 1974 was the last time a film was printed IB in America, The Godfather ll." "And that was the end of it." "Mean Streets came out..." "The only thing of my own films printed IB is the Mean Streets trailer." "[chuckles] Everything else is Eastman Color." "We also began to discover that the Eastman Color was beginning to fade." "The prints were fading." "The negatives were also fading." "That's another issue to do with film preservation." "All the archivists and studio people are arguing as to how many degrees you store it at, and that sort of thing." "So that's still working out." "But the real shock was, this was before videotape, only being able to study movies in repertory houses and on television, when they were viewed on TV, when whoever took a whim to program it on television." "So, to study certain films, we'd only be able to get..." "In a repertory theater, you might see an edited version, the color had faded badly." "On TV, you look at a picture and it gets pinker and bluer every time you see it." "You'd rent a 16mm and the 16mm was faded." "It was hard to study the three-strip Technicolor I wanted for this because I would have to go back to the source prints, the prints that the studio had." "Some were nitrate so could only be screened on the lot." "Nitrate IB musicals were extraordinary." "Each studio had its own look." "Columbia had a look." "MGM had the most incredible look." "The MGM musical was the top of the line in terms of production." "Any, even a B-film at MGM looked better than an A-film at Columbia." "Columbia films, you look at them these days, and you can really see that the production value was very, very low." "Everybody remembers the story of MGM trying to punish Clark Gable by having him go to Poverty Row to do It Happened One Night." "Poverty Row was Columbia Pictures at the time." "It Happened One Night turned out to be a big hit, so instead of punishing him, it worked out." "But Columbia was pretty poor, the look on the films." "When they threw some money into it, like Cover Girl, or on Gilda, it looked pretty good." "Columbia's style lent itself later to pictures like From Here to Eternity, and more of a documentary feel, like The Wild One." "Some beautiful stuff that they did in the early '50s." "The beautiful use of Technicolor in The Jolson Story, for example, and Jolson Sings Again." "They're both Columbia films." "I remember seeing Jolson Sings Again with my mother." "It was the first time I'd seen anything of the filmmaking process onscreen." "It's very interesting." "I have such a warm feeling seeing it." "It's not a great picture." "Actually, it's better than The Jolson Story." "But it has that element." "Columbia did a beautiful job with it." "But MGM was the top of the line." "You had the greatest musicals out of there." "Vincente Minnelli films..." "How he changed the musical with Meet Me in St. Louis, in which the characters were able to..." "Instead of just the story coming from the tradition of the Ziegfeld Follies and variety shows on Broadway, boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl, with some wonderful George and Ira Gershwin songs thrown in..." "And you usually see this in the Astaire and Rogers films of RKO." "Here, what Minnelli did in Meet Me in St. Louis was incorporate the music into the emotional state of the characters, and the characters expressing their emotions through song and dance, and also plot, too, at times." "But it was interwoven with a serious story, and a beautiful vision of America, also, at the time, and it changed musicals forever, in a way." "MGM would spare no expense at that sort of thing." "Arthur Freed was the great producer of these musicals, from Meet Me in St. Louis to The Pirate to, in the early '50s, The Band Wagon which we studied a lot for New York, New York, especially the Girl Hunt Ballet." "You'll see lots of references, especially with De Niro playing the saxophone under the lamp at night." "Boris Leven, the great production designer, actually painted the spotlight on the ground as paint, and then we lit the paint." "That comes right out of the trumpet player in Band Wagon." "As he hears the trumpet, we see the fire escapes in a beautiful image." "We studied A Star ls Born, of course, too." "Warner Brothers had another look, an earthier look to their musicals." "They hit their stride in the early '50s with Doris Day and some of the stranger pictures that were made there at Warner's." "What I think happened, what I'm going for, number one, is that I'd expected to find that I could get the same powerful color image as the three-strip Technicolor, but it was all gone." "So I had to create it another way." "We studied these other movies." "We'd blow up these frames and tell Laszlo Kovacs, Boris Leven and Irwin what we wanted, and Boris understood and Laszlo did too." "And we started to paint, in a way, onscreen." "We started to paint the actors." "Even the men had a certain kind of make-up put on them to kind of give the impression of the make-up of three-strip Technicolor of the late '40s." "Mind you, we were interested in situating the film in musicals of the late '40s, postwar." "Something happened to the musicals at that time." "What happened, in my mind, was that a kind of noir element infiltrated these musicals." "Things that, before the war, were only hinted at, barely hinted at, in Meet Me in St. Louis, for example..." "After the war, in pictures like My Dream ls Yours, a Warner Brothers film, Michael Curtiz directed in Technicolor, starring Doris Day, Lee Bowman and Jack Carson." "It's a story about a career, a woman's career." "She's in love with the heel, played by Lee Bowman." "Jack Carson is a loyal friend who loves her, but she doesn't love him." "Basically, Carson's role throughout the piece is to support her and help her when she's having problems with Lee Bowman." "I think, in the ending, they cop out, in a way, and she winds up with Jack Carson." "But the reality is that, when we saw the film, on its first release, there were disturbing elements in it." "Something wasn't right personally and emotionally with the characters." "They had problems that were kind of talked about, arguments, and yet, suddenly, they'd have a musical sequence in which" "Doris Day and Jack Carson are dressed as big bunny rabbits. [chuckling]" "Trying to say, "it's OK, everybody, we're just hinting at these problems." ""It's all going to turn out all right."" "The other film that surprised me that way and had me watching it again and again, because as I got older I said, "Did I get that right?" "Did they mean that?"..." "The other film was Blue Skies, Stuart Heisler." "It's the only picture that Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire acted in together." "I'm sorry, the second one." "But the only color one. [laughing]" "Holiday Inn, obviously, was the other one, but I keep forgetting because I keep thinking of White Christmas." "Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire in this beautiful Technicolor Universal International no, Paramount film, directed by Stuart Heisler, whose films are quite interesting, as I see them again." "In Blue Skies, the female lead is Joan Caulfield, and it has Irving Berlin songs." "They made up a story to just throw in these Irving Berlin songs." "They're wonderful songs." "Whats interesting about it is how Bing Crosby was able to be so pleasant and charming and touch something in himself to play, basically, totally irresponsible characters and lovable heels." "And this film is a minor picture, in a way, but it's very evident in this film." "Joan Caulfield falls in love with him and marries him." "Of course, Fred Astaire loves her." "He's teamed with Bing Crosby, a close friend." "The film is situated in flashback, placed in a flashback style." "[clears throat] You have Fred Astaire, at the beginning of the film, talking in a special radio show where he brings people together and solves their problems." "He starts a story about "a great guy and gal who are friends of mine"." "They take you all the way back and Caulfield falls in love with Bing Crosby and marries him." "And Crosby shirks the responsibility of the relationship constantly." "He keeps buying and building new nightclubs." "The minute he gets into a place, he says, "This is what I've always wanted."" "Each nightclub has a theme:" "one is Southern with pancakes, another is a Russian place, another one is..." "I forget." "There was a Western-style dude ranch..." "Bing Crosby's character, no matter how irresponsible, was still very likeable." "But what he was doing!" "She has a child." "He doesn't visit the child." "He does see the child once, I think, in the film." "There were some feelings being expressed by the filmmakers against this character, and you felt it." "And Fred Astaire loved Joan Caulfield and she still wouldn't go with him even after she leaves Bing Crosby." "Fred Astaire, mind you." "There's a remarkable scene where he gets drunk, and he's about to perform a very difficult dance routine called the Heat Wave, the "Jamaican number"." "She says, "Don't dance the Jamaican number tonight."" "He goes, "Don't be silly." "I can walk a straight line."" "They do Heat Wave, a big production number and he falls." "And he never dances again." "And it's so depressing. [chuckling]" "But at the end of the film, they cop out completely with Fred Astaire bringing Crosby and Caulfield back together on the radio." "What were they trying to get at?" "The jealousy." "The competitiveness between the two men, and the competitiveness between" "Caulfield and Bing Crosby in their own work." "It was really interesting and these elements fed their way into Jimmy Doyle's character in New York, New York." "We wanted to go one step further where you add, what was influencing me at the time, an almost documentary-style of filmmaking." "Cassavetes, Elia Kazan, all of that." "I wanted to push it further and make Doyle not as likeable as Bing Crosby." "[chuckling] Make him irresponsible and not likeable." "Take that further and begin to explore," "I think, although I don't think I could've verbalized it at the time..." "We were living it as we were doing it." "I tried a new way of making movies on this picture." "After the opening scenes, that is the opening shots of him walking in the street and the introduction of Tommy Dorsey and the shots of the band, after that, I improvized everything, literally." "Normally, I plan everything in great detail, so if you improvise, it's within a structure." "Here, I tried not to do that and ran into difficulties." "And ran way over budget." "It was all meant to be a revision of the genre." "But the love note to the genre, the homage to the genre, was the way the film should look:" "the use of color, the framing." "There are very few extreme close-ups in the film." "There's only one, when she looks in the mirror." "The rest has to be, usually, a medium shot from below the knee up." "The French call that the "American shot"." "Very specific." "We actually took frames from other movies of the period and tried to recreate the sizes and the shapes." "It looks artificial because the films of the late '40s were artificial-looking." "The curbs in New York were never that high." "The extras in the background didn't walk like New York people." "They walked like they were acting-walking." "So, in a way, I wanted all that entire artificial look." "The taxicab scene with Liza and De Niro." "There's a process screen in the background." "You'll notice the shot in the back of the cab." "It's as if the front seat of the cab has disappeared." "I wanted it to have that look, but I wanted in the foreground the work that I had been doing with other films and the work I was influenced by, Cassavetes and Kazan." "I wanted something almost documentary-like." "But even more, so that we didn't know sometimes what was going to happen in the next scene." "[Ricky] Despite the improvised slapstick of this scene," "Jimmy's about to tell Francine something serious, the three most important things in his life." "This is where Francine learns that she can be, at best, third in the Jimmy Doyle priority list." "You want to know what interests me the most, Frances?" "One is music, number two is money and number three is... [makes kissing sounds] [chuckles] I got it." "[Ricky] This sequence amplifies the pick-up scene." "It reveals another contrast between Jimmy and Francine." "Francine is all dolled-up in a civilian suit, and Jimmy is rumpled in the clothes he wore last night." "The two characters embody elements of the script." "Francine is organized, structured, Jimmy is improvisational." "Francine likes structured music, Jimmy likes to improvise." "We'll see that in the next sequence, when the two learn whether they could actually do a duet." " You put it where, er..." " You put it where number three is." "That's..." "Wait, let me start all over again." "Let me get this..." " Three would be one..." " Then two is three." "Exactly." "And when you have that, you have what you call a major chord." " What's a major chord?" " When everything works out perfectly, when you have everything you want." "The woman you want, the music you want and enough money to live comfortably." "That's a major chord." "[car horns honking]" "Huh." "One, two, three, four." "[jazz music plays]" "[man] That's enough, Doyle." "Hold!" "Doyle!" " What?" " I've got a hangover." "That's loud." "Loud?" "What do you mean?" "You didn't dig those sounds?" "You didn't even let me finish the chorus." "[Ricky] The volatile chemistry between them explodes in this audition, where they realize that despite their conflicts, temperamental and artistic, they do make beautiful music together and this might augur well for a relationship." " This guy's got that kind of attitude." " Yeah, yeah." "The whole joint screams..." "Are you my agent?" "Want 10 percent?" "Huh?" "Sit over there." "I said when we came to sit over there." "Now sit over there." "See what you did?" "Come here!" "Come here." " Don't do that." " We do this all the time. [chuckling]" " [Francine] Don't touch me." " [Jimmy] All right." "I just wanted to say I'm sorry." "I just got annoyed with him." " I put my foot in my mouth." " How about my foot in it?" "How about putting your horn in it?" " That's what we're here for." " Give me a break." " Come here." " Get a load of this guy." " He wants you to go over there." " Come on." "Go there, go there." "Go ahead." "Try and understand my situation, will you?" "What I've got is a boy singer and an eight-piece polka orchestra." "Try Chevalier." "The guys coming back from France like that sound." " Chevalier?" " Chevalier." " Chevalier." " Yeah." "Hey, man, this isn't 1917." "You look a little more hip to me than that." "[Ricky] Jimmy refuses to play Chevalier." "That would be artistically impure." "But Francine surprises him here by taking a lead." "# They'd sing much sweeter Than they do" "# 'Cause you brought a new kind of love To me... #" " Play!" " [jazz music plays]" "[Scorsese] I find I need to express myself in American narrative tradition." "But there were elements I was influenced by which I talked about, which was the avant-garde films that came out of New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco in the '60s and late '50s, too," "and early '70s." "The entire output of European cinema that I had devoured over the years in the late '40s and '50s." "Then you had the new wave coming out of France and Italy and England." "Polish films." "Andrzej Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds." "Pictures like that." "I was trying to see if we could combine, because my foremost love is American movies, to combine the elements that the European and Japanese filmmakers had, which, in America, I guess, would be called art movies," "with the American mainstream." "As much as I love art films, I love Meet Me in St. Louis and The Band Wagon, all Minnelli's work, Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers." "Francine takes over, and there's just as much of a thrill as seeing a wonderful performer on-stage, like Frank Sinatra, or Liza on-stage, which is what I tried to recreate here in a few scenes." "The genuine thrill of watching a person perform that's out of a great tradition." "I love both and I don't know if both can be combined." "I'm still not sure." "Here's where the tension comes from, because I wasn't able to articulate it at the time." "This was, in a way, me making a real Hollywood movie and putting my own stamp on it." "What I mean by a real Hollywood movie is using the artifacts of Hollywood." "The fake New York street in the back lot, fake rain," "the overly studied montages, where they do the traditional night on the town." "We shot every one of those things." "We pulled some of the neon pieces from some old montages from old movies." "Don't forget, constantly, this underlying element of, I guess, the most powerful of them all, the most powerful film of all in this style, A Star ls Born, the George Cukor version with Judy Garland and James Mason." "That underlying taste, bitter taste, of competitiveness in the careers, stopping the movie and putting on a ten-minute musical number, which was wonderful to do." "Which is what we did in Happy Endings at the end." "Although Happy Endings had to look like the musical numbers MGM did in the first three years of the '50s:" "'50, '51, '52, maybe '53." "OK, four years." "Pictures directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly." "Or I Love Melvin, which is out on disc now, has a certain energy to it." "Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds." "Those films had a certain look." "And a certain style of shooting that was different from the musical numbers that Minnelli directed for the films with the big production numbers in the late '40s and early '40s." " [man] Oh, Miss Evans!" " What?" "[man] Telephone. it's your agent." "He's been calling." " You can take it here." " Thank you." " Tony, it's nice to hear from you." " Yes, sir." "May I help you?" " I'd like to check in." " Just sign the register." " Do you have any more bags?" " Yes, I have one in the cab, if you wouldn't mind waking up the bellhop." "Send him outside." "I'll pay the bill also and put it on this bill." " That'll be fine." " We'll wake him in a few minutes." "I'm sort of ready to go back to work." "I'd like a little rest." "[Ricky] There's an inside joke here." "Jimmy registers as M. Powell, or Michael Powell, a favorite Scorsese director, the man who directed The Red Shoes, another movie about the conflict between love and work." "Maybe we can send the bellhop to get it." " We'll put that on the bill." " When he wakes up, we'll send him." "All right, Jimmy." "Look." "Take this." "This'll be enough for a room for tonight." "Go anyplace else." "It's a lot easier if I come up." "I'll sleep in the bath." " No." " A lot easier." "Please take this." " it's a lot easier." " Just take this, Jimmy." " 12 o'clock?" " Yes." "Twelve." "I promise." " All right." " Suite 415, sir." "Forget it." "He doesn't even wake up." "I'm not interested." "Sorry you feel that way, sir." " That's a great suit." " Thank you very much, Miss Evans." "Tony." "What do you want?" "Right, Frankie Harte, 7:30 tomorrow morning." "No!" "No!" "Jimmy!" "Jimmy!" "Jimmy!" "[jazz music plays]" "[Ricky] This song is Fit as a Fiddle." "The next line is "and ready for love", which comments on the plot." "But this sequence shows us that" "Jimmy is more comfortable doing his artistic improvisations as a soloist than in playing compromised music," "Chevalier music, with Francine." "This is where his real heart is." "And here comes Lionel Stander, possibly best known as the gravel-voiced narrator of TV show Hart to Hart, but also very famous in Hollywood as a character actor." "He was e press agent in the 1 937 version of A Star ls Born." " No." " You're the sax player, ain't you?" "Yes, but I'm not Jimmy Doyle." "Can you communicate with Jimmy Doyle, the sax player?" "It depends." " I have an important missive for him." " A what?" "A billet-doux." " A billet-doux?" " Billy who?" "[instruments play]" "I'll elucidate." "A tender message from a certain female party." " For me?" "For him?" " Precisely." "Take it, Doyle." "It's from Francine." "She said she had a wonderful time." "[indistinct dialogue]" " Wait, I'll be right back." " Where are you going?" " Ain't she coming?" " I'm getting her." " Ten minutes or you're fired." " Who cares?" "Hey, man, whoa!" "Can I talk to you for a minute?" " Did you read this letter?" " Of course not." " You think I read letters?" " Your name is Tony Harwell?" "That's right." " You're an agent?" " Yeah." " You're her agent?" " Of course." "She says, "Just ask Tony if you need any help." "He appreciates talent."" " Let me see that." " I can't show you. it's personal." "She also said that she's with Frankie Harte's band and there's a possibility of a spot for me." " Possibility." " A possibility?" "That's right." " You're an agent?" " I reiterate: yes." " Would you be my agent?" " No." " Why not?" " I'm satisfied with my client list." " You're making a mistake." " I've made lots." "I'll make another." " This one's on me." " Where is she?" "Why should I tell you, if she doesn't tell you?" "Why do you take the time to come to Brooklyn to give me this if you don't think she cares enough about me to let me know where she is?" " Doesn't that make sense to you?" " It should, but it don't." "They're in Asheville." "But don't mention my name." "If Frankie asks, I don't know you, I haven't met you." " Where is Asheville?" " Where God lost his shoes." "Where God lost his shoes." "Good answer." "Thanks." "I'll find it." "It's a resort in North Carolina." "Thanks for telling me." "Any other advice for me?" " Stay off the junk and you'll go far." " Fine, thanks a lot." "[saxophone plays]" "[Ricky] Jimmy begins this sequence in his style, this song is Once in a While, which Scorsese musically and visually connects with Francine delivering it in her musical style." "# Once in a while" "# Won 't you try to give One little thought" "# To me?" "# Though someone else may be" "# Nearer your heart" "# Once in a while" "# Won 't you think of the moments" "# I shared with you?" "# Moments before we two" "# Drifted apart" "# In love's smoldering embers" "# One spark may remain" "# If love still can remember" "# That spark may burn again #" "[Scorsese] The idea of the major chord..." "De Niro and I felt that there was something about the way real musicians express themselves." "We wanted to cast as many real musicians as possible." "Clarence Clemons, Georgie Auld, who was really almost Jimmy Doyle's character at times." "He was almost patterned on Georgie Auld, personally." "He was quite a character, a pretty strong personality." "At times, extremely funny." "At others, quite edgy and interesting." "He had that edge in him we really liked, that made it kind of dangerous at times." "That's where you get the danger with Jimmy." "He had friends who were musicians and we put them in the film." "One of them was the bus driver." "Forgive me, I forget his name." "You can get it off the credits." "His philosophy was the idea of the major chord." "We loved that idea so much that we incorporated it into the script." "I believe it's in the taxicab scene." "Later on, his nightclub's called The Major Chord." "What has to be understood is that" "I wanted Jimmy to be a character who was tough and obnoxious at times, but the passion between the two of them is what kept everything going." "They could not be away from each other." "Really, I felt that Doyle should have setup goals for himself that were almost impossible to attain." "Which is the fact that he loved..." "He wanted to be..." "He wanted to have the kind of pure jazz expression of the great black musicians." "And he's not." "He simply is not that way." "He expresses himself other ways." "He had to find his own expression." "How to work through his instrument, how to express himself through that instrument." "But he had, in a way, punished himself constantly by setting up goals which were unattainable and falling in love with a person whose work and career reflects a totally different kind of approach to music, and to show business:" "Broadway musical, musical comedy films coming out of Hollywood." "And I think, in him, inherently, that was something that he looked down upon, which caused a great deal of friction between the two." "What caused the most friction between the two was, I felt the unavoidable, unfortunately unavoidable, in most cases, situation of competitiveness, as two creative artists in a relationship." "And I think the best scene in the film that shows that is the rehearsal scene where she counts, "One, two, three."" "He says, "Don't ever do that." "This is my band."" "It got down to petty things." "That scene was one of the best improvisations because I did it the way I did Alice and Mean Streets and others, where we did the improvisations weeks before and wrote them out and it became a structured scene." "Other scenes were improvised on the spot and that got me into difficulties at times." "[Ricky] Nearly every scene in New York, New York underscores one basic theme:" "personal relationships come between an artist and his or her work." "Notice how Francine is torn between Jimmy's courtship and the demands of her job." "You're upset because I didn't come to you in person and say goodbye." "Right." "And another thing:" "You don't say goodbye to me, I say goodbye to you." "In no way do you say goodbye to me." " Oh." "Fine." "Go ahead and say it." " What?" "[Ricky] Fake snow, fake trees, all the better for Scorsese to experiment with the realistic behavior and emotions of Jimmy and Francine." "I see." "I just wait until you say "come here"." "And when you do, I'm supposed to come here." "Look." "You think I came all the way here to argue with you?" "You think I came all the way down here, chased you, to argue with you?" " I'm just confused." " By "major chord" I meant you." "Sometimes you really are hard to understand." "You're hard to understand." "Don't change the subject." "I love you." "I mean, I don't love you, I dig you." "I like you a lot." "I mean..." "I wouldn't come all the way here if I didn't, right?" "Yeah." "Oh, Jimmy." " How do you feel about Texarkana?" " What do you mean?" "Frankie said that, if you came down, you could audition." " I could audition?" " Yeah." "Forget it." "I'll play for him." "I won't audition." "OK." "Oh, Jimmy." "[saxophone plays]" "[Ricky] Apart from being a tribute to '30s and '40s films that lyrically, and wordlessly, show accelerated time, this montage shot shows the artist's life as a non-stop journey." "[Scorsese] One of the main sources of inspiration over the years has been music." "If I go back to this picture, if I think of New York, New York," "I immediately see in my mind my father's 78 rpm records, and a sepia photo of my mother's two brothers, two of her brothers in their army uniforms in Corona, Long Island," "Corona, Queens, I should say resting their right leg on the bumper of a car and looking at the camera in those uniforms." "One other piece of very important music to me, which is used in the film, by the greatest European jazz musicians at the time," "Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli and the Hot Club of France." "The piece of music I use is called Billets Doux, roughly translated as "Love Letters"." "Those were also 78 rpm records my father had." "That particular one, as a child, was my favorite." "I would listen to that constantly." "That piece of music, along with the photograph of my two uncles, is what clicked in my head as my personal way into the film." "That's why it's used at a pivotal moment, when she decides to go to the Harlem nightclub where he's playing when she's at home alone and pregnant." "If you listen to the Django Reinhardt piece in the film..." "That piece is memorized by me." "Plus other songs they had on the album at the time." "And since then, even more so because I've collected most of his work." "I sort of get images in my mind when I listen to that music." "Most music gives me images." "And so I make up my shots, or the shots seem to come together as I'm listening to the music, and the music is in bars." "Certain shots in my mind go for three bars or four bars, or one just goes for a chorus and one for a whole verse." "So, I decided I'd start shooting the musical scenes that way." "Whereas you don't have four cameras and shoot an orchestra, then do it in the editing, which becomes more selecting than directing." "Here it was, literally, from this bar to this bar, there's one shot." "That's the shot we have to get." "When you cut, from the tail of shot A, you go to the head of shot B." "That goes on for three bars, and that is the only shot covering." "In other words, you don't have any other coverage." "That was what I stumbled on 'cause I couldn't seem to express myself any other way." "I later used it in Raging Bull for the fight scenes, where the choreography of the punches and the movements of the bodies corresponded to bars of music." "That's why the fight scenes were shot that way." "Most of the shots I do come from listening to different types of music." " No, Jimmy." " Come on!" "Let me see." " I don't want to. it's private." " it's only a poem." " it's for me." " You never let me see what you write." "I'm embarrassed." "You wrote all this about me?" "it's all about me?" " Most of it." " it's all about me?" " Yeah." " Not anybody else." "Me." "That's right." " Get your shoes on." " Are you all right, honey?" "I know it's not very good, but..." "Come on, get them on." " Come on." " I don't know what we're doing now." "[Ricky] Even in the most life-and-death situations, Jimmy improvises, all the way with Justice of the Peace." "Francine isn't sure, and they will continue their patented power struggle on whether they should do things impulsively or think about them beforehand." "According to cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs," "De Niro accidentally punched out the pane of glass and the actors incorporated this into the scene." " You knocked?" " Yes, we, er..." "Sorry..." "Are you the Justice of the Peace?" " That's right." " I'm sorry about the window." "Is there a possibility that we could be married now?" "We're in a hurry." "Please close yourself, honey." " Now?" " Yeah." "Please." "We'll make it worth your while and pay for the glass." "Please?" "Well..." "I guess..." "We can arrange it." "Come on." " No." "Just a minute." " Aren't you sure?" " Yeah, just one second." " You're kidding?" "That was it?" " What?" " Your proposal?" ""Get your coat and shoes, let's go!" That was it?" " What's wrong with that?" " [woman] They're not sure." "We're sure." "What's wrong with that?" "I guess I thought it was going to be different." "It is different." " Anything wrong?" " Nothing." " They're not sure." "Believe me." " No, I just thought..." " What?" " I thought it would be different." " It is different!" " I know." "The kind of different I had in mind was maybe sweet and calm and..." "It is calm!" "I'm sorry." "Just a little..." "And pretty, you know." " it's pretty!" " You can't say that." " It is pretty." " You can't say it's pretty." "I want to marry you!" "Please, go inside." "This is private." " [glass being stepped on]" " Would you wait one second?" "Did you hear what I said?" "I want to marry you." "OK?" "What do you want me to do?" "You want me to kill myself over this, darling?" "When I say "now", you back up." "That's it." "Jimmy, I..." " Don't back up!" "Don't move!" " Now!" "No, no!" "Don't shift, don't do anything." "Just stay..." "Will you please get out from under there?" "This happens all the time." "Will you marry me?" "I love you." "Will you marry me?" "I don't want anybody else to be with you." "I want to be with you." "I don't want anybody else to be with you except me." "I love you." "I love you." "Look at me." "I love you." "I love you, too." "[chuckling]" "Wait..." " See, that was terrific." " You liked that?" " Yeah, I liked that." " It was a lot better?" " Yeah." " Oh, good." "[Francine laughing]" "No!" "[jazz music playing]" "[Ricky] Francine and Jimmy marry at a time America is settling down and there are fewer people to go out and listen to music in clubs, as this abandoned ballroom tells us." "[Scorsese] The clashing styles..." "It made it..." "How should I put it?" "First of all, it was very difficult because every time we set up a new shot, we had to remember that there were two different styles in the same frame." "And so, it was exciting, but, at the same time, I felt very..." "Excuse me." "I felt very... unsettled and anxiety-ridden because of the nature of the improvisation." "I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to put in that frame." "Boris Leven had designed the sets." "We all agreed on that." "That looked extraordinary." "But often we'd improvise ourselves out of one set into another." "But into the wrong one [chuckling] and we'd have to wait for another set to be built." "So, basically, I think when they go for the job with Dick Miller, they play A New Kind Of Love." "We'd worked on that scene a while." "It got to that point and we were supposed to move into another set." "We'd improvised the story another way." "We wound up reshooting certain pieces and building little bridges." "A similar thing I did in After Hours, where we'd shot so much and the story had gone on for 2% hours, when we realized the film has to be shorter in order for it to work." "We dropped whole subplots and shot a couple of pieces to bridge those subplots, to bridge the missing section." "Then, I was jiving you." "I mean it." "I'm going to pack it in." "You remember we used to go out and do 80, 85 one-nighters in a row." "Yeah." "Those joints aren't ballrooms any more." "They're parking lots, skating rinks." "The theaters are all bombed out." "I've thought about letting somebody else front the band, take a piece of the action." "I wouldn't have to lift a finger." "But only one guy can front this band." "I know." "Jimmy, right?" "No." "Me." "And if I go, the band goes." "it's game over." "You know that." " Sure you won't have a little taste?" " No, you have it." "Beautiful." "I will." "Maybe Jimmy would consider..." "You said he's good." "You think he's good." "He's not only good, baby." "He blows a barrelful of tenor." " But he's a pain in the ass." " I don't want to start this argument." "But he's a top pain in the ass." "Top pain in the ass." "You want to say it three times for luck?" "Three is my favorite number." "Top pain in the ass." "[jazz music plays]" "You're right." "But he's good." "I'm sorry, Mr. Doyle." "it's not quite what I had in mind." "Yeah." "Sorry, fellows." "[indistinct chatter]" "Mr. Horace, I know it's not Frankie Harte." "We can do that stuff, too." "Just give us another chance." "This guy must be crazy." "I made a deal with Frankie Harte and his Orchestra, not Jimmy Doyle and his Flying Sack O' Maniacs" "This is Frankie Harte and his Orchestra, without Frankie." "Frankie wouldn't give us the band if it wouldn't work." " That's true." " What do you have to lose?" "What do I have to lose?" "Does this look like a peanut gallery?" "It looks like a place that needs someone like me." "[laughing]" " [Jimmy] Give us half a chance." " [man] Where's the girl singer?" " Is she stunning, blonde?" " Stunning, blonde." " She walks, she talks..." " She'd better be good." " Right, number 358." " [man 2] Horace, have you gone crazy?" "Why do you want to listen to the singer?" "Of course I'm crazy." "How do you think I wound up in this business?" "Hello, Mr. Morris." "[Ricky] The difference in Jimmy's and Francine's musical styles is highlighted in this scene by the resistance to Jimmy's music and the easy acceptance of Francine's traditionalism as she launches into The Man I Love." "# When the mellow moon begins to beam" "# Ev'ry night I dream a little dream" "# And of course Prince Charming is the theme" "# The he for me" "# Although I realize as well as you # it is seldom that a dream comes true" "# To me it's clear" "# That he'll appear #" "[Scorsese] One film I didn't talk about was The Man I Love, directed by Raoul Walsh, with Ida Lupine, I believe." "Yeah." "That was a main influence on the picture, along with My Dream ls Yours, Blue Skies and a number of others." "I didn't talk about it because it's black-and-white." "There's a big difference." "It has more of a noir element than the others." "I was very interested in the fact of a noir film hiding under the guise of a musical, in color." "That's what interested me." "Noir themes and ideas." "Unpleasantness hiding under that Technicolor." "And in terms of my own personal approach to all of this, there's no doubt, I was trying to find a way to express some semblance of my own personal life in the story of the picture." "But it's not in one specific person, it's not in one specific time." "It's something that's been going on in my mind, still does:" "the work bringing people together and the work driving people apart." "And 20 years later, I don't have an answer for it either. [laughing] 20 years later, I really don't know." "It's a matter of maybe taking it a little easier on the people around you and on yourself." "That came out of Raging Bull." "That's what Raging Bull was about." "Coming to some sort of terms with this conflict." "# He 'll build a little home" "# Just meant for two" "# From which I'll never roam" "# Who would?" "Would you?" "# And so all else above" "# I'm waiting for" "# The man" "# I love #" "[Jimmy] Thank you, Francine Evans." ""But the winner is singer Francine Evans, a spirited filly whose musical pace is as smooth as her form." "Miss Evans is headed for the winner's circle."" " Jimmy, see this?" " I saw that, yeah." "The guys are all excited, everybody's all buzzing around, and Paul had a good idea." "He said we should take the best quote about your band and put it outside." " Good idea." " Maybe take something to Downbeat." "Very good idea." "We might get another week out of this hotel with this." "Did you get a hold of that trumpet player?" "Oh, yeah." "I called his wife." "She'll give him the message when he calls." "Let's go with Charlie Baxter." "Yeah, I like him." "OK." "I don't know if he'll go for the money that we can pay." "That's your problem." "That's your department." " OK." "I'll see you later." " Thank you, Paul." "We've never made the papers before." "it's wonderful." "Thank you." "It's really good. it's great." "# ...taking a chance on love" "# Here I slide again #" "I know, I know." "Hold it, fellows." "[Scorsese] My favorite scene is..." "I have two things, really, but number one is this scene in which they're rehearsing with the band." "The whole conflict of who's in control, creatively, comes up between them." "It's nothing to do with the band." "it's between them." "Whose work is better?" "Whose artistic instincts are more pure?" "I think that's what it's about." "And the anger and embarrassment and difficulty of that sort of thing." "And also how hard it is to create anything of an artistic nature, get a group of people together and try to do it." "That, for me, is the best scene in the film." "Of course, the scene I like to look at is the Happy Endings sequence." "It has little to do with me." "It has to do more with Kander, Ebb, Boris Leven and Liza." "Ron Field did the choreography." "He was so wonderful." "Larry Kert, Jack Kelly Senior and Boris Leven, of course." "And that was edited by Carl Lerner." "Unfortunately, he died Christmas Day 1975." "He just edited that one sequence." "Then he was gone." "# I'm all aglow again Taking a chance on love" "# Here I slide... # Where on earth are you going, Nicky?" "You're rushing like we're in the racetrack." " I'm picking up your tempo." " Did you have a fight today?" " No." " Then what's wrong?" " Nothing." " You're not picking up my tempo." "You're doing what you're always doing." " Your wife is slowing it down." " What am I doing?" "Wait a minute!" "She is slowing it down?" " Yes." " I am not." "I can handle it." "We have been through this 50 million times." "You always give me a hard time." "Can't you read this?" " Now I can't read?" " Not if you can't do that." "I studied at Brooklyn Conservatory and Staten Island Conservatory for three years." " You did?" "It doesn't show, man." " It doesn't?" "Maybe this will show." "I'm packing my axe and my hooks and I'm cutting out." "That shows." "OK, I want to show you something." "OK?" "Happy?" " Yeah." " Good." " Are you?" " Yeah." "It's funny." "I'm happy, too." "Got it all out of my system." " Feel better?" " Much better. it's very good out now." "OK, can we start all over again?" " I feel much better." " Good, OK." " One, two, three..." " I'm sorry." "I know we've all been working hard." "We've been working too hard." "But, like the man says, if we get this right, we'll blow the roof off this place." "So, why don't we really try?" " All right?" " Yeah." " One, two, one, two, three, four." " One, two, three, four." "# Here I go again I hear the trumpets blow again" "# All aglow again Taking a chance on love #" "Francine, come here." "What?" "No, I want to hear this." "You do not kick off the band." "I kick off the band." " Don't treat me like that." " Don't ever do it again." "Ever again." "Let's go." "From the tag." "One, two, one, two, three, four." "Come on." "# Taking a chance Taking a chance" "# Taking a chance on love #" " Like that?" " Yeah. it's good." "# What are your charms for?" "# What are my arms for?" "# Use your imagination" "# Just you" "# Just me" "# I'll tie a lover's knot" "# I'll tie a big fat knot" "# Round wonderful" "# Your" "[Ricky] New York, New York chronicles two musical evolutions." "Jimmy's improvisations and experimental style, but also Francine's evolution from a big band singer in the tradition of Doris Day and Jo Stafford, into a performer like her mother," "Judy Garland, and herself, popular interpreters in a tradition that continues today until the 1990s." " Are you all right?" " She's all right." " Whats the matter?" " I feel terrific." " Are you sure?" " I'm not sick. it's just that I..." "I guess now is as good a time as any." "I'm going to have a baby." "[Scorsese] Liza was a wonderful actress in" "The Sterile Cuckoo and especially Cabaret, and Junie Moon and pictures like that." "I really liked her a lot." "And the power of her presence, simply, the presence of the woman, on-stage, or even in person, just off-stage, is really unique." "And has such a force to it, has such power, that I wanted to tap into that, that energy in the film." "And, in a way, I wanted to show how she could become that, how Francine Evans could become Liza in that sense." "It culminates in New York, New York and But the World Goes 'Round, and moments like that." "I felt that casting is 98 percent of the job." "Also her sense of timing and sense of humor." "Very, very good." "That helped a lot in the improvisations." "Also, a person who seemed to be willing to go, willing to take risks and chances." "This is very different from a normal musical." "So, there were no problems." "Even to the point where they got into a physical thing in the car when she's pregnant." "We were talking about improvising something like that." "She goes, "You go ahead and I'll just join in." ""I'll follow you and do the best I can with it."" "There was no problem ever of anybody fighting what I wanted to do." "It was a matter of my not being clear enough how to do certain scenes." "I could lose this kid if I travel, and I don't intend to." " I just said, we'll ride in a car." " Do you want this baby?" " Yeah, I want the baby." "Of course." " Do you want this baby?" " What do you mean?" " You know what I mean." " I want it." " Then I'm going to New York." " You're going?" " Yes." "Go to New York." " Jimmy, I'm sorry." " There's nothing to do." "If you get pregnant, you get pregnant." "That's life." " I just want you to be happy." " I'm happy." "I just want you to be so happy so much." "I'm happy really." " Are you really?" " Yeah." "[sobbing]" " Oh, brother." " I've got just the thing for you." "Saltine." " I can't keep anything down." " It settles the stomach." "Take it." "The Chicago reviews were great, so something big is liable to happen." "Meanwhile, I've set you up for some easy work." "Studio stuff, so you can pick up a couple of bucks." "I don't think we'll need money." "The band's doing so well." "Now listen." "With a kid coming, you can always use some extra money." "[jazz music plays]" "# Blue moon" "# You saw me standing alone" "# Without a dream in my heart" "# Without a love of my own" "# Blue moon" "[Ricky] Here's Mary Kay Place, a cult figure in the late '70s for her stardom on a TV sitcom called Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman." "And her character is proof that Francine is irreplaceable." "The quality of music in the Jimmy Doyle Orchestra sinks and sinks and so does the number of listeners." "# Blue moon" "# Now I'm no longer alone" "# Without a dream in my heart" "# Without a love of my own #" "[scattered clapping]" "That's a take on Jo Stafford." "Let's try Peggy Lee." "Hold it!" "Hold it!" "Wait just a second." "She's fantastic." "Terrific singer and terrific girl." "And she's as sweet as she sings, off-stage." "[Ricky] If Francine brings Jimmy into the mainstream, what Jimmy does for Francine is make her pursue a career as a soloist." "# Came to bat at the beginning" "# Thinking that my team was winning" "# Now I'm at the final inning" "# Score A big fat nothing #" "[Ricky] As in many two-career movies, such as A Star ls Born and The Man I Love, the success of one partner is counterpointed with the failure of the other." "[woman sobs]" "What did you say?" "[woman] Finished." "I want to die." "You want to die." "Come on out, baby, for Chrissakes." "Come on." "[woman] I'm never going to sing again." "She doesn't sing now." "She won't sing again." "I said everything is going to be all right." "You'll sing with Paul Wilson." " Come on, now." " No, I'm never coming out." "Paul is waiting for you, baby." "They're all there." "Let's go." "I'm no bimbo, you know." "I see the writing on the wall, Jimmy." "What writing?" "Did I ever call you a bimbo?" "After all we've been through, is that what you're going to say?" " I hope I can trust you on this." " You can." " I hope I'm not signing my life away." " Just the band." "That's enough." "OK." " The schedule's inside." " The bus schedule?" " All right." " Good luck." " Say hello at home." " I will." " Keep in touch." " OK." "See you in the Apple." "Good trip." "Move over, honey." "The 8:02 eventually." " Bring her back, Jimmy." " I'll bring her." "And The Times, too." "[Ricky] Note that Jimmy's not the one riding off into the sunset here." " Maybe another nail?" " We have seven in there already." " An even eight?" " Hold your side a little bit over..." "Jimmy!" "Jimmy!" "[piano plays slow tune]" "it's pretty." "[Ricky] Together, Jimmy and Francine have two collaborations." "A song and later a son." "The things that bring them together are also the things that divide them." "Each is personally happier pursuing music on his or her own terms." "Remember this?" "This old song I wrote for you?" "How can it be old if you wrote it for me?" "It was old when I wrote it." " I'm working on the words." " Are you?" "[Ricky] Jimmy improvises, Francine thinks out beforehand." "She's writing a song that would be the testament to their collaboration." "I've heard it's going to be a nice day." "Whats the Theory of Relativity?" "That light is curved?" "I don't know." "They say that only five people in the whole world know really what it's about." "The .laps understand, from what I know." " Do you want to talk about it?" " What do you mean?" "About the band and how you feel and how you are." "I don't know." "It just didn't work." "I got worried when I didn't hear from you for three days." "I thought you were coming home and you didn't and..." "Well, I was..." "Didn't you get the telegram that I sent?" "No, I didn't get it." "I didn't send a telegram." "I wanted to be alone for a while, figure some things out." "I stayed down south for a while." "I understand." "No, you don't." "Don't tell me you do." "But I had to do it, baby." " I understand that I don't understand." " That's being better." "[man] Sammy Sparks!" "Sammy Sparks!" " Hey, man." " Jimmy!" "Hey, how have you been?" "How have you been?" "Meet some friends of mine." " This is Booty, this is Washington." " I hear you play a mean tenor." "I've heard about you, too." "[coughing]" "How have you been?" "What are you doing?" "I went on the road with Frankie Harte, then I took the band over myself." " Kind of slipped away." " No." "You heard that?" "Yeah." "A little talk about it around here." "No, it didn't slip away." "What happened was, you know..." "I was working with bad musicians." "You can't pitch new cats in Scranton." "You've got to come back to the Apple." "Same old faces, same old place." "I wonder if I should be back here." "Listen, man, I've got a little thing going" " over at the Harlem Club." " Oh, yeah." "Some really good oats." "Come over." "I will." "I've heard a lot about it." " One problem, though." " What?" " Do they let white cats in?" " You come round the back." "[all laughing] [jazz music plays]" "[Ricky] Notice in the background here the Henri Rousseau-like backdrop of The Dreamer in the Jungle, which reflects Jimmy's ventures up into Harlem." "[crowd cheering and clapping]" "[Ricky] So many of the conflicts in New York, New York take place in a car or a taxi." "It's as though Jimmy and Francine are one automobile and two drivers, always battling for control." "Remember that oat Cecil Powell I always used to tell you about?" "We'd better go to lunch." "I'll explain to you there." " What am I getting into?" " A Buick. 1941 green Buick." "Just get in." "Trumpet player OD'd." "Long story." "Just get in the car." "I'll explain to you later." "If you don't get in, I have no way of talking to you." "I'm not going to shout it in the street, so get in and I'll explain." " You remember Cecil Powell?" " Yes." "I met him and went to Harlem, this new club." "It was fantastic." " Why didn't you call me?" " Why should I?" "I'd be home soon." " So there was no reason to call." " Jimmy..." " Hi, there." " Hi." "How are you?" " Are you pulling out?" " Do I look like I'm pulling out?" " Excuse me." " Yeah?" "I don't mean to..." "Would you look at me?" "If I look at you, I'll get upset." "Yo!" "Hey, look at me!" "I can't believe this guy." "I'm looking at you." " You're being unreasonable." " Too bad." " Just a little bit inconsiderate." " [Jimmy] I can't believe this guy." "I'm being inconsiderate?" "You know what I'm doing?" " I'm arguing with my wife." " [cars honking]" "If you can help me solve the problem, you can have the space." " You don't have to get nasty." " Just a minute..." "[Jimmy] Get off my back, for crying out loud!" " I don't want to hear it." " Get out of here." "Beat it, will you?" "Don't mess with her." "The same to you!" "You're not getting this space if I have to die on the floor." " I hope you pop!" " You'll never get this space!" "[car honking continues]" " Creep!" "Creep!" " [Jimmy] I hope you never get a space!" "I hope you travel round the block 50,000 times." " That was dumb." " Let's go for lunch." " I'm not hungry." " Honey, you're pregnant." "Let's forget about this stuff and go and eat." "That's right." "I am pregnant." "I'm six months pregnant." "So you're going to have to pay a bit more attention to me right now." "You opened the door for me." "You didn't even wait to see if I got in." "I have trouble getting around now." "What do you think I am, a dummy?" "I just lost the band." "If it had clicked, I'd still be with the band." "Right?" "When you wanted to come back to New York, did I stop you?" "No, I didn't, right?" "So, you can't stop me." "And I don't like you doing that stuff there." " What stuff?" " The demo stuff." "You're too good for that." "They should be doing that for you." "So, you'll be up there at nights?" "You'll be there almost every night?" " So..." " The other guys are married, too." "I know." "Well, I'll have to take the day shift and you take the night shift, hmm?" "Honey, you're making it very hard on me." "You want me to smash this to pieces?" "Is that what you want me to do?" "That's what you're telling me to do." "This is the most important thing to me besides you." "If I can't do this, I'm not good for you or anybody." "Do you understand?" "[Scorsese] The relationship between De Niro and myself was a collaboration." "Though unintentionally, we were more collaborators." "And after New York, New York..." "Having gone through that, we were able to do more clearly, Raging Bull." "It was a testing ground." "We didn't know it at the time." "Working on some ideas and really experimenting, and finding out how to clarify, quite honestly." "For example, the long cut that everyone talked about," "Brian De Palma, Sam Fuller and everybody at that big screening, that was over four hours." "But that was not a cut, it's an assembly." "Any assembly is two-thirds or one-third the length of the normal picture." "The problem was should it be 2% hours, 2:45 or 2150?" "It was that kind of thing where it ultimately didn't matter." "If it was 2:46, it really didn't matter." "You cut 20 minutes out of it and you still had the same narrative problems." "You still had the same demand on the audience." "Look at this." "Oh, honey." "You were looking at the words to the tune, huh?" "Yeah, I was." "[Scorsese] The changes in the film fascinated me." "Maybe I tried to cover too much territory, but August 15, 1945, the change in the world, in what's happening to humanity, the change in Hollywood and the change in music..." "It goes through until the big montage at the end in which it's the '50s, '57 or so." "Until that big change at the end." "I think there's almost a almost a resigned sadness about the change, but at the same time, an acceptance of life and how it goes, as she sings The World Goes 'Round." "It all shifts and different values come about." "There are certain key songs, like The Man I Love, a song I adore." "But we also used the verse at the beginning 'cause it's so beautiful, the poetry of it." "A New Kind of Love, an homage to one of my favorite scenes in Monkey Business, where they try to imitate Chevalier getting off the boat." "I thought it was very funny." "When Day ls Done is in the film, too." "It's a song my mother used to sing." "She liked it a lot." "Each song, each traditional song, each standard, had its own meaning for me." "I can't talk off the top of my head about them." "I'll park the car." "Oh, I'll tell you..." "I'll park it." "[Ricky] Note the dazzling set, one of Boris Leven's simplest and most memorable." "Neon red bathing everyone in the colors of passion and blood." "[jazz music plays]" "Ellen!" "You're looking wonderful." " Hello, Artie, how are you?" " How's my girl?" "Thank you very much." " Thank you." " Jimmy's parking the car." "# ..." "I haven't a chance" "# True I've been seen With someone new" "# But does that mean That I'm untrue?" "# When we're apart the words in my heart Reveal how I feel about you" "# Some kiss may cloud my memory #" "[Scorsese] Liza and I worked together specifically in a palate of colors." "I'd show her many different pieces of Technicolor films of the late '40s and early '50s." "We even screened a print of Lady in the Dark also, which had a certain Technicolor look, but the print was faded." "We even saw Leave Her to Heaven at the museum in Los Angeles." "20th Century Fox screened their IB nitrate print of that." "The use of color was important." "Boris Leven came with us." "But we really dealt with the palate of colors, specifically, frame by frame, scene by scene, working very closely with Theadora Van Runkle on costumes." "Richard Bruno also helped with the costumes." "Where the colors of the materials and the combinations of colors..." "How, if he wore a light blue jacket, he'd have ultramarine blue pants with a buff-colored shirt." "This is all clearly worked out with Laszlo and the costume designers to give the impression of three-strip Technicolor in the late '40s." "The other thing was composition." "I'd show scenes from the old films that related directly to compositional devices I wanted to use in the picture." "And, possibly, I believe, the use of no real long lenses in the picture." "I may be wrong, but I think we stayed with the 32mm lens, shot everything as much as possible, which had a neutral effect, didn't distort anything." "Could you give this gentleman a sloe gin fizz?" "And step on it." "I don't even know what a sloe gin fizz is." "He doesn't want a sloe gin fizz." "What do you want?" "You know what I'd like?" "A big glass of milk with about 12 shots of Scotch in it." " Why don't you just get a fix?" " She said it." " It's reasonable." " A little ice?" "A bucket of ice." "Tell you what you do, waiter." " You've got the order?" " Yes, sir." " A quart of milk..." " Milk isn't necessary." "All right, milk isn't necessary." "And give this lady a pink squirrel." " You got it?" " Let me see." "A sloe gin fizz..." " No, forget that." " I'll have that." "She'll have the sloe gin fizz." "Sloe gin fizz is on again." " A sloe gin fizz..." " You're smart." " A sloe gin fizz..." " A sloe gin fizz." " A quart of milk..." " Forget the milk." " Sloe gin fizz, quart of Scotch..." " Quart of Scotch." " Bucket of ice." "And you, sir?" " No, zip for me." " Thank you." " Yes, sir." "[man] Jimmy, for a minute can I grab your ears?" "I've heard nice things about you." "Your wife tells me your band used to blow the roof off." "Look, man, I'll be straight with you." "I don't want to be here," "I don't want to listen to this music." "I don't give a damn for that stuff." "Let's go." "If nothing else, we can get a tan here." " The place stinks." "Let's go." " You're hurting me." "I'm sorry." "If you came with me, I wouldn't have to." "Let's go." " Jimmy, relax." " Come on." "No." "No." " I don't want to go." " You want to stay?" "Somebody will take me home." "I can get a ride home." "What's the matter with him?" "A few hours from now, it's forgotten about." "You'll be home and it's over." "Thank you." "We're going to take a snort intermission." "Everything all right?" "Yeah." "So, Jimmy finally got here?" " Hey, Jimmy." " Paul, how are you doing?" "Give me your hand." "Come on, reach out, reach out." "Come on, Jimmy." " Are you all right?" " Can I tell you something private?" " Yeah." " Do you mind if I touch you like that?" "I'm jealous." "I think you're so good that I can't even top you." " I'm really flattered." " You should be." "A great compliment for a great musician." "From a great person." "Everybody feels you're great." "Even your wife." "Even your wife, man." "[Scorsese] Between the color palate that we had worked on in devising designs of color for each scene in the film, we also designed the color of the people." "That had to do with make-up, but also, most importantly, costume design." "Theadora Van Runkle and Richard Bruno worked together." "Mainly Theadora, as I recall, and we emphasised we exaggerated certain elements of clothing to emphasise the look, to give an impression, if you just glance at the screen, you say, "That looks like the late '40s."" "In particular, the shoulder pads for the men." "If it was a certain size, we'd say, "Give it another half inch, the lapels."" "The width of the ties a little wider, the length of the collars a little longer." "We exaggerated those elements so we'd have the spirit of the time." "If it was too realistic, I don't think..." "The realism we would've got hung up on and been confused with was the realism of the actual period, 1947-1948." "I was interested in the realism of the Hollywood movies of 1947-48." "The clothes were different." "So, that was the extra element that was added." "Get up!" "Mac, help me with this guy." " Come on, come on." " OK." "OK?" "Don't you guys know how to talk?" "Just relax." "It's all right." "You take it up the block." "[Scorsese] Bob and I would improvise a lot and go off in a corner and talk, but she became part of the group and we pointed out to her that the relationship between De Niro and me was and still is a very private, trusting relationship," "and we might appear to be excluding people at times, but that's not the case." "It has to do purely with his character, purely with the levels the scene is supposed to go to, details of his character, that sort of thing, and possibly suggestions to push the scene another way or go further." "She was always there, and literally said, for example, that thing in the car." "We talked about it privately, then I came and said we got this idea that it should erupt into a violence." "And she goes, "OK, I'll go with it."" "And she would add to it once we were set on doing something because I worked very closely with him on the picture at the time." "I'm really sorry about last night." "I was trying to figure it out." "I..." "I'm sorry." " I'm sorry." " I'm sorry, too." "[Scorsese] In the film, I hoped, at this point to kind of increase the kind of escalate the conflict, in which she's home alone, pregnant, just looking at photographs of the life she had." "Basically, it's that major conflict in life." "It's that business of if you want to get involved in a life like this, it's very difficult to raise a family and give the attention to the child." "You find very often, in certain relationships, the women are the ones who go under, in a way, artistically, because they've got to..." "It depends on each relationship." "But often they can't work, they've got to take care of the kid, they don't have the money, someone's got to take care of the kid, and the woman winds up with the great responsibility there." "I felt that she was feeling that as a character." "She was feeling desperate, not being able to express herself." "Did I make a mistake?" "Should we have gotten married?" "Should we have had this child?" "And it makes her do something which is not usually in her character." "It makes her provoke the situation." "In the hopes, I think, of settling everything once and for all." "If it's not going to work, it's not going to work." "Let's break up." "That sequence is very clear." "That wasn't improvised." "The dialogue was improvised, but the elements were there in the script." "That's why I used Django Reinhardt because that's the music that is the key to me, that inspired me to make the movie." "Looking in the mirror, she realizes she has to provoke." "I don't think she can articulate it, but she says, "To hell with it, I'm going up there."" "[jazz music plays]" "[man] Come on." " Jimmy?" "it's Cecil." " [Jimmy] Cecil who?" "Come on, man." "Cecil B. DeMille." " I've got your lady out here." " [Jimmy] I've got your sister in here." "Come on, man." "She's got two cats with her." " We're having a conference." " Your old lady's here." " My old lady?" " Right outside." " A record deal or something?" " Yeah." "I wanted you to meet him before I did anything." " Yeah, sure." "All right." " OK." " Why did you bring him here?" " I couldn't reach you on the phone." "He's got to leave tomorrow." " Have a seat." " Thanks." " On a break?" " No, but I've got a minute." " Good." "We can talk, then." " Sure." "You remember Artie Kirks, Decca Records." " I know the label very well." " He wants to sign her." " What?" " He wants to sign her." " To where?" " On a label." " To a record contract." " Oh, yeah?" " Great." "That's great." " You think so?" "Sure, sure. it's great." "I wanted us all to meet tonight so I could ask if you approved..." "Excuse me, darling." "If there are any problems, that's what I'm here for." " There's no problem." " Everything's fine." " Then everything's fine." " Not quite." "I would like to know more." " You mean the deal?" " Exactly." " it's logical." " When I heard her, I said, "That's it."" "Absolutely sensational, fantastic, a smash." " I tell you, from my mouth, this is it." " And this isn't just for one shot." "One of the things I'm not comfortable with is the travelling." " The promotional tour." " Is that a problem?" " I don't know if I want to travel." " What about the baby?" " Exactly." " There's nothing we can't handle." " There's no problem we can't solve." " Let's hear what they have to say." "I'm just emphasising, putting in an exclamation mark." " Very good." "Go ahead." " What about the kid?" "Oh, the baby." "You're going to get it first class." "I'll get you the best nurse, a car." "I'll treat the kid like it's my own." " You just sing." " It will be in the contract." "[Scorsese] At the same time, it was my fourth major movie, and I was dealing with the same things in my own life, I would think." "And I think the key one was certainly..." "Besides the relationship between Jimmy and Francine, and the competitiveness, and the concept of two creative people being in love and finding that extremely difficult..." "At that time, I couldn't articulate that." "I knew that's what it was, but I couldn't articulate it." "But what I could articulate is Jimmy trying to be "an artist"" "in a commercial world." "That's what I was doing in Hollywood." "To this day, I have that struggle, where, for better or for worse, the films I want to make are in the American narrative tradition." "Which means I deal with certain things, and one of the biggest is the box office and "how much can I get away with?"" "I believe that's what Jimmy comes out of." "I think that's what Jimmy's main thrust is, to be as much of an artist as possible." "[Ricky] Here's Diahnne Abbott." "Apart from being a two-time Scorsese actress, she plays De Niro's girlfriend in King of Comedy." "She was, in real life, Mr. De Niro." "# Every honeybee Fills with jealousy" "# When they see you out with me" "# I don't blame them Goodness knows" "# Honeysuckle rose" "# When you're passing by" "# Flowers droop and sigh" "# And I know the reason why" "# You're much sweeter Goodness knows" "# Honeysuckle rose" "[Ricky] Abbott singing Honeysuckle Rose, a song made famous by Lena Horne in an MGM musical, Thousands Cheer." "# You're my sugar" "# It's sweet" "# When you stir it up" "# When I'm taking sips From your tasty lips" "# Seems the honey fairly drips" "# You're confection Goodness knows" "# Honeysuckle rose" "Yes, this looks better." "Thick, sweet." " All right." " Got any other colors?" " We've got one with a lot of colors." " I'll try that." "# I don't buy sugar" "# You just have to touch my cup" "# You're my sugar" "# It's sweet when you stir it up" "# When I'm taking sips From your tasty lips" "# Seems the honey fairly drips" "# You're confection Goodness knows" "# Honeysuckle rose # [applause]" "Thank you." "[jazz music plays]" "[plays a faster tune]" "Yeah!" "[Jimmy] What the hell are you doing?" "Once again, Scorsese's chosen battlefield for Francine and Jimmy is the car." "Who's driving?" "Who's being driven?" "is Jimmy Francine's chauffeur?" "Or is he in control of the fight?" "The conflict is heightened by her pregnancy." "The scene, both Scorsese and Liza Minnelli said, was inspired by" "Lana Turner's melodramatic sequence in Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful, where Lana Turner goes out of control and so does her car." "No, I didn't tell you." "You had it." "You have it, now keep it." "That's it." "Keep hitting me." "Go ahead, hit me, that's right." "You had it!" " Now you're crying." " Be quiet!" "When it gets tough, you cry." "I'm not going through this any more." "You said it." "You want that." " it's not what I want." " It is too what you want!" "It is not what I want." " I'm scared." " You're scared?" "You're scared?" "What about me, for Christ's sakes?" "You've got everything, man." "I'm the one that's scared." "Not you." "Me." "You've got it easy." "I've got nothing." " it's always you." " Damn right." "The way you had the kid when we shouldn't have had a kid." " You don't care about me." " What are you crying for?" "CW, Cry!" " You don't care." " I do care." "You do not." "You know what you care about?" " Your clubs..." " I care about you." " ...your friends..." " I care about you." " ...and your music." " Damn right!" "That's special." "If that's the problem, I don't care." " I do care." "That's not the problem." " You don't." " You do not care!" " I do care." "Crazy." "Driving me crazy." "[Ricky] "You're driving me crazy," means many things here." "Don't hit me!" "Don't you ever hit me!" "Now I'll get you." "Damn!" "Jimmy." " Jimmy!" " What?" " What's the matter?" " The baby." "The baby, Jimmy." " Take it easy, honey." " I'm scared!" " I'll get us to a hospital." " Oh, my God!" "Where's a cop?" "When you look for one, you never find one." "Oh, God!" "Oh, no!" "Oh, no, no, no!" "Don't worry, honey, you'll be all right." "Don't get excited." "How are you doing?" "Is everything all right?" "Yeah." "Good." "Did you see him?" "Who?" " The baby." " Oh, the baby." "It's a him?" "Yeah." "I named him Jimmy." "You named him Jimmy?" "This is official?" "You named him Jimmy?" "Yeah." "There's one thing that you're wrong for doing." "You should have let me decide with you instead of just giving him a name." "I am the father, no matter what the situation is." "You should have at least let me do that." "[Ricky] Again, Francine's unilateral decision to name the baby makes Jimmy feel superfluous." "Jimmy Senior can't see his namesake because if he looks, he'll stay." "No way." "[whispering] I don't want to see the kid because, if I do, I'm going to break up." "I don't want to see..." "What good is it to see the kid?" "I wish this lady wasn't here." "How can I see the kid?" "What am I going to say?" ""Hi, I'm your father." "I'm going away."" " Are you going to see him?" " I can't see him today." "I'm sorry." "I'm sorry, too." "Jimmy..." "I don't want to use my handkerchief." "it's the only one I have." "There's no way it's going to..." "I love you." "But it's not..." "All right." "I'll just go." "Jimmy..." "Jimmy..." "I don't know what else to say." " Goodbye." " Goodbye, baby." " Goodbye." " I'm sorry." "I love you." " Goodbye." " Goodbye, honey." "That's the last." "Mr. Doyle, I can take you to see your baby now." "[Ricky] Along with the new birth of their baby comes the death of their relationship." "# ...round And round and round" "# And round and round" "# The world goes round And round and round" "# And round #" "I'm sorry." "Can we do it again?" "I'm sorry." "[man on P.A.] OK, here we go." "Stand by." "Take 18." "[piano plays]" "# Sometimes you're happy" "# And sometimes you're sad" "# But the world goes round" "# And sometimes you lose" "# Every nickel you've had" "# But the world goes round" "# Sometimes your dreams" "# Get broken in pieces" "# But that doesn't alter a thing" "# Take it from me" "# There 's still gonna be" "# A summer A winter" "# A fall And a spring" "# Sometimes a friend" "# Starts treating you bad" "# But the world goes round" "# And sometimes your heart breaks" "# With a deafening sound" "# Somebody loses" "# Somebody wins" "# One day it's kicks" "# Then it's kicks in the Shins" "# But the planet spins" "# And the world goes round" "[Ricky] But the World Goes 'Round." "She sings about the merry-go-round of love." "She's gotten off the carousel once." "Will she get on again?" "And in this scene, Scorsese spotlights her because Francine has found her spot as a soloist, as Jimmy had found his own in a previous scene under the streetlamp." "# Sometimes your dreams" "# Get broken in pieces" "# But that doesn't matter at all" "# Take it from me" "# There 's still gonna be" "# A summer A winter" "# A spring" "# And a fall" "# And sometimes a friend" "# Starts treating you bad" "# But the world goes round" "# And sometimes your heart breaks" "# With a deafening sound" "# Somebody loses" "# And somebody wins" "# Then one day it's kicks" "# Then it's kicks in the Shins" "# But the planet spins" "# And the world goes around" "# And round and around" "# And round and round" "# The world goes round" "# And round and around" "# And round #" "[Ricky] The world goes round for Hollywood's great technical artists." "Hairdresser Sydney Guilaroff did the coifs for Minnelli's mother, Judy Garland, and now he's doing Liza's coifs here." "Hold the photographing." "She's very nervous." "# Happy endings all around me" "# Happy endings" "# All I see are happy endings" "# On a silver screen" "# That's Hollywood" "# Lovely lady Gallant fellow" "# Meet one evening Hear that cello" "# Troubles come between" "# But in that final scene" "# Count on a Happy ending by a river" "# Happy ending on a mountain" "# Happy ending in a Broadway show" "# But oh" "# The life I lead is less dramatic" "# Not remotely cinematic" "# Happy endings" "# Far as I can see" "# Are only for the stars" "# Not in the stars" "# For me" "[Scorsese] Happy Endings was in my mind from the beginning, to stop the movie and put on a production number." "Because of the story, it had to come near the end." "So we thought, "l think it'll work."" "So, the first ten days of shooting, we shot Happy Endings." "It was a wonderful experience." "It was really created by Kander and Ebb." "I told them what I wanted." "We studied Born in a Trunk and a few others, Girl Hunt Ballet, Limehouse Blues, and a number of other things Minnelli did." "There's another very famous one, Singin' in the Rain, of course." ""Got a song, gotta dance!" The Broadway Melody." "The movie stops, you go off and become something else, then come back." "I love that sense of freedom." "It gave us a great chance to do something in production design." "It would be a lot of fun and the music would be wonderful." "Between Leven and Kander and Ebb, we came up with some wonderful stuff." "But then I changed the style of the shooting." "I started improvising to the point where I wasn't sure where we were going next, the specifics of the scene." "For example, we knew Jimmy and Francine had to break up." "But what the stages were, we weren't quite sure any more." "And what eventually happened was that" "I wound up shooting the film for almost 100 days." "And, in the editing, we were up against a very short release date." "After this was all over, Irwin said to me," ""I'll never work for a release date again."" "'Cause we felt we ruined it in the editing, in this sense that, at a certain point, there was a different cut of the film every four days." "We'd screen it for people, students, friends." "A lot of the friends were very supportive." "The students weren't." "It was very difficult." "Classes of students from different universities." "It was a difficult experience." "What we wound up doing was, at a certain point, the picture was about 163 minutes with the Happy Endings sequence complete." "We screened it every week and looked at the whole film recut." "Happy Endings would come on and we'd say, "Now we've got to sit there for another 10 minutes."" "The whole movie would stop and that would happen." "We weren't sure what the value of it was any more." "At a certain point, they begged me," ""You're holding on to Happy Endings because it's the first thing you shot." "The movie's become different since then, and you're immovable." "You're doing it almost for yourself." "It may not be the best thing for the film."" "These were my friends and the people making the film with me." "After one meeting when we were trying to lock the film in a week and a half, a friend took me aside and said, "You've got to rethink this." "Show the picture once with most of the Happy Endings scene cutout." "You might find it'll move faster, we'll get the point across, etc." "And it might just be a breakthrough."" "So, we looked at it once and I said, "Yeah, let's keep it out."" "I think it was mainly because we were so tired, and because it was presented as, in my mind, maybe I was just being stubborn." "Maybe I wasn't thinking what was the best thing for the whole film." "So, we cut it." "But that's the only thing that was really cut." "When the film was released, it didn't do well." "So, on its second run, United Artists asked me, they didn't do it, they called me and asked," ""Maybe you could shorten the picture for its second run for us." "Maybe you could." Because there were sequences that could come out." "So we could make back some money, 'cause the film was way over budget." "So for the second run, I was very depressed about it and said," ""All right, let's drop the sequence in the Up Club, the neon club, that is."" "Inadvertently, I dropped the reason I made the movie:" "the Django Reinhardt song." "That was inadvertent." "Her eyes looking in the mirror." "All of that gone." "I was working on something else at the time." "That was it." "So the film was then cut down to 136 minutes, I guess." "For its second run." "When it played at the Ziegfeld in New York, and the Cinerama Dome in LA, it was the complete version, with two-thirds of the Happy Endings sequence cutout." "So, it didn't do any business, and it was very difficult for me." "And finally, in '81 the film was restored." "The sequences cutout for its second run were put back." "Which means that it was simply the version originally released." "We also put back the rest of the Happy Endings sequence." "And it seemed the Happy Endings sequence satisfied the audience's need for a happy ending." "In a way." "It was as if you had it in the dream." "And you go back to the reality, he walks away, she walks away, they don't show up for the date." "That was kind of an interesting thing." "But reviewers who did not like the film when it came out re-reviewed it and liked it then in '81." "One also has to understand the period in which the film was made." "It was 1977 and Marcia Lucas was the main editor on the film with me," "George Lucas's wife at the time." "She was, on the weekend, going up to work on Star Wars." "And Star Wars opened a week before we did." "And the whole industry changed." "The outlook on film changed." "The entire audience changed." "Everything changed." "The country changed." "The story is told faster." "The story of Star Wars is told faster." "It's based in myth." "It's based in stories that go back to the beginning of time, and you have very clear-out good forces and bad forces." "It has a spiritual level that everybody could tap into." "It began a technological change that had begun with 2001." "But it became very clear that audiences almost wanted to become part of the film in a fantasy world, in a way, and behave in the film as if..." "When I saw the rough cut, I told George it's going to be great because, even though I didn't see the blue screen, the fighting scenes," "I said it's almost like an arcade game." "It has the same energy." "The audience can almost participate in this." "The special effects are beautiful and so much fun." "It's so enjoyable. it'll be great." "It began a whole new way of looking at films." "It changed the audience too." "The big moneymakers up to that time were Gone with the Wind," "Godfather, then Jaws, I think '75," "The Sound of Music and pictures like that." "Then suddenly Star Wars, Close Encounters and many other quite beautiful films." "But they changed the kinds of films people in Hollywood wanted to make." "So, you had lots of descendants of that style." "It reached its peak in the '80s, where it was very difficult for me to even get a film made, not the kind of film I wanted to make." "I was able to with the After Hours, but I had to make it for a shoestring budget." "In any event, everything had changed." "So, in '81 when they wanted to put it back together, as Irwin said, "What have we got to lose?" "It opens a second time and we see what happens."" "It also helped that the song was extraordinary." "The original music that Kander and Ebb put in was beautiful." "Especially New York, New York, and The World Goes 'Round." "Especially New York, New York." "We knew it on set." "When the playback music came on, everybody said," ""This is a great song." "This'll be very popular."" "But, of course, the film didn't do any business." "The song wasn't even nominated for an Academy Award." "I may be wrong, but the song from The Omen won." "Good of its kind, for the kind of picture it is, but it was very different from New York, New York." "I think, possibly, Frank Sinatra's recording of New York, New York helped set the mind of the audience to see this picture again." "'77 to '81, five years or so, six years." "I think, maybe, when the film was re-released in '81, the initial need of an audience for films in the tradition of Star Wars had dissipated somewhat." "They could see the picture for what it was, what we were trying to do." "# Are not reserved for stars" "# No, no, no, no, no" "# They're in the stars" "# For me #" "[Ricky] Happy Endings is an homage to the Born in a Trunk sequence from A Star is Born, starring Liza Minnelli's mother, Judy Garland." "In New York, New York, it recapitulates the entire movie." "We see a young woman, a man trying to pick her up, her resisting him, very much like Francine and Jimmy in the early sequence of New York, New York." "Later, the man, Donald, who turns out to be a Broadway producer, helps build Peggy Smith up, but leaves her because he doesn't want to be Mr. Peggy Smith." "Scorsese uses this sequence to show now movies resolve tensions that often remain unresolved in real life." "Peggy Smith is a movie usherette who wails that happy endings are for the stars, but not in the stars for her." "Yet she's played by Francine Evans who knows that happy endings aren't in the stars for her in her real life." "In the 1977 version of New York, New York, when two-thirds of Happy Endings was taken out, it left the second half of the movie feeling rushed." "Once restored in 1981, it balanced the film and gave it a fourth movement that sums up the plot in the same way that the overture of Jimmy and Francine courting introduced the movie." "Thank you, ladies and gentlemen." "Thank you." "Now I'm proud to introduce an old buddy of mine." "We go back so long I'm a little embarrassed to tell you." "He's here with us tonight, Mr. Cecil Powell." "A big hand." " How are you two lovely ladies?" " Well played." "Terrific." "After this round, I'll get you a drink." "Thank you." "Give them ginger ale." "Anything they want." "I'm kidding." "You want to okay that guy's credit?" "The one sitting..." "No, forget it." "I might as well use that for wallpaper." "Would you excuse me for one second?" "[Scorsese] John Kander and Fred Ebb..." "Their ability to work within a personality and create material for Liza and others they worked for is a great asset." "New York, New York, Happy Endings, the idea came from me to stop the movie and put a big production number in the middle, or at the end, but they came up with the story, the songs and the lyrics." "We played around with the story a little, but with Boris Leven's production design, they gave one of the major contributions to the film, and all the music like The World Goes 'Round and New York, New York." "So, it was very difficult to make that..." "No, it wasn't difficult to shift to their music at the end because that's what Francine becomes, that's what it becomes, but the only sound she could have would be their sound, for me, in this particular film." "It couldn't be anyone else." "[Ricky] In the penultimate sequence," "Jimmy and Francine are in the room where they met." "The world goes round indeed, but will Francine get off the carousel?" "[crowd] More!" "More!" "For you!" "You're so wonderful." "Thank you so much." "Thank you for coming here." "I'd like to sing a song now." "It was written by a friend of mine who is a great believer in major chords." "[Ricky] Francine, too, recapitulates the theme of major chords." "The major chords that Jimmy Doyle will not see realized in his personal life." "# Start spreading the news" "# I'm leaving today" "# I want to be a part of it" "# New York, New York" "# These Vagabond shoes" "# Are longing to stray" "# And step around the heart of it" "# New York, New York" "# I want to wake up" "# In the city that doesn't sleep" "# To find I'm king of the hill" "# Top of the heap" "# My little town blues" "# Are melting away" "# I'll make a brand new start of it" "# In old New York" "# If I can make it there" "# I'd make it anywhere" "# It's up to you" "# New York, New York" "# New York, New York" "# I want to wake up" "# In the city that doesn't sleep" "# To find I'm king of the hill Head of the list" "# Cream of the crop At the top of the heap" "# My little town blues" "# Are melting away" "# I'll make a brand new start of it" "# In old New York" "# If I can make it there" "# I'd make it anywhere" "# Come on Come through" "# New York, New York" "[woman] I've also made an appointment for Jimmy for the inoculation." "[Scorsese] Actually, as I said before, I could not articulate fully what the film was about in terms of Jimmy and Francine." "The person who told me what it was about was Jean-Luc Godard." "He said to me, "l like the film because I tried to do it in A Woman ls a Woman, but it didn't turn out as well."" "He said, "This is really interesting." "I particularly like the scene where she's pregnant and Jimmy says," "'We'll get you a car.' And she goes, 'I can't do that'" "Yet when she is offered a contract by this new manager she has, Lenny Gaines, she goes to talk it over with her husband in the Harlem Club and points out that Lenny would get her a separate car, it would be all right."" "We instinctively knew what we were doing there, but I couldn't articulate it, and it took him to tell me about it." " I saw Sappy Endings the other night." " Happy Endings." " Yeah, Happy Endings." " Did you like it?" " I loved it" " Seen one, seen them all, huh?" "Yeah." "Pretty good." "Success hasn't changed you at all." "I'm only kidding." "I'm serious." "You know, I'm..." "I'm very proud of you, in a way." "In a way, I'm proud of you." " Well, I'm going to go." " Say goodbye to the kid on the way." " Did he get the drums I sent?" " Yes." "They drive me crazy." " That means he plays them well." " He's got a lot of talent." " Gets it from his father." " Gets it from..." " You weren't going to say "mother"?" " I was." "I just didn't make it in time." "We're going to start all over again now." "Well, I guess I'd better go." "So long." " Which way do I get out?" " Through there." "I'll see you." "[woman] Are you ready to go, darling?" " How are you doing?" " How are you?" "Aren't you going to give your father a kiss?" " Who bought you these clothes?" " Mom." " They look terrible." " I'm only wearing them for the party." "Do you think you look like me or your mother?" "You." "I try not to look like girls." " Goodbye." "Take care of yourself." " I will." " OK?" " All right." "Bye." "What?" " Hello?" " [Jimmy] It's me." "You want to have Chinese food with me?" "[Ricky] When New York, New York was first released in 1977, many viewers were disturbed by the conflicting moods, by De Niro's and Minnelli's hyper-realistic acting against such obviously phony backdrops." "Yet in art, when realist painters, such as Chuck Close and Alex Katz, put their realistic figures against artificial grounds, most thought that this juxtaposition made the figures emerge more profoundly, what Scorsese intended." "Similarly, at the time, few noted that this movie was itself a tribute to and criticism of Hollywood musicals, and that it was perhaps an unconscious, precocious work of post-modernism, a self-reflexive mode of art that took previous works of art" "and commented on them, a movement that swept the art and literary worlds around 1980, and would also produce such musicals as Pennies from Heaven." "The movie was ahead of its time in other ways." "It engaged with the emerging issues of two-career couples;" "with the divided loyalties of a career woman and mother;" "it characterized the terms of its spousal conflict in a complex way." "Not simply in terms of comparative salaries, or male versus female." "Its conflict was that of a mainstream artist versus a vanguard artist." "A struggle perilously close to the filmmaker's own personal dilemma." "New York, New York is a movie in which Scorsese asks himself whether he should make popular, readily understood art, or art that was difficult and challenging." "Without taking sides against one of his principal characters," "Scorsese chooses the latter." "His film, like the best art, is honest and challenging." "It leaves us thinking that, sometimes, an unhappy ending is not only the most honest one, but perhaps can lead to the greater happiness." "[Scorsese] The shoes." "It begins and ends with the shoes." "The shoes are important to me." "They remind me of Harry Lime's shoes in The Third Man." "It's that signature that I guess I was going for." "In the first image of the shoes, which might've been in Earl Mac Rauch's original script..." "But I knew that those shoes at the beginning..." "The picture had to have an arc that went back to the beginning." "But the shoes at the end are more, not necessarily conservative, but they're less flashy, he's matured, he's also reached some sort of peace with himself, in his work." "And that ties into the song which she sings, The World Goes 'Round, which pulls everything together in the film, and gives her the courage to deal with her emotions, and him too." "That was an important song for the picture," "The World Goes 'Round, because of that." "It somehow pulled everything together for us." "I like the look of the picture and I love what the actors do." "And looking back, I say to myself many times, if I had worked on the improvisations the same way we did in the scene where they're rehearsing the band, and got each scene down to that lean quality and very precise behavior," "I think I would enjoy it more, and I'd say it's more successful." "I couldn't have done that at the time." "That's looking back." "I couldn't have made Raging Bull without having done this, to try to find its way." "I am more satisfied with the look and the actors when I look at it again, and specifically the Happy Endings and all the musical sequences." "I really like those."