AFTER THE BARRAGE OF PRESS FOR NEW YORK, NEW YORK, De Niro wouldn’t consent to a significant interview with a journalist for some four years. But on March 9, 1981, just three weeks before the Academy Awards for 1980’s films would be handed out, he sat patiently and answered hours of questions about his work at great, careful length. His interrogators weren’t members of the film press, however. They were attorneys representing Joseph LaMotta, brother of the boxer Jake, who was suing De Niro, Scorsese, and the Chartoff-Winkler production company over the way he was depicted in Raging Bull.
De Niro had finally, against significant obstacles, managed to realize his dream of seeing Jake LaMotta’s story to the screen, inspiring Scorsese to create a film even more potent than Taxi Driver and delivering a performance that was recognized as an all-time classic the moment it appeared. But in the arduous process of wrenching a filmic narrative out of LaMotta’s painful story, liberties were taken, corners were cut, and mistakes were made. Joey LaMotta had a legitimate beef and his lawsuit had merit, and all De Niro could do throughout his hours of legal deposition was explain how the film came to be and express regret for an unpleasant legal situation he could only bring himself to refer to as “this.”
RAGING BULL HAD its genesis more than a decade earlier, when Jake LaMotta, his childhood friend Pete Savage (né Pete Petrella), and journalist Joseph Carter collaborated on the book of the same name, with an eye toward making it into a film. Savage was already something of a moviemaker, having written, produced, and directed about a half dozen independent films, including three—The Runaways (1965) and Cauliflower Cupids and House in Naples (both 1970)—that featured LaMotta in key acting roles.
As soon as the book appeared, Savage knocked together a screenplay and spent a few years trying to get somebody interested in making it. In 1974, when De Niro was still bouncing back and forth between the Italian set of 1900 and New York, where he was incubating new film projects, usually with Scorsese, Savage got a copy of the book and the script to him.
De Niro had no interest in the script, but the book genuinely compelled him. Written in the first person, but in an engaging combination of crude street talk and thoughtful reflection, Raging Bull was an astonishingly frank and disturbing account of a deeply flawed man’s emotions, struggles, attitudes, and deeds.
LaMotta had been one of a generation of Italian American champion and near-champion boxers that included the likes of Rocky Marciano, Rocky Graziano, Two-Ton Tony Galento, Tony Janiro, and Carmen Basilio, among many others. He was a street kid—born in Philadelphia, raised in the Bronx—who was in trouble with the law from a young age and first learned the rudiments of boxing in reform school. Billed as “The Bronx Bull” and “The Raging Bull,” he was known for an ability to take a beating from opponents and keep charging forward. He held the world middleweight title from June 1949 to February 1951, and he was famed especially for his six bouts with Sugar Ray Robinson, fought over nine years, the second of which marked the great Robinson’s first professional loss (and the only one of the six bouts in which LaMotta was victorious). When he retired in 1954, just before turning thirty-three, LaMotta had a career record of eighty-three wins, nineteen losses, and four draws, scoring thirty knockouts in the process: an estimable record by any account.
But the story of a once notable boxer was hardly the stuff of a compelling movie or book. In fact, what fascinated De Niro about LaMotta wasn’t his boxing record (De Niro never was much of a sports fan) but his astounding confessions and his fearless attitude toward physical punishment, which, the book indicated, he seemed to invite almost as a form of self-imposed justice, punishment for his bad deeds.
To wit: Jake LaMotta stole, sometimes using near-lethal violence in the act; he forced himself on women so violently that it would have been no exaggeration to call it rape; addled with jealousy and resentful at being domesticated, he beat his wives, causing one to miscarry; he went so far as to use his hands on Savage, his closest friend, who avoided him for decades after an especially grisly encounter; he defied the local gangsters who ran the boxing game until it became clear that he would get a shot at the title only if he cooperated with them, and then he threw a fight at Madison Square Garden to line their pockets and pave his way to the championship; after retiring and, naturally, squandering all his money, he served time in a Florida prison for the sexual corruption of a minor, an underage girl who worked as a prostitute from the harbor of a nightclub that he owned (albeit, he always maintained, without knowing what she was doing or how old she was); in total he was married seven times (“I hate the Jews so much I married three of them to make them miserable,” he joked), most lately in 2013, not long before his ninety-second birthday.
In his book, LaMotta confessed bluntly to much of this, and that was the fellow who fascinated De Niro: brutal, self-lacerating, darkly driven, haunted by his misdeeds, painfully honest about his failings, funny and crude and sardonic and ugly and real. And he was a boxer, which meant a film about him would allow an actor to take his place in a great tradition of Method-acting pugilists, from John Garfield in Body and Soul through Paul Newman in Somebody Up There Likes Me, from such near-Method performers as Robert Ryan in The Set-Up and Kirk Douglas in Champion to, chief of all, Marlon Brando, who created such an ineradicable icon of Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront as to set the standard portrayal of the weary palooka without ever stepping into a ring or donning gloves. Playing LaMotta would allow De Niro to claim the championship of acting, if such a thing could be said to exist. It would be the role of a lifetime … if the character could be captured in a screenplay.
AS REVEALED IN the pages of the March 1981 deposition and the extensive production files of both De Niro and Paul Schrader, the process of forging LaMotta’s autobiography into a screenplay took the better part of eight years, with at least a half dozen complete drafts, some radically different from the others, and a similar number of writers. And it also entailed gaining the trust, interest, and funding of a movie studio, which would naturally be loath to back a picture about such a disagreeable protagonist, and of a director, Martin Scorsese, who was struggling with demons, dark deeds, and destructive habits of his own.
At first it seemed a straightforward matter. De Niro had broached the subject of a film about LaMotta with Scorsese as early as 1974, when the director visited him in Parma during the production of 1900. Scorsese wasn’t interested at first—“A boxer? I don’t like boxing,” he said. But De Niro wasn’t deterred. In 1976, while making Taxi Driver, he acquired the rights to the book from LaMotta and Savage during dinner at the famed Times Square Italian restaurant Patsy’s.*1 Later on, while finishing Taxi Driver, Scorsese read the book and, his head turned by the darkness of the story and the themes of guilt, purgation, and redemption, agreed to at least pursue a film based not on the Savage-Clary screenplay but on the book itself. The job of adapting went to Mardik Martin, who was working for Chartoff-Winkler on a number of projects. Delayed by the chaos of New York, New York and his work on Ken Russell’s Valentino, Martin didn’t submit a draft until March 1978; then, with significant input from De Niro, he turned around another draft the following month.
At this moment, the project was known as Prizefighter and conceived of in a radical fashion: De Niro wanted to stage it as a play on Broadway, directed by Scorsese, and then film it simultaneously. “I had an idea to do a play to be done like a movie,” he said, “and we almost did it in Raging Bull. We were gonna do it as a play and then we were gonna shoot it once we had mounted it. We were gonna shoot it in the day, and do it at night, and theatrically what we would get out of it during the day would apply to the scenes in the play at night, and I was just curious how it would have turned out, because on a movie it is looser. In a play you have cues and it’s locked.”
But Martin’s scripts weren’t, they felt, sharp enough for either the stage or the screen; in fact, they read like straightforward transcriptions of the book. And really, the whole thing was moot because Scorsese was a wreck. His woes made up a sobering list: New York, New York had flopped; he had been removed from the stage play that he had been working on with Liza Minnelli; his marriage to Julia Cameron was over and she and their daughter were living in Chicago; he had a new roommate in Robbie Robertson of The Band, whose rock-and-roll lifestyle and circle of friends unhealthily amplified Scorsese’s increasing use of cocaine and pills; he had managed to make The Last Waltz, a great concert movie, but he was unable to focus on a new feature film; he was living in Southern California like a vampire, bouncing between superficial relationships with women, watching movies all night with a coterie of chums in a garage with blacked-out windows, drugging himself awake and asleep. It got so that the alcoholic John Cassavetes, still a mentor and a fan, upbraided him at a Hollywood party for wasting his talent.
De Niro kept trying to interest Scorsese in the film, but Scorsese was in no shape to work on it, and the inadequacy of the scripts gave him an easy out. Still, he didn’t want to put De Niro off entirely. In the late spring of 1978, they decided between them that they would take the project away from Martin and give it to Paul Schrader, who had begun directing as well as writing films. De Niro visited Schrader on the set of his second film as director, Hardcore, and got him to agree to come to dinner with Scorsese to discuss the project. Schrader was doing his own thing, but agreed, reluctantly, at the price of $150,000 plus expenses, to have a look at the book and Martin’s scripts and rewrite the film.
Right away, he knew that there was a good movie in Raging Bull but that Martin had been too faithful to the source material to find it. He began doing research of his own—he hired an assistant and did interviews with Jake LaMotta, his brother Joe, his ex-wife Vicki,*2 Pete Savage, and various other acquaintances, dug into newspaper clippings about LaMotta’s career and post-boxing spiral, visited key sites in LaMotta’s life, and watched kinescopes of LaMotta’s fights. As he worked, Schrader came to believe that the problem with Martin’s scripts—and with the film as it was being conceived—was that Savage had inserted himself overly into the Jake LaMotta story and was being granted a little too much input into the prospective film. As he explained to a Writers Guild arbitration board when the final credits for the film were disputed in 1980:
Mr. Savage had involved himself in the film project of “Raging Bull” just as he had in the book. In both cases, he had exaggerated his role in Jake LaMotta’s life. It struck me that the true story of “Raging Bull” was not one of Jake, Peter and Joey but was a story of the “Fighting LaMotta Brothers.” As young men, Jake and Joey were both better than average middleweights. Their personal and professional styles contrasted drastically. Joey was a dancer, Jake was a bull; Joey was a fast talker, Jake was painfully shy and inarticulate; Joey had a way with women, Jake did not. After two years of professional fights, Joey made the decision to give up boxing and manage his brother. Therefore, the drama of the LaMotta brothers: Joey had the freedom to give up boxing, Jake did not. Joey was able to establish a normal family life, preserve his body and mind—albeit from the sidelines. Jake, in some ways less of a fighter, could only go out and wear his opponent down. This sibling trade-off of roles and responsibilities I took to be the core and the theme of “Raging Bull.”
By the end of May, Schrader submitted a draft, which differed from Martin’s in the use of key fight scenes to break up the domestic and psychological drama, and in framing the film with scenes of the older, retired, and out-of-shape LaMotta working in nightclubs. Then, after he finished post-production on Hardcore, Schrader spent five days in Palm Springs and Las Vegas working on a thorough rewrite, which he submitted to Scorsese and De Niro in early July. The character of Pete Savage was still in the film as part of a troika with the LaMotta brothers, but, Schrader felt, he had been whittled down to more appropriate dimensions.
Still, though, Scorsese remained elusive, unable to focus on a new film while his personal life whirled and deteriorated. Then, around Labor Day 1978 he hit rock bottom. At the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, where he’d traveled with De Niro, Mardik Martin, and Isabella Rossellini, whom he’d started dating seriously and would soon marry, Scorsese collapsed. The whole group of them, Martin later claimed, were using some badly compromised cocaine on the trip, and Scorsese, his system almost entirely shattered by his unhealthy regimen, started coughing up blood and blacked out. He was rushed to New York and admitted to a hospital in grave condition, just in time for doctors to begin reversing the damage he’d been doing to himself. De Niro, who would prove over the years to be loyal and helpful to friends who hit health crises, particularly those involving drugs, came to see him in the hospital and put the idea of Raging Bull to him once again. Scorsese had originally been repelled because the character of Jake LaMotta seemed so dark and irredeemable to him. Now, though, at his own nadir, he could see the power of the project. “We could do a really great job on this film,” De Niro said to him. “Do you want to make it?” Somewhere Scorsese found the resolve. “Yeah,” he said.
They faced new problems, though, when they thought about shooting Schrader’s script. For one thing, there was still the question of Pete Savage. Schrader had trimmed him down as much as possible but felt that the best thing to do was to remove him from the story altogether, a revision that De Niro, who had been working with Savage for almost four years, was loath to consider. Then, too, there was the brutality and frankness with which Schrader had imagined the film, culminating in a scene a couple of pages long in which the imprisoned LaMotta tries to masturbate by conjuring the women in his life, only to lose his erection when he recalls how cruelly he treated them all; add that to a scene depicting LaMotta becoming sexually active with Vicki before a fight but then dousing his erection with ice water to preserve his strength, and you had something that would be unimaginable to shoot or to screen—or, of course, to finance.
Money, pointedly, was the next obstacle to making Raging Bull at all. Chartoff-Winkler had a production deal with United Artists, where they had scored a tremendous success a few years prior with Rocky (which had beaten out Taxi Driver as Best Picture at the Oscars), and they were already engaged in Rocky II for the studio. With this kind of leverage, Irwin Winkler felt able to convince the studio to budget as much as $18 million for Raging Bull, even in the wake of New York, New York and the poor performance (which, to be fair, nobody blamed on De Niro) of 1900 and The Last Tycoon.
On a wintry day late in 1978, Winkler had Steven Bach and David Field, relatively new production executives at United Artists, accompany him to a meeting with Scorsese and De Niro at Scorsese’s East 57th Street apartment. The pair had read Schrader’s most recent script and had some legitimate concerns, and they wanted to at least pay the would-be star and director of the film the courtesy of having a meeting to discuss them. Bach, as he would later write, had significant issues with the script, which he called “brutally depressing and depressingly brutal.” And he wasn’t very comfortable in Scorsese’s apartment, which, because the director had only just decided to move back to New York, had the bare-bones feel of a dorm room and was filled with mysterious and vaguely creepy friends and hangers-on.
Bach was further disquieted when he realized that one of these odd folks, a skinny guy in jeans and bare feet who wandered in from another room and greeted the executives in near silence, was in fact De Niro, who sank into a chair in the living room and contributed not one word to the ensuing conversation. After Winkler pitched the film to them, Bach allowed Field to take the lead in stating the studio’s objections to and hesitancies about the project. For one thing, Rocky had created a new fad for boxing movies, and in addition to its sequel there were as many as a half dozen other fight films in some stage of production—a lot of competition, in other words.
There was also the matter of censorship, which Schrader’s script would surely entail. United Artists would not put its name on an X-rated film, as that designation had come to be associated with hardcore porn; they would find it impossible to book an X-rated film into normal theaters or, indeed, to advertise it in newspapers. Raging Bull would have to be delivered as an R, Field reminded them, and “this picture as written is an X.”
“What makes you so sure this is an X?” asked Winkler.
“When I read in a script, ‘CLOSE UP on Jake LaMotta’s erection as he pours ice water over it prior to the fight,’ then I think we’re in the land of X,” Field retorted.
Winkler explained that his team wasn’t happy with the script yet, either. Field countered that UA’s concerns went deeper than a few scenes. “It’s the whole script.… We have a real question whether this story can ever be made as a movie any audience will want to see, whatever the rating.”
“Why?” Scorsese asked.
“It’s this man,” Field replied. “The problem is will anyone want to see any movie about such Neanderthal behavior? Can any writer make him more than what he seems to be in the scripts we’ve seen?”
“Which is what?” Scorsese wondered.
“A cockroach.”
The room went quiet. The deal was nearly dead.
Then De Niro spoke for the first time since his mumbled greetings: “He is not a cockroach. He is not a cockroach.”
It all ended with the status quo in place: De Niro and Scorsese had a script that no one was ready to make.
BUT DE NIRO had made Taxi Driver happen because he determined that he wouldn’t be dissuaded from doing it. Similarly, he had been focused on making Raging Bull for years, and he wasn’t going to give up. He’d been working with the same boxing trainer who’d prepared Sylvester Stallone for Rocky, he’d maintained a strict diet and fitness regimen even while working on The Deer Hunter, and he had become increasingly involved with Jake LaMotta himself.
LaMotta had spoken with Mardik Martin and Paul Schrader, and of course with Pete Savage and his book- and screenplay-writing partners, but he and De Niro had developed an extremely intimate bond over the previous few years. And now that De Niro was focused exclusively on Raging Bull, the actor pushed the relationship even further, enlisting the old fighter to teach him to box in the exact style he had used; visiting the home LaMotta shared with his fifth wife so often that she mentioned De Niro in her 1979 divorce claim (“He was in the apartment constantly, for nearly two years”); probing him like a therapist about scenes from his past, about his emotions, fears, drives; trading admiration and understanding for the chance to dig into the very soul of the man. The movie, and LaMotta, had gotten under his skin.
De Niro was, LaMotta told a reporter as far back as 1977, “more qualified to be a psychiatrist than a psychiatrist. He goes very deep. He’s telling me things about me that I never knew. I thought I was a pretty bad guy for a while, but he made me realize I’m not. I’m a pretty good guy.” (He added, as if slightly unnerved: “Every once in a while I catch him looking at me. He studies me.”)
In fact, De Niro relied on a combination of skills to comfort and probe LaMotta by turns. “I just kept repeating in his ear, ‘You’re not so bad, you’re not so bad,’ ” he said. “People did not like him. Jake had done some low-life things that were supposed to be bad, but I felt that the drama in his life—with the brother and all that stuff—was real.”
There was a limit to how far De Niro could get, even with great tact, sympathy, and sensitivity and a subject who was game to be mined. “I admired the fact that he was at least willing to question himself and his actions,” De Niro said. “But what’s he going to do? Should he be like a college professor and try to say, ‘Well, I think the reason I did that was because …?’ He would talk that way sometimes, but he was more cunning. He’d look at you deadpan, or he’d laugh about certain things. He would protect himself sometimes, but then he would say, ‘Aah, I was a son-of-a-bitch.’ ”
Finally the actor exhausted even himself: “I tried to ask him every kind of question,” De Niro later admitted, “but it’s hard to get somebody to be straight and honest about himself, because he is not even sure himself.” Or, as he put it another time: “You can only go so far with people. Like I can only go so far with you here. There are things I can’t tell you, I can’t consciously or unconsciously give them up.”
There was one thing, though, that LaMotta offered that gave De Niro and Scorsese the last impetus they needed to apply themselves successfully to the film. During one of their lengthy conversations, LaMotta stood up and started banging his head against a wall. As Scorsese said, “De Niro saw this movement and suddenly he got the whole character from him, the whole movie. We knew we wanted to make a movie that would reach a man at the point of making that gesture with the line, ‘I am not an animal.’ ”
WITH THEIR DEEP knowledge of LaMotta, and with Paul Schrader’s suggestion that they jettison the Pete Savage character from the script, De Niro and Scorsese decided to make a retreat of sorts to the Caribbean island of St. Martin, where they planned to take one final stab at getting the thing right. They spent two to three weeks there—Scorsese suffering from the tropical climate, De Niro patiently taking care of him—working and reworking the pages. Somewhat reluctantly, because Savage was still connected to the project, they did as Schrader suggested: no trace of Pete was left in the final film.
Or, rather, no trace of a character named Pete was left. Fatefully, they took some of the actions, words, and situations involving the real Pete Savage and the character Pete Savage and ascribed them to the character (and, by implication, the real man) Joey LaMotta. Some of these were innocent things, but a few, including a beating given to a mobster acquaintance who was caught by Savage squiring Jake’s wife to a nightclub when the fighter was out of town, amounted to defamation. To make matters worse, they had been so busy working with Savage, Jake, and Vicki that they somehow neglected to obtain Joey LaMotta’s permission to use his name and likeness in the film. They had, in effect, stolen his life rights and then defamed him, which was why De Niro wound up being deposed in a lawsuit.
But that, of course, was later, after the picture was made—which finally, on the basis of a new draft of the script delivered in early 1979, seemed likely to happen. This version, Steven Bach noted, bore no screenwriter’s name and was accompanied by none of the usual paperwork the studio and the Writers Guild would normally rely on as they arbitrated credits and payments for the work. Rather, he remembered, the title page said, “in small type, tucked modestly in the lower-right-hand corner, ‘RdN.’ ” De Niro had finally willed Raging Bull into life.
AS EVER, his preparation took De Niro well beyond merely learning the script. There was the training, years of it, which put muscle on his eternally skinny frame and then taught him how to use it. He was in his mid-thirties and had never been athletic, but now he worked his body into something remarkable: rock-hard, sinewy, articulated. He had daily training sessions through long spans of 1977 and 1978, learning specifically from LaMotta about his idiosyncratic crouched style, his technique, his mentality; he took tutelage from Tony Mancuso, a journeyman fighter from Canada whose style sufficiently resembled LaMotta’s that he was often hired by LaMotta’s opponents as a sparring partner. And he kept extensive notes about what he learned: “Don’t leap and lunge with wide punches which will ultimately miss … Be constantly aggressive and punch to the body exclusively … Try to rally when you have opponent on ropes or in the corner … Don’t throw one punch at a time. Combinations.” Scorsese would meticulously storyboard and choreograph the fighting sequences like dance numbers (a nice carryover from New York, New York and The Last Waltz), but De Niro still felt he had to be able to improvise and create like an actual fighter in the heat of battle. Eventually his skill was such that he hurt LaMotta during sparring sessions and fought a few amateurs in competitive settings.
By early 1979 he was the spitting image of a younger professional fighter: he had scores of photos taken in traditional prizefight poses, and it’s hard to believe that this was the same fellow who had played the gaunt Travis Bickle or the withered Monroe Stahr just a few years prior. He was toned and thick in the stomach, all muscle, without a cup of fat on his body. In and of itself it was a feat. And the transformation wasn’t just in the body: he sat patiently for makeup that would provide him with a semblance of Jake LaMotta’s mashed nose and ears and of the bruises, swellings, and other wounds accumulated in the ring, and he experimented with different ways of fixing his long, straight hair into something more like LaMotta’s sloppy halo of ringlets. He watched home movies of the LaMotta family (some of these would be reproduced exactly for the film) and a rare film clip of LaMotta walking casually through his training camp (“It was only 25 seconds long,” De Niro remembered, “but it was a big help”). And he worked on a bit of physical business that was never mentioned in the script but would be immediately familiar to anyone who knew the real man: Jake LaMotta was nearly deaf in one ear, so De Niro practiced leaning in to hear in such a fashion so as not to reveal the embarrassment of his hearing loss but still hear as much as possible.
In addition to his lengthy interviews with and observations of Jake, he spent time with Joey LaMotta, Vicki LaMotta (who had remarried but still often used her first husband’s name), and Pete Savage, who had disappeared from the script but remained connected to the film—albeit at a remove—as a producer. (De Niro kept ongoing lists of questions to ask them all.) He took trips to the zoo to watch animals move; he listened to LaMotta’s tape-recorded voice again and again to pick up its timbre and rhythm. He had every bit of spoken dialogue from the book Raging Bull transcribed so that he could acquire a full feel for Jake’s idiom. (As proof of his mastery of LaMotta’s argot, De Niro would take credit for a famous line in a scene in which LaMotta warns his first wife not to overcook his steak because “it defeats its own purpose.” “I knew it didn’t make sense,” he said, “but in a way it did—it was like a double negative of some sort.”)
As he always did, he annotated his script with monkish devotion, filling the margins with reminders about what to think, how to read a line, what gestures or facial expressions might create the effect he was after. Some of this work had begun before the final script was created. While making The Deer Hunter, he kept a notebook of thoughts, ideas, questions, and chores related to Raging Bull:
The way I talk is like poetry. The energy is what conveys this. I slur the words but the energy coming through is the important … Hated racket guys and tough guys … After I blew up [from drinking] I’d suffer a lot with remorse. “I don’t know how I could do that.” … My rage and frustration coming out through the drink … Never lay around, always doing something: shopping, golf, etc.… Never confided in people. Work it out myself. Didn’t want people to know my real problems.
But then, as each day’s work presented itself, he kept up a running account of his thoughts about the man he was playing and the scenes he was filming:
I know I’m a fighter, I have a right to be a fighter and act like one physically and in every way … Remember during all fights you’re not a fighter per se (or rather a fighter-fighter, style-wise). You can only do so much. But you must have that intention, that aggressiveness, and have fun with it and it will give you what you need. Just concentrate on knocking the motherfucker out and keep watching him, for any opening, and keep my block up … Remember, I just scare them looking at them … My humor doesn’t go over too well with these people—or people in general. Except those who know me really well … I’m cold and distrustful with people I don’t know or am not close to but with family and friends a little looser … Remember I’m paranoid. DON’T TRUST NOBODY!
While De Niro built this uncannily thorough physical and psychological portrait, Scorsese prepared to shoot the fight scenes with almost heroic creativity and energy. The film may not have as much boxing action in it as, say, Rocky, but it had more than a lot of fight films; as a result, Scorsese planned to shoot inside the ring for ten weeks, a stretch necessitated partly by the intricate motion and cutting he planned to execute, partly by the exertions being asked of the actors in each take, each of which would be repeated multiple times (De Niro got into the habit of attacking a heavy bag just before the cameras were set to roll so that he’d look appropriately sweaty and pumped), and partly because he and his crew had to jerry-rig harnesses, dollies, and cranes that would allow them to get the images he saw in his head.
It was grueling, sometimes comically so—at least to Scorsese, who wasn’t inside a boxing ring under hot lights pretending to fight all day for months. “It was really funny,” he said. “I was talking to Bob two days in a row, and he said, ‘What do I do in this shot?’ I said, ‘In this shot, you get hit.’ And we went on to the next one. I got that one all worked out, and then he said, ‘What about this one?’ I said, ‘In this one, you get hit!’ ” (Later Scorsese admitted, “It was excruciating for me to watch him because of the way we worked—every agonizing detail he’d go through, I’d feel for him.”)
Throughout this period, Scorsese established a visual style for the picture: garish, close-in, unblinking. The prevailing metaphor came in the exaggeratedly loud and blinding pop of photographers’ flashbulbs, which burst around LaMotta like firecrackers. There was frequent use of speed changes, with the imagery alternately slowing down (“I had to shoot the punches in slow motion or you wouldn’t see them,” Scorsese explained), and speeding up to give a sense of the adrenalized heat of battle. He had learned quite a bit of his arsenal of cinematic ideas by studying the films of the English director Michael Powell (especially The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffman), and he shared some of the fight scenes he shot with the older filmmaker, who provided him with an artistic epiphany. Watching some early footage of De Niro in the ring, Powell remarked to Scorsese, “There’s something wrong: the gloves shouldn’t be red.” In fact, he said, the scenes shouldn’t be in color at all. At first Scorsese balked at the idea: “This from the man who had red all over his own films, which was where I’d got it from in the first place!” But after conferring with his cinematographer, Michael Chapman, who acknowledged that he felt that the color photography seemed drained of detail somehow, Scorsese got the permission of his producers to shoot the film in black and white.*3
BEFORE THE SHOOT BEGAN, De Niro bided his time in New York, socializing with actors (along with Al Pacino, he attended a party at Lee Strasberg’s house at which the Japanese Grand Kabuki troupe was feted), and he agreed to appear in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to accept the annual award of Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club (“I’m a little unhappy there’s no pudding in this,” he quipped while accepting his brass prize). In April he went to Los Angeles for nearly three months of shooting boxing sequences. By mid-June he was back in New York to spend a similar amount of time shooting scenes of life outside the ring during LaMotta’s boxing years. In Los Angeles, LaMotta was an almost daily presence on the set, reminding De Niro about fighting strategy, attitude, posture. But when they went to New York, LaMotta was asked not to follow them. “When we did the acting stuff in New York, we didn’t want him around,” De Niro explained. “He understood, because you don’t want the guy to come over and say, ‘That’s not the way I did it.’ You feel his presence and all your energy is drained. You feel like you’re doing it for the approval of someone else.”
Instead, he had two other people to work with, actors who had been discovered for the film from almost literally out of nowhere and who would play the roles of Joey and Vicki. It was the Jake LaMotta story, but, following Schrader, Scorsese and De Niro had built the movie around three characters, and these actors would wind up sharing virtually every scene with De Niro that wasn’t set in the ring.
At times it seemed like the roles would never get filled. Casting director Cis Corman was put on the hunt for likely types and found nothing. It was De Niro, in fact, who turned up an actor who might play Joey. Watching a little-seen mob movie from 1975 called The Death Collector, he was struck by a fiery actor playing the lead role. De Niro couldn’t know it, but the fellow had actually been a child TV star in the 1950s, then a professional musician in the 1960s (he played guitar for Joey Dee and the Starlighters), and then, until appearing in The Death Collector, half of a Martin-and-Lewis-inspired comedy duo. He had only made the one film, it hadn’t done anything, and he had finally quit showbiz altogether and was running an Italian restaurant in the Bronx. His name was Joe Pesci. Near the end of 1978, not very long before shooting commenced, De Niro and Scorsese called him to find out if he was interested in auditioning for the part of Joey LaMotta.
“How they found me in that restaurant, I don’t know,” Pesci said. He had truly given up chasing a career as an entertainer, he explained to De Niro in that first phone call, and he didn’t feel that he was up to the job. “I told him I didn’t think I wanted to do it, that I wasn’t interested. He said he’d come and talk with me.” They had dinner at Pesci’s restaurant, Amici’s, and De Niro brought along the script. “Robert told me, ‘It’s a good role, not a great role,’ ” Pesci recalled, “and I told him I didn’t want to go back to acting unless I got a part that proved I was good.” He was grateful for the opportunity, of course, but he was still reluctant: “I figured they should give it to a working actor who really wanted it.”
But it turned out that they wanted him, and as soon as he was on board, Pesci began helping the production in ways nobody could have imagined. He helped them cast the role of Salvy, the wannabe neighborhood gangster charged by the local Mafia boss with putting the squeeze on the LaMotta brothers. Pesci persuaded Scorsese and De Niro to audition his old comedy sidekick, Frank Vincent, a pompadoured guy from Boston who was also a former lounge musician and who had also appeared in The Death Collector. In their nightclub act, which they performed as Vincent and Pesci between 1969 and 1975, “I would abuse the audience, and Joe would abuse me,” Vincent remembered. And, in fact, Raging Bull depicted a brutal beating of Salvy by an enraged Joey LaMotta.*4 But real life lent a hand here: the former partners hadn’t broken up amicably, so there was some genuine mistrust and sour emotion for them to draw upon in their scenes.
And then Pesci solved another problem for his new bosses. Cis Corman and her team had been working for long months to find someone to play Vicki LaMotta, who first met Jake when she was a neighborhood girl of fifteen and he was a married man some ten years her senior. Within a few short years they married, and she bore him three children during their time together, which coincided with his rise, his ascension to the title, his decline, and eventually his imprisonment. Vicki, who lived in Florida and was cooperating with the production, was still a bombshell in her late forties, and Corman had been charged with finding “a young Lana Turner” to play her. But she was getting nowhere.
One night Pesci walked into Hoops, a discotheque in Mount Vernon, New York, just north of the city, and he saw a picture of a girl on the wall that startled him: “a dead ringer for Vicki,” he later said. He found out she was a nineteen-year-old Yonkers girl named Cathy Moriarty who was working as a model in the garment district, and he tracked her down.
“He wanted a picture of me for Marty for the film,” Moriarty remembered, “and I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, sure,’ thinking it was one of those modeling jobs where all they really wanted was for you to take your clothes off.” She agreed to meet the director and star at their midtown offices, and after she made a favorable impression, they asked her to continue coming in. “I would go down to the city and read for them,” she recalled. “It was like taking private acting lessons. They never once said that I had the part or anything, and I know they were seeing other actresses, too.”
It would be a huge risk, giving such a big part in a major studio production to someone who had never acted professionally, but De Niro was particularly struck with her. “She had a feeling and an aura you will seldom find in professionals,” he said. “Sometimes amateurs are better to work with because of their instincts.… If you’re doing a theatrical play, it gets difficult. But for a movie you can repeat the scenes.” They tried all sorts of things to test her range and focus, and she never faltered. “She was totally natural even if we were doing nothing,” De Niro remembered. “She was comfortable,” Scorsese added. “She was so at ease it was incredible.” They screen-tested her in February 1979 and hired her the next day.
COMBINED, THE BLACK-AND-WHITE cinematography, the post–World War II setting, the stifling lower-class milieu, and the unknown faces (which included even De Niro’s, remade by his fitness regimen and the discreet prosthetics) imparted a neorealist quality to Raging Bull. The footage seemed almost to have been captured without the camera (and, of course, the audience) being noticed by the people on the screen. The craft that went into it was exquisite and exact, but there was a rawness and immediacy that made it feel almost like an invasion of the characters’ privacy.
De Niro, taking advantage of the greenness of his co-stars, coaxed them into startling, unrehearsed displays of emotion. During a scene in which Jake, off-camera, confronts Joey with an accusation that he’d slept with Vicki, De Niro wasn’t provoking the energy he sought from Pesci, so he came at him with a twist, changing the line “Did you fuck my wife?” to “Did you fuck my mother?” and startling Pesci into a genuinely confused and immediate response. (“When you see the film again,” Scorsese laughed, “look at Joe’s reaction!”) He would get Pesci riled by repeatedly interrupting his takes with questions about trivial details until, Pesci remembered, “I’m hot, I’m ready to go.”
Moriarty, too, confessed that “some of the scenes with Bobby actually made me nervous,” particularly those in which Jake comes at Vicki with violence; De Niro would play them differently each time. “I began concentrating so much on not getting hit or how to go with punches that I thought, ‘I’m never going to be able to say my lines,’ ” she said. The resultant fear and confusion she conveyed were, naturally, exactly what the moments called for. Scorsese and company also pointedly kept Moriarty from meeting Vicki LaMotta, who visited the set a few times, until after the production was done. “Marty didn’t want us to get together,” the actress explained. “He was afraid she’d influence me.… It was difficult to play a woman I had never met, and knew very little about, but even more difficult to play a character seen entirely through Jake’s eyes”—which, of course, was just what De Niro and Scorsese wanted.
They shot the domestic scenes in New York from mid-June to mid-August, and then they stopped—not because they were done but because De Niro was about to undergo another radical physical and psychological change for the part. He had chiseled himself into an uncanny simulacrum of a boxer, and now, following LaMotta’s story, he was going to let that exquisite body go to hell. The production would shut down for four months so that he could put on fifty to sixty pounds and portray the retired, slovenly, heedless older LaMotta.
“I just can’t fake acting,” De Niro said. “I know movies are an illusion, and maybe the first rule is to fake it, but not for me. I’m too curious. I want the experience. I want to deal with all the facts of the character, thin or fat.” It was another stunning commitment to a role, another stupendous transformation, and it was an important aspect of his attraction to the material to begin with. “To see that deterioration and to capture it on film was really interesting to me,” he said. But he wouldn’t take Hollywood shortcuts such as using padding or fat suits or makeup; he would turn himself, in a matter of months, from an Adonis to a slob, just as LaMotta had, albeit over a span of years. “I needed to feel Jake’s shame at getting fat,” he said. “To feel my feet hurt with the extra weight, to know what it’s like to be short of breath and not be able to bend down to tie your shoes.”
He’d always been skinny, but not because he was a picky eater: he was just cut out that way, lucky bastard. But now he was going to have to make work out of eating, and eating specifically to gain weight fast. “At first it was fun,” he admitted. “I ate ice cream and everything I wanted—it’s like part of the fantasy that one has about eating everything. I took a tour through France, from Paris to the Riviera, stayed in inns and ate. And for two weeks I was miserable, because as good as the food was, it’s rich—you could eat only one big meal a day and then lie there, digesting it.” But before long he had to go beyond the limits of comfort and force himself to eat: “After 15, 20 pounds, it was hard work. I had to get up early to eat a full breakfast and digest that in order to eat a full lunch and digest that in order to eat a full dinner. And lots of Di-Gel or Tums.”
Aside from the unpleasantness of feeling constantly overstuffed, there were aspects to his new size that he hadn’t anticipated: “I began to realize what a fat man goes through,” he said. “You get rashes on your legs. Your legs scrape together. You feel your weight on your heels when you stand up. It was like going to a foreign land.” But, he said, the results could not have been achieved any other way: “The internal changes, how you feel and how it makes you behave—for me to play the character, it was the best thing I could have done. Just by having the weight on, it really made me feel a certain way and behave a certain way.” (Ironically, as De Niro was bulking up to play the gone-to-pot Jake, Pesci, who would appear in a later-life reconciliation scene between the brothers, had to thin out a bit to play the older Joey. They shared a meal at Pesci’s old stomping grounds, Amici’s, during the production hiatus, and while De Niro gorged, Pesci skimped.)
Production resumed for one day in the autumn so that they could get some intermediate shots of De Niro’s weight gain; then he went back to overeating until December, finally topping the 215-pound mark that he’d been aiming for. Scorsese had planned to shoot the later sequences in Los Angeles, doubling for Florida, and he quickly learned that he was no longer dealing with the same sort of actor he had had in front of the camera earlier in the year when they created the boxing sequences there. “Bobby’s weight was so extreme that his breathing was like mine when I’m having an asthma attack,” Scorsese said. “With the bulk he put on he wasn’t doing forty takes, it was three or four takes. The body dictated. He just became that person.”
The film wrapped just as the year ended. Scorsese took a break to energize for the six to eight months of editing, sound work, and scoring he would undertake for the film, and De Niro set about regaining his usual form—a daunting process. On a visit to Long Island, he put his son, Raphael, on a bathroom scale. “He was 30 pounds,” De Niro said, “and I remember thinking that I had to lose two of him.” He learned that he couldn’t lose the weight as quickly as he put it on. “I couldn’t go back to eating the way I normally did,” he said, “because I would then feel sick. I had to let myself down gradually.” When he showed up at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards at Sardi’s that winter, he conspicuously ate but a small cube of steak for dinner; we know because the press were dutifully recording his diet, partly a testament to how much his personal commitment to the role captivated the world. For years, in fact, movie audiences would scrutinize each new photograph and film appearance to see if he had lost his Raging Bull fat, and it took him a decade and another severe physical transformation, this time for Cape Fear, to show the world that he’d done the trick fully.
AS HARD AS De Niro had worked in making the film happen and in becoming—there really was no other word for it—Jake LaMotta, Scorsese would replicate his commitment and endurance in assembling the footage they’d shot into a film. Much of the editing was done by Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker—who had worked with him on his student film Who’s That Knocking at My Door? and who would cut every one of his feature films after Raging Bull—in all-nighters in a cramped, makeshift editing room in Scorsese’s apartment. They came up with certain aspects of the finished film’s structure there, such as the slow-motion shots of De Niro dancing in the ring in a leopard-skin robe that ran over the title sequence and the concept of beginning the film with the older, fat LaMotta preparing to recite from, among other things, Budd Schulberg’s script of On the Waterfront as part of a cabaret show (“De Niro playing Jake LaMotta playing Marlon Brando playing Terry Malloy,” Scorsese noted)—revealing the end, or really the aftermath, of the story right at the outset.
United Artists executives had felt that surprising the audience with De Niro’s weight gain would have more impact if it happened later in the film. But publicity about it had begun to leak out even while they were still shooting, and when the studio bosses finally got to see the film, in an unpolished but basically finished cut in July 1980, they saw the genius in the choice that Scorsese and Schoonmaker had made. “Scorsese,” Steven Bach admitted, “had been right. He had feared that publicity about De Niro’s weight gain would be too widespread and that audiences would sit through the film not seeing, not hearing, waiting only to see ‘the fat man.’ He undercut that voyeuristic fascination at the start, replacing it with curiosity not about an actor’s stunt but about a man’s life.”*5
That first screening of the finished film would become legendary for the reaction of Andy Albeck, the Russian-born (of Danish stock) film distributor who had made a personal fortune in the movie business in Asia before spending thirty years climbing the corporate hierarchy at United Artists, where he reigned as president at the time Raging Bull was made. He was a neat and punctilious fellow, a vigorous athlete, a stickler for protocol. If young, hip executives such as Bach and David Field had a hard time swallowing Raging Bull, even in a version tempered from Schrader’s vision, they feared that Albeck would have a visceral reaction against it. When the film ended, Bach recalled, “the lights came up slowly in a room full of silence, as if the viewers had lost all power of speech.” Bach saw Scorsese in the back of the room, cringing against a wall. “Then Andy Albeck rose from his seat, marched briskly to him, shook his hand just once, and said quietly, ‘Mr. Scorsese, you are an Artist.’ ”
Indeed he was, but an exceedingly temperamental one, and ever more so as the long process of finishing the film dragged on. As the film’s November debut approached, Scorsese was working day and night, literally, and becoming lost in the details of production. Near the very end, he threatened to remove his name from the film entirely because he didn’t feel that the drink order of a background actor (played by the director’s father, in fact) was audible enough. Irwin Winkler, who was deprived of the opportunity to throw a proper premiere for the film because Scorsese was taking so long to polish it, had had enough. “I said, ‘People are going to look at this picture one hundred years from now and say that it’s a great, great movie,’ ” he remembered. “Because you can’t hear ‘Cutty Sark,’ which, by the way, everybody else says they can hear, you’re taking your name off?’ And he says, ‘Yes, I’m taking my name off the picture.’ I said, ‘Okay, if you want to take your name off the picture, it’s off, but meanwhile, the picture’s going in to the lab.’ And that was it. Obviously, he was a little emotional at the time.”
In time, Scorsese would level out, and he would always feel that what he and De Niro had achieved in Raging Bull went beyond anything they’d ever done or ever seen in a film. “Look,” he said soon after the release, “there’s no way to do it unless you do it right. What other people might call ‘honest,’ we call ‘right.’ And that degree of honesty is highly painful. We had a similar idea in mind on Raging Bull, but I cannot verbalize that idea. The point is I’m standing there naked in this film, and that’s all there is to it.”
Raging Bull premiered on a single screen in New York, and the critical and public responses were an almost unanimous acknowledgment of the genius of it accompanied by widespread repulsion at the pith of it. (Among the viewers startled by the brutal tenor of the film was Jake LaMotta himself. After seeing Raging Bull for the first time, he said to his ex-wife Vicki, who was also at the premiere, “That wasn’t me. I wasn’t like that.” “No,” she replied. “You were worse.”)
TIME HAS LED us to believe that the foremost acting achievement in Raging Bull is the fact that its leading man put on fifty or so pounds to play the final portion of the film. But to be fair, putting on weight, even in a binge, isn’t as hard as what De Niro did with his body before filming began, namely, building the scrawny frame of Travis Bickle and Monroe Stahr into a body indistinguishable from that of a professional fighter fifteen years younger than himself. In his Everlast shorts and old-timey gloves, the muscles in his belly, arms, and legs as hard and sleek as marble, De Niro is every bit the picture of the prizefighter: lithe, chiseled, not a cup of fat on his body, a thoroughly credible fighting machine.
When he moves in the ring—and Scorsese films the action in slow and fast motion almost as often as at regular speed—De Niro doesn’t only move like a fighter (and, specifically, like Jake LaMotta) but acts like a fighter: focusing like a laser on his opponent, trying to strategize while engaged in combat, absorbing and meting out punishment with a genuine sense of pleasure, relishing the challenge of the bout, playing broadly to the crowd, too adrenalized and battered and in the moment to absorb the things his cornermen are telling him. Not a decade before, De Niro played a baseball player of limited gifts and could barely pass as a simulacrum of the real thing; in Raging Bull, he is one of the most plausible movie-screen boxers ever filmed.
And yet, as ugly as things get in the ring—busted noses, eyes spinning after blows to the head, blood filling water pails and dripping from the ropes—it is outside of it that LaMotta and his story are at their most feral, ugly, and horrifying. Even when he tries to understand himself, LaMotta cannot separate one type of violence, one type of threat, one type of fight from another (not for nothing, by the way, does the film open with him staring at himself in a mirror, the first of several such moments). In the first non-fighting sequence set in the 1940s, LaMotta and his wife squabble viciously in an apartment no bigger than a boxing ring, and he explodes, throwing over the table, dinner and all, taking time to yell threats out the windows at the neighbor and his dog. Soon he goads his brother into punching him in the face, hard, without making any effort to defend himself. It’s a remarkable, unblinking vision of masochism, a thirst for punishment and abuse made especially awful by the cockeyed grin De Niro sports throughout. He’s proud that he can endure pain, even—maybe especially—outside of the professional setting in which it’s expected.
Jake isn’t entirely horrible. With his dapper 1940s wardrobe, gorgeous body, and killer grin, De Niro sells us on the fellow’s appeal. LaMotta’s “no Olivier,” as he himself confesses in the film’s brief opening scene, nor is he a Cary Grant. Among the local hoods there are several, including the unctuous Salvy, who have better manners, slicker clothes, more stylish miens. But Jake has panache, a sense of play, an occasional twinkle in his eye. On his first date with Vicki, when her ball disappears into an obstacle at a miniature golf course, he’s positively endearing when he responds to her question “What does it mean?” by saying gently, “It means the game is over.” You can see why, even if he weren’t semi-famous, he’d catch a girl’s eye.
But he is a haunted man, and the demons inside him will find a way out, whether in boxing or in some other medium. Often his behavior in and out of the ring seems identical. At times Scorsese slows down the action as the camera gets near to Jake’s perception of things, so that Vicki and the men with whom she interacts seem as much of a threat to Jake as his opponents in the ring. De Niro indicates Jake’s vigilance and predation with just a shade; he never quite reaches the verge of violence. But we know that there is hell brewing inside of him, and the slight churning behind his eyes is almost more frightening than anything he might unleash.
There is tenderness in him, as evinced by the remarkable scene in which he and the underage Vicki come close to having intercourse before his rematch with Robinson. Battered from the first fight (which was just a week or so prior), he insists that she get intimate with him: “C’mere, before I give you a beatin’… Touch my boo-boos.” But then, aroused, he douses his passion by standing in front of a bathroom mirror and pouring ice water on his erection (which, pace United Artists brass, is never shown). The scene is a gripping blend of eroticism and denial, pleasure and punishment, classical beauty (both Moriarty in her lingerie and De Niro with his sculpted abs and chest) and grotesquerie.
But that one blissful idyll is wiped away by the things that happen when he succumbs to his worst impulses. Lost in a jealous rage, he beats his brother and then his wife, holding her face up before punching her, just as he had done to a recent opponent before destroying him. Even though he has thrown a fight and will later be convicted of procurement, this is the worst deed of his life, and it’s no coincidence at all that he subsequently allows Robinson, in their final meeting, to beat him to a bloody pulp. “I done some bad things,” he has told his brother, and at this moment we cannot imagine that he will be able to claw his way back into the good graces of his family, his God, or, most of all, himself.
The final space in which LaMotta’s inchoate self-loathing is realized is the tiny isolation cell of a Florida lockup. There are no mirrors; there is no crowd; there is no opponent other than himself. Howling “I’m not that bad” like a beast, weeping (De Niro was never a good movie crier, but this is prime stuff), he beats his head at least a dozen times against a stone wall, as well as delivering literally scores of punches to it. (The wall, of course, was made of Styrofoam.) He has long sought to bring some sort of vengeance down upon himself, some sort of punishment for his perceived inner evil. Finally, he is left to do it himself. De Niro throws himself so fully into this moment, more violent than anything he’s done to anyone else in the film, in or out of the ring, that we wince in sympathy for the pain in his hands, his head, and especially his heart.
Somehow, though, there is a path to salvation through this abyss. LaMotta emerges not so much a man intact as a survivor; life, like Robinson, has failed to knock him down. We leave him at the film’s end just where we met him at the beginning, in a dressing room at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel, rehearsing his extremely dubious cabaret act in a mirror before donning his tux. Preparing for the stage, he recites some of the lines Brando spoke in the back of the car in the famous “It was you, Charlie,” scene from On the Waterfront, an actor playing a washed-up fighter imitating an actor playing a washed-up fighter.*6 There’s something strangely pacific in this bloated shell of a man finding a means to express something inside without resorting to violence, whether against a boxing opponent, a family member, or even (maybe especially) himself.
Despite the wishes of the studio executives who didn’t want to green-light the film, we are not meant to empathize with LaMotta, not in the traditional sense in which a movie’s lead character is an object of identification for the audience. Rather, his journey is emblematic of human struggle through pain, darkness, weakness, and temptation toward solace, strength, peace, and light. He seems to get there, heading off for the stage having pumped himself up with a few flurries of sparring jabs and the mantra “I’m the boss, I’m the boss, I’m the boss, I’m the boss.” But he may be no more cured or healed than Travis Bickle, a cannon that has been strapped back into place but which might again get loose and threaten everything around it, including itself. As a character, he is not a warm figure or a figure of admiration. But he is so fully realized—and the frame in which he has been mounted so exquisitely wrought—that he has become an immortal character, and an astounding achievement by the men who conceived and created him.
It’s hard to recollect a film so widely regarded as superb and so widely reviled at the same time. In Sports Illustrated, Frank DeFord put it this way: “Has any movie ever so utterly lacked soul and yet been so rewarding?” Like the executives at United Artists, critics were thoroughly repelled by Jake LaMotta and his story—and deeply puzzled about Scorsese’s desire to bring them to the screen. In the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann compared watching it to “visiting a human zoo,” and in the New Yorker, Pauline Kael sounded a similar note, writing that De Niro and Scorsese “are trying to go deeper into the inarticulate types they have done before; this time they seem to go down to pre-human levels.” (This was not proffered as praise.)
But even those who felt an almost visceral repulsion to the film acknowledged De Niro’s power. “If you respond,” Kael granted, “possibly it’s not to LaMotta’s integrity but to De Niro’s; he buries the clichés that lesser actors might revel in.… With anyone but De Niro in the role, the picture would probably be a joke.” Conceded Kauffmann, “Behind his false nose, he assaults us with force, engulfing force so sheer that it achieves a kind of aesthetic stature.” In Time, Richard Corliss wrote, “When the film is moving on automatic pilot, De Niro is still sailing on animal energy.” And David Denby in New York quite aptly captured the dichotomies the film presented to critics: “The truth is that De Niro doesn’t want us to identify. His furious, cold, brilliant performances are a way of saying, ‘Don’t try to understand me, because you can’t.’ In Raging Bull,… he brings all his cruelly eloquent physicality … to a man with a soul like a cigarette butt. He is extraordinary and repellent.”
For all these stellar notices, De Niro could be thin-skinned with anyone who didn’t fully embrace the film. He annotated his copy of Pauline Kael’s review, scribbling defensively in the margins, “That’s the idea, that’s right,” and “So? That’s right. That’s him.” And when he was told that the film was “a brutal portrait,” he insisted otherwise: “Raging Bull is like a little domestic spat compared to what people can really do to one another.”
DE NIRO RECEIVED an astounding array of letters from his peers congratulating him on his work in Raging Bull. Al Pacino joked that it was a bad precedent to write in admiration because he’d create the impression that he wasn’t impressed henceforth if he didn’t send a note. Jane Fonda described De Niro’s work as “beyond any acting I’ve known about.” Paul Newman wrote, “Dear Robert, I can’t remember being humbled by an American actor for many a year. Well, you did that in spades. Can’t add much to that.”
But the public failed to respond, frankly staggering Scorsese, who was coming off a series of commercial disappointments. As was the practice at the time, the film received a slow rollout, starting with an exclusive run of several weeks in only four theaters and escalating gradually to a wider audience. While word of De Niro’s performance clearly compelled some viewers to buy tickets, more people seemed to have been turned away by what they heard of the film’s grim tone, foul language, open-eyed violence, and dark moral core. In a year in which such relatively breezy films as The Empire Strikes Back, 9 to 5, and Stir Crazy dominated the box office, Raging Bull was a poor earner, grossing barely $23 million, placing it in twenty-seventh place among the year’s releases, behind films such as Popeye and The Jazz Singer, which were widely seen as flops.
Money was never really the thing, of course. Raging Bull would surely find its redemption in the form of awards. Yet there, too, the film ran into rough seas. When the critics started polling themselves at year’s end, De Niro walked away with almost every possible prize, being named Best Actor by the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the National Board of Review, and the Golden Globes (his only loss was in the polling of the National Society of Film Critics, which went instead for Peter O’Toole in The Stunt Man). Joe Pesci and cinematographer Michael Chapman also collected nice hauls of prizes. But Scorsese’s sole accolade, for a film that in retrospect would be among the great masterpieces of a great director, received only the National Society of Film Critics award for Best Director; elsewhere, he lost out to the likes of Jonathan Demme for Melvin and Howard, Roman Polanski for Tess, and Robert Redford, who had made his directorial debut with Ordinary People.
And the Oscars turned out to be a mixed blessing for the Raging Bull team as well. In all, the film was in the running for eight Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, and Best Sound, tying The Elephant Man for the most nominations that year. De Niro was the prohibitive favorite to win, in competition against O’Toole, Robert Duvall (The Great Santini), John Hurt (The Elephant Man), and Jack Lemmon (Tribute). But after the Golden Globes and the Directors Guild selected Robert Redford as Best Director of the year, Scorsese’s chances looked dimmer and dimmer.
The Oscars were scheduled for March 30, 1981, but early that day a psychopathic loner named John Warnock Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan and three other men outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. There was no protocol for handling an awards show in the shadow of such a situation, and rather than risk celebrating themselves while the president fought for his life, Academy officials decided to postpone the telecast for twenty-four hours. Reagan, quite fortunately, would recover from his wounds. But the pall that the assassination attempt cast over the Academy Awards would only deepen the following day, when America would learn that Hinckley, in the sort of coincidence that wouldn’t pass muster with anyone reviewing a script for a thriller, had been inspired to shoot the president by his obsession with Taxi Driver and, more specifically, his wish to impress Jodie Foster with a holocaust of violence like that depicted at the end of the 1976 film. As Scorsese, De Niro, and Schrader were waiting to hear if they’d been rewarded for the exceedingly bitter Raging Bull, it appeared as though their earlier collaboration had inspired someone to a wild act of real-world violence.
At the start of the telecast, though, almost nobody at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion knew about the connection between Hinckley and Taxi Driver. In fact, when De Niro arrived, his attention was grabbed by a reminder of another sensational crime. Emerging from his limo, he noticed an ABC-TV page named Thomas Rogers wearing a green ribbon on the lapel of his suit. Curious as to the meaning of the symbol, De Niro learned that it was part of a nationwide effort to show solidarity with the citizens of Atlanta, Georgia, where a serial killer was preying on young black men. De Niro asked if Rogers had one that he could wear during the evening, and Rogers gave the star his own ribbon. Thus did De Niro inadvertently become the first celebrity to be seen sporting what became known as an “awards show ribbon” in support of some humanitarian cause.
Inside, as word of the Hinckley/Taxi Driver connection started to spread, the evening slowly slipped away from Raging Bull. Editor Thelma Schoonmaker and cinematographer Michael Chapman were awarded Oscars, but Pesci and Scorsese were overlooked. With only three awards left to be distributed, Sally Field, who’d won Best Actress the previous year for Norma Rae, came out to present the Best Actor award. To no one’s surprise, the name in the envelope was De Niro’s.
Six years earlier, his director, Francis Coppola, had accepted his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for him. But now De Niro was present to speak for himself, and he did so rather fumblingly, reaching into his tuxedo jacket for a slip of paper and joking, “I forgot my lines, so the director wrote them down for me.”
“I want to thank everyone,” he declared, and he more or less did, acknowledging the film’s costumer, casting director, sound man, makeup artists, writers, and producers. He mentioned Pete Savage: “If Pete wasn’t involved in the film he wouldn’t have gotten it started … I’m a little nervous, excuse me … the film never would have gotten started.” He thanked “Vicki LaMotta and all the other wives, and Joey LaMotta, even though he’s suing us. I hope that settles soon enough so I can go over to his house and eat once in a while.” After the audience laughed, he continued to a list of even more important thank-yous: “And of course, Jake LaMotta, whose life it’s all about. And Marty Scorsese, who gave me and all the other actors and everyone on the film all the love and trust that anyone could give anyone and is just wonderful as a director. And I want to thank my mother and father for having me. And my grandmother and grandfather, for having them. And everyone else involved in the film. And I hope that I can share this with anyone that it means anything to and the rest of the world, and especially all the terrible things that are happening. I love everyone.”
In the backstage press room, reporters tried to get De Niro to comment on the Hinckley business, but he was predictably reluctant. “I don’t know about the story,” he said. “I don’t want to discuss the matter now.” When the questions persisted, he put his foot down: “Look, I said what I wanted to say out there. You’re all very nice, but that’s it.” He then left to pass the better part of the evening with the Raging Bull team at a Beverly Hills restaurant, where they had repaired to make sense of the day’s events in privacy. He had been compelled by the law to answer the questions put to him by Joey LaMotta’s attorneys. Hollywood reporters, as he well knew, had no such power over him.
*1 Joseph Carter, who was not part of any phase of the movie deal, would later sue LaMotta and Savage for a percentage of the film rights. And decades later, Savage’s daughter would sue MGM, which would eventually own the film, for her late father’s portion of its total earnings, claiming copyright infringement on Savage’s original work. In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to adjudicate the matter.
*2 Her name would also be spelled “Vickie” and “Vikki” over the years in various publications and documents.
*3 Given the raw scenes he was filming, this choice nicely mirrored that of Alfred Hitchcock, who shot Psycho in black and white during the greatest period of color photography in his career so as not to alienate audiences with garish displays of bloodshed.
*4 This scene was one of the reasons Joey LaMotta sued the production; in reality, it was Pete Savage who’d put the fellow represented by the Salvy character in a hospital.
*5 It was another echo, perhaps inadvertent, of Alfred Hitchcock, who had learned over time to put his famous surprise cameos near the beginning of his films so that audiences would stop looking for him and pay attention to the actual movie.
*6 Even more vertiginous: for the second time in a half dozen years, De Niro will literally repeat dialogue first spoken by Brando in an Oscar-winning role in an Oscar-winning role of his own.