Martin Scorsese is a living legend.
Born Nov. 17, 1942, Queens New York.
His parents took him to the cinemas when he was a kid and it really put the hook in him. Read any bio on the man and you'll see how deeply affected he was by those early filmgoing events.
He has said that there are only two things that interest him: religion and cinema. He was all set to become a priest when he decided to become a film director. His early films are raw little works that clearly have an interesting mind behind them.
In 1959 at age 17 he made Vesuvius VI, a film I'm assuming has religious undertones-I haven't seen it, who has?- and his 1963 What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? and 1964's It's not just you, Murray! are clearcut examples of his emerging talent. His 1967 short film "The Big Shave" is an incredible shocking movie of a guy bleeding to death while shaving. I love it. You can see it on the vhs release with 1974's ItalianAmerican- a doc on his mother and father. You get to see Catherine Scorsese making her famous spaghetti sauce!
His most famous early film is Who's That Knocking At My Door? a great movie with kinetic energy and a snappy soundtrack- it's available on Warner Bros. home video and most "good" video stores carry it.
He then helped make the landmark Oscar-winning documentary Woodstock with Michael Wadleigh and Thelma Schoonmaker (his long-time friend and editor). I liken Marty's work on Woodstock to be the equivalent of Kubrick's "on the fly" shoot of Day of the Fight- loading cameras and trying to get the best shot.Woodstock was probably a better film education than
anything he'd done up to that point.
He had stints as a film professor at NYU (where Oliver Stone was his student-check out THE DOORS- Oliver plays Marty as UCLA prof, goatee and all!) and he completed the great New York film Street Scenes in 1970. Around this time he landed a job in Los Angeles at Warner Bros. as an editor.
Boxcar Bertha is an accomplished, focused film that got him some more notice in the film community, but he was still "unknown". It could be said that Scorsese didn't "arrive" until 1973: The year of Mean Streets, the kick-ass, balls-to-the-wall masterpiece that put himself, Robert DeNiro & Harvey Keitel into the books of film history. This is one aggressive motherfucker of a movie. The soundtrack is the first great Scorsese soundtrack: 50's & 60's hits spliced with gliding tracking and swift edits. You got a turf war here: hints of a dark underground (New York seems mysteriously sinister in Marty's hands) and the "You callin' me a mook?" scene is the best example of Marty's intent: to make a real movie about real inhabitants of a real city. Mean Streets indeed.
Everyone from Marlon Brando to Stanley Kubrick acknowledged that Marty was a blazing new talent.
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