Martin Scorsese
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Martin Scorsese achieved critical acclaim with his feature Mean Streets (1973), a film which also began his long collaboration with actor Robert De Niro. The film was an independent production in an era when that meant something different than it does today. It first meant that the film was low budget, and director Scorsese overcame this with strong performances and creative and powerful visuals. The film was also produced in the early 1970s when this sort of socially relevant, dramatically developed film was more the norm than it is today, and independent films had the aura of a counter-culture statement even when they dealt with more mainstream subjects. This film shows how a filmmaker could take what actually was a mainstream subject--the gangster film--and recreate it as a character study that extended beyond what was normal for this type of film. The film came out after the highly successful studio production The Godfather in 1972, and it invited comparisons and weathered them with the critics. Mean Streets showed at one and the same time the potential of the independent film and its dangers, for while it was highly successful with critics and at festivals, it was not a commercial success. The film was considered a sensation when it showed at the New York Film Festival in 1973, and it was also well received in the Director's Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. The film did well for the director and the stars, but it did no make money:
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of life, of people that he saw better than anybody. My job was to make a story of it (Dougan 35).
After the script was rewritten, it was renamed Mean Streets, a phrase taken from Raymond Chandler and suggested by film critic Jay Cocks, a friend of Scorsese. Scorsese did not really like the title until he became used to it during shooting (Dougan 35).
Scorsese took the script to a number of companies and individuals trying to raise the money to make it. He even approached Corman, who suggested changing the film to a black exploitation story because it was more marketable. Scorsese met rock entrepreneur Jonathan T. Taplin, who was interested in trying the film business. Taplin was impressed by Boxcar Bertha and by the script and convinced a boyhood friend, E. Lee Perry, to invest his recent inheritance in the film. Further funding came in the form of a deferment from the Canadian Film Institute Laboratory, which rated scripts and offered forms of deferred payment based on an evaluation of the merit of each project (Keyser 37-38).
Mean Streets cost $350,000 in cash, with another $200,000 deferred. Mean Streets was shot over a period of 27 days, with six spent in New York and the rest in Los Angeles for interiors, after
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Approximate Word count = 1622
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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