WHATEVER MIGHT BE MEANT BY THE PHRASE “CAREER criminal,” it certainly was appropriate for James Burke, aka Jimmy the Gent, a hijacker, loan shark, gambler, extortionist, drug trafficker, and murderer who was born in New York in 1931 and had an adult arrest record from the time he was eligible for one. Burke was taken into custody by the NYPD four times in 1970, three times each in 1948, 1957, 1964, and 1966, twice each in 1961 and 1963, and once each in 1949, 1950, 1953, 1956, 1962, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1972, and 1973: thirty-three collars in twenty-five years, real archcriminal stuff.
That last bust—for beating a Florida man who owed money to some people in New York—wound up with Burke going to prison for six years, during which time a parole officer noted, with some understatement:
This resident can be described as “The Model Inmate.”… It is plain to see that this man knows how to “pull time.” During interviews he was always courteous and cooperative and gave the appearance of being self-confident and mature. However, because of his lengthy criminal record he is considered to be street-wise and criminally oriented.… The prognosis for Mr. Burke to remain free of involvement in criminal activities is guarded.
Burke was aligned with the Lucchese crime family, which held sway over parts of Brooklyn and Queens, where Burke was born and committed most of his crimes. He was particularly keen on Kennedy Airport, which was near his base of operations, provided a rich source of cargo, cash, and valuables, and, in the days before 9/11, featured a loosey-goosey security infrastructure that could be easily exploited by a small and well-connected gang of thieves. Burke was famous in criminal and police circles for his ability to prey upon the airport; the most audacious heist of his audacious career, a $6 million haul of untraceable cash from a Lufthansa Airlines storage facility in 1978, became the stuff of legend, in part because in the years afterward Burke systematically killed so many of the people involved in the job.*1
What Burke was not was Italian, and thus despite all his collaborations with mafiosi and all the money he made with and for them, he was never initiated into the mob. That was a privilege accorded to full-blooded Italians and never to Irishmen like Burke or even to the likes of Henry Hill, a half-Italian, half-Irish member of Burke’s crew who grew up watching and emulating Jimmy the Gent and other gangsters from his neighborhood. Burke was a father figure to Hill and to the slightly younger Thomas DeSimone, both of whom he’d instructed in the ways of the mob from adolescence onward and who partnered with him on any number of crimes, including the Lufthansa heist. One of the lessons he repeatedly drilled into them was that they should never, under any circumstances, rat on a colleague or assist the police in any way. But when Hill was caught dealing cocaine in 1980—against the orders of Burke and their mutual bosses in the Lucchese family—he did what he’d been tutored never to do: he cooperated with law enforcement authorities against Burke and several others and vanished into the witness protection program. On the strength of Hill’s testimony, Burke went to prison in 1982—not for the Lufthansa heist and all the murders that he’d committed or ordered others to cover up, but for fixing college basketball games as part of a 1978 gambling scheme. While he was incarcerated, though, he was convicted of the 1979 murder of a cocaine dealer, and any chance he had of being paroled disappeared. He died of stomach cancer in a prison hospital in 1996.
Burke’s story came to the attention of Martin Scorsese in 1985 when he read Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family by the New York journalist Nicholas Pileggi. The book was an as-told-to account of Henry Hill’s life and deeds, recounted from the vantage of an unnamed safe harbor and an assumed identity. Said Scorsese, “I was drawn to the book because of the details—life—stuff that I remembered friends saying when I was growing up in Little Italy and that I had never seen written down before.” With Pileggi, Scorsese worked on adapting a script from the book (the title of which could not be used because of a fear of confusion with the then-popular TV series of the same name). They focused their work on the quotidiana of mob life that enthralled Scorsese, ending up with what Pileggi called “a mob home movie.”
Before Scorsese could get around to it, though, he finally made The Last Temptation of Christ and then the short film Life Lessons, which was part of the New York Stories trilogy that also included pieces by Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola. Finally, in the summer of 1989, he set about making Goodfellas, as the Henry Hill movie had come to be entitled, with a $25 million budget from Warner Bros. Ray Liotta, hot off successes in small but vital roles in Something Wild and Field of Dreams, would play Hill; Lorraine Bracco, then married to Harvey Keitel, would play Hill’s wife, Karen; Paul Sorvino would play a Lucchese family crime boss; Joe Pesci would take on a character based on Tommy DeSimone, and De Niro would play the role of Jimmy the Gent—or Jimmy Conway, as the script renamed him.
Whatever he was energized by—the story, the role, or the chance to work with Scorsese for the first time since The King of Comedy—De Niro dove into preparing for the part of Jimmy the Gent with a vigor he hadn’t demonstrated in years. In some ways it was a supporting role, since Hill was the narrator and the protagonist. But De Niro treated it with fanatical devotion. He never met with Burke—“It would have been too complicated,” he explained cryptically—but he spoke with Henry and Karen Hill repeatedly (they joked about receiving seven or eight phone calls from him a day), and his researchers helped track down other people who could tell him about the mind, the heart, and the habits of the real guy.*2 And he heavily annotated his copy of Pileggi’s book.
The result was a massive written portrait of Jimmy Burke, larger than the one Pileggi had written, teeming with insights and reflections that would shape De Niro’s performance: an account of how Burke talked, walked, dressed, gambled, killed, ate, drank, moved, loved, hated, thought. In each scene in which he appeared, De Niro distilled his research into specific choices of actions, attitudes, and dialogue. It was the most work he’d done on a film role since Raging Bull. Take, for example, these excerpts from his notes on the character:
Lots of bets … he liked to laugh … when drunk a little loud … tried to be a part of any situation … good at bullshitting people … bookmaker all the time … plays gin rummy … fabulous memory … dozen roses to mothers of guys in can … glide, little bounce … always shaking hands … Didn’t like strangers … I’d go over in a restaurant if I knew them and say hello, buy drinks, send a bottle … big spender … likes to tell jokes, good company, a laugher … I created my own crew … I was contemporary … I networked very well. I was always working, my mind was working. Anybody and anything … I made myself known and I made myself feared. A rebel … I know that if I wanted to get it done right, anything, I had to do it … seemed to be everywhere, all the time … I have a set of values, set of rules … wonderful around children, respectful, a gentleman … hair short, clean … when had to do business, looked good. Good dresser. A rebel but respectful … expressive with eyes, looked right at you … intense smile you never knew how to take … could smile wide and be very angry … play one person against the other, egg a person … on power trips … never slept; once in a while took a cat nap … loved that he was Irish and when walked into place they’d play “Danny Boy”… a good sport; if someone needed, I’d give … nice smile … normally laid back, take things in stride, always in control … my mind was on making a score, not so much a woman … when walked in the place glowed, but people didn’t like to see me get drunk.
There are the makings of a complete performance in those observations, and De Niro’s dossier would go on for pages and pages, noting Burke’s love of ketchup on his food, his preference for Chivas Regal or J&B scotch neat with a glass of water on the side, his workaholism, his inability to relate to women, his love of elevated diction, and especially his singular status as an Irishman working for the Mafia: “Part of my power was Italians needed me. They had the money but I had the connection with the Irish DA and politicians. I being Irish they could trust me. So if I whacked guys from time to time they’d let it go, cause I was too important to them and I knew that.” He also cannily noted another oddity of Jimmy’s status vis-à-vis his Mafia connections: “I did all the shit that the wiseguys wouldn’t and couldn’t do. I just did it! Whatever it was … I’m more of a wiseguy big shot than the actual wiseguy big shots. I got more style than they do.… I act more Italian than the Italians to overcompensate.”
In the course of the film, Jimmy the Gent would age twenty-four years, and De Niro was, predictably, scrupulous in addressing the changes in physique, diction, wardrobe, and especially hair color and hair style that the character would undergo. (During production, he went to a Manhattan nightclub to see the jazz singer Little Jimmy Scott perform and was approached by a woman unknown to him who wanted to know why he looked so gray. “That comes from the aggravation of being a star,” he replied.)
He wasn’t the only actor devoted to verisimilitude throughout the production. Scorsese gave Joe Pesci the go-ahead to fill his prop pistol with blanks for a scene in which he shot an errand boy in a fit of pique, and the loud report of the gun genuinely took the other players in the scene by surprise: “Everyone in the room was shocked,” Pesci recalled. “No one moved. I think they were really scared.”
Pesci also remembered how carefully De Niro observed everything about the film, not just the details concerning Jimmy the Gent. When they filmed the famous body-in-the-car-trunk scene, he said, “I attacked Frank [Vincent] with the knife viciously. After the first take, Bob kept staring at me. I said, ‘How was it? Was I ok?’ Bob said, ‘Yeah, it’s fine.’ But he kept staring like he wanted to tell me something. He said, ‘Well, Joe, your emotions are great, but I don’t see how you can get that knife in and out of the chest area that fast because of the bones and the tendons all around it. It’s such a big butcher knife, it seems you’d have to force it in and force it out.’ That’s Bob. He really wants to help.”
There were even true-to-life details that none of the filmmakers knew about. Cast as Fat Andy, one of the mobsters in the movie’s slow-motion introduction of the Lucchese crew in their nightclub hangout, was Lou Eppolito, a Brooklyn detective who, it later emerged, was an active participant in as many as eight gangland murders, among a number of crimes for which he and a fellow officer were eventually tried and convicted—and sentenced to what was in effect life in prison.
That sort of thing helped infuse the film with the sort of spirit that Scorsese sought. Goodfellas would have a sexy patina that made mob life seem as attractive to the audience as it did to the young Henry Hill, but in the end the violence, disloyalty, and darkness of the life would emerge even more powerfully. “Anyone who wants to live that lifestyle after seeing this movie—it’s beyond me,” the director said. The film was designed to make clear, according to Pileggi, that “the honor code is a myth.… Once Henry’s life is threatened, he has no qualms about testifying. He does no soul-searching because he has no soul.”
DESPITE EVERYTHING THE actor had learned about the real-life Jimmy “the Gent” Burke, the sheer gorgeous style of Goodfellas is the most important determinant in De Niro’s assured, breezy, and unimpeachable performance. The film belongs to Liotta, of course, and Pesci steals it (and was, properly, awarded an Oscar for the job), but De Niro’s every appearance is memorably graced with savvy, showy, well-designed, and well-played moments. He’s playing a fictionalized version of a real character rendered through the memories of another based-on-truth character, and he plays with just the right degree of stylization to fulfill that delicate charge and to enhance the film indisputably.
When he first arrives, in Henry’s memory (which, of course, is the vantage from which the entire film is seen), he is in his late twenties, dark-haired, slick, and voluble, smiling deeply without baring his teeth, sticking C-note tips in people’s shirt pockets, and declaring, with his head cocked at a jaunty angle, “The Irishman is here to take all you [sic] guineas’ money,” the Cadillacs’ boastful R&B hit “Speedoo” his entry music. “It was a glorious time,” Henry remembers; riding Jimmy’s infectious, energetic, and festive vibe, you have to agree.
From there, Jimmy takes on the role of mentoring Henry and Tommy, telling them, like a good coach, when they’ve done well and not and demonstrating with his professionalism and judicious meting out of punishment how the game works. The three are grown men, but Jimmy is the eldest, the most stable, the smartest, the most trustworthy and emulable and wise. He’s also deeply loyal, as he demonstrates by joining in on the beating and murder of a gangster whose offense was a verbal show of disrespect to Tommy (“You insulted him a little bit,” as Jimmy famously points out to the fellow). De Niro leaps into the fray with his patented kick to the body: arms outspread, knee lifted high to bring his full weight to bear on a downward blow with the heel. When next we see him, he’s getting ready to tuck into the scrambled eggs that Tommy’s mother has cooked for the boys, and it’s hard to say which action has more engaged him: stomping a man to the edge of death or spinning a ketchup bottle between his palms to get the contents flowing. He’s got a zest, Jimmy does.
But he’s also extremely vigilant and suspicious, to the point of paranoia and, eventually, murder. After the Lufthansa heist, one dope in the crew after another shows up at a holiday party with an opulent new toy: a fur, a floozy, a Cadillac. And Jimmy dresses them down in what will become an iconic mode of late De Niro temper: “What did I tell you? What … did … I … tell … you?” That face of Jimmy’s coldness is amusing; far less so is the one we see later, when he goes from thinking that he has to whack his crew to save his own skin to knowing that he’ll do it. He’s at the corner of the bar, chatting, smoking, his eyes gelid, moving from the fellow he’s talking to, to whom he smiles insincerely, to the blabbermouth Morrie, the ceaseless irritant of which he plans to relieve himself soon. The camera zooms slowly in on De Niro, Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” on the soundtrack, and his expressions work on two levels: the superficial one of grins and chatter, the subtextual one of psychopathic intent declaring itself. It’s one of the best things De Niro and Scorsese have ever done together.
He has two more standout scenes. Waiting at the diner with Henry for news of Tommy’s initiation into the mob, Jimmy’s all bubbly nerves, eating and laughing at once, clearly relishing life. When he receives bad news instead of good, he rages against the parking lot pay phone and struggles to keep from bursting into tears—one of the best such efforts in De Niro’s career (he never was a very good crier). Later, behind the pair of cheaters he’s taken to wearing in middle age, he seems kindly and caring when telling Karen how to find “some beautiful Dior dresses … down the corner.” In fact, given the circumstances under which they’re meeting—Henry has been busted by the feds and is being leaned on to turn against his friends—Jimmy’s avuncular manner is terrifying. He seems not to have evil intent, but De Niro plays him on a delicate edge in a particularly quiet and attenuated scene, and he thus becomes unreadable. It’s a marvelous trick: nothing in the scene suggests menace … except for everything.
As those reading glasses suggest, De Niro creates a character who spans a couple of decades credibly, graying, giving up a little bit of hairline, and becoming more cautious and more intent on survival with the passing of the years. The film is about Henry Hill, and secondarily about his wife. But Jimmy Conway is the principal third character in that his chronology runs almost as long—though never as deep—as Henry’s. In a sense, De Niro gets to build an entire character as if he were carrying the film. Rather than mark the transitions, though (save that one from wondering about murder to committing to it), he simply makes them and appears in a slightly older guise: his hair, his clothes, his manner. It’s a performance with flashes in it, and details, but it’s mainly low-key ensemble work, and quite good. It’s only the second time in a collaboration with Scorsese that he hasn’t played the central character, and he’s as engaged in it as in any of the major roles he crafted with the director.
And it was a hit. Goodfellas was released in September 1990 and led the North American box office on its opening weekend with $6.37 million. It wound up lasting five weeks in the top ten, grossing a total of $46.8 million—not a blockbuster but one of the best results its director and his longtime star had enjoyed to that point.
IN AUGUST 1989, virtually as soon as he was done shooting Goodfellas, De Niro found himself in London’s Highlands Hospital, observing and, when possible, interacting with a group of people who’d been living there for more than a half century: patients suffering from the aftereffects of an epidemic of encephalitis, a sickness that had left them immobilized, almost zombielike. He was there in the company of Dr. Oliver Sacks, the acclaimed British neurologist and author whose 1973 book Awakenings described his work with similar patients in the Bronx in the late 1960s. And he was preparing to play one of Sacks’s patients in a screen adaptation of the book.
Sacks had observed the post-encephalitic patients and theorized that their physical catatonia could in fact be a form of Parkinson’s disease—in effect, their bodily spasms had sped up to a point at which they froze. He experimented with the use of a new drug, L-dopa, which had been developed to slow the spasms of traditional Parkinson’s patients. For a period the post-encephalitic patients responded, unfreezing, coming to life after decades, attempting to merge back into the world, sometimes with alarming results. In the course of time, though, they developed a tolerance for the drug treatment and regressed to their immobilized states.
Sacks’s book had been warmly received in both scientific and literary circles; Harold Pinter had adapted a short play from it, and W. H. Auden had written a poem inspired by it. In 1983, a documentary made for British television told the story and showed Sacks and his actual patients, including some footage from their period of emergence. In 1989, screenwriter Steve Zaillian adapted Sacks’s book as a project for director Penny Marshall, who was fresh off the massive success of Big (which, of course, had nearly starred De Niro). Now she was offering him the role of Leonard Lowe, loosely based on one of Sacks’s patients who was among the earliest—and, when briefly “cured,” the most volatile—of the L-dopa patients. Robin Williams would play Sacks, and shooting would begin in October, meaning De Niro had his work cut out for him in order to segue from the itchy Jimmy the Gent to Leonard, who’d been paralytic for decades.
In order to do so, according to Sacks, De Niro embarked on a serious study of Parkinson’s, paralysis, catatonia, and similar medical conditions. He made particular use of a friend of friends in New York who had a severe case of Parkinson’s. This fellow was responsive to L-dopa and very articulate about what it felt like to be in the throes of his condition and then freed by medication. De Niro interviewed him at length, as he did another Parkinson’s patient, a man whose symptoms resembled those of Sacks’s frozen patients; De Niro had a chance to accompany this fellow to an alternative therapist to see what it was like when his body was, in effect, thawed.
I’ll never forget first meeting him in Penn Station—everyone rushing about at high speed, and there was this real-life, living statue of a man, just standing there still, quite frozen. When we picked our way down the stairs to the train so slowly, I could feel his terrible need for an impetus to move—as if he was flailing in some sort of fog we could both feel. We went to this healer on Long Island who could free him for a while by pressing parts of his body and nerves until Bang! All of a sudden he snapped out of it. He became wildly animated: “We mustn’t miss the train back,” he said, so there we were suddenly jogging along together to the station. He was able to explain to me, articulately, just how he was feeling, and what he was going through. He was a great artist in his own way.
While De Niro observed Sacks’s patients, Sacks observed De Niro, noting how eerily he could slip in and out of various moods—or, more accurately, the expressions of those moods. Watching him rehearse for a scene in which Leonard was particularly exercised, Sacks said, was “like overhearing a man thinking, but thinking with his body … thinking in action.” At other times, watching De Niro play physical crises, Sacks became alarmed at the accuracy of the portrayal, his inner physician emerging from beneath the author visiting the film set: “I forgot he was an actor. I thought he had suddenly lost all his postural reflexes, that there had suddenly been a neurological catastrophe.” He was amazed, too, to see that De Niro couldn’t always turn it off at will; chatting with the actor in his dressing room between takes, Sacks noticed that De Niro’s right foot was turned at a ninety-degree angle, just like the feet of his post-encephalitic patients. He pointed it out, and De Niro replied, “I didn’t realize. I guess it’s unconscious.”
Sacks considered hooking up De Niro to his diagnostic machinery to see if he had actually created a post-encephalitic brain profile in himself, but he ultimately decided against it. Still, ever the neurologist, he developed a theory about De Niro’s technique: “Bob’s method, as far as I could see, was to take in everything he learned about Parkinsonism, absorb it silently, without any external sign, and then let the images sink down into his unconscious and ferment there, uniting with his own experiences, powers, imagination, feelings. Only then would they return so deeply infused with his own character as to be an integral part, an expression of himself”—as good a working definition of Stanislavskian acting as De Niro would have heard in Stella Adler’s classroom or the Actors Studio.
What Sacks didn’t see were the copious line-by-line notes that De Niro made in his script, reminders of virtually every bit of physical acting he wished to do: drooling, twisting his head, fidgeting, rocking, clutching the arms of a chair, shaking, speaking with subtle gradations of looseness and rigidity. De Niro wrote down dozens of questions for Sacks, and continually sought comparisons for the behavior he wished to embody: a sloth, the cartoon Road Runner, various of Sacks’s patients, even Sacks himself.
During the production, De Niro impressed Marshall with his application, his imagination, his versatility: “You say, ‘Bob, comb your hair,’ and he does it several different ways, all amazing to watch.” Even more eye-opening was the day on which Robin Williams accidentally broke De Niro’s nose during a take of a scene in which Sacks was testing Leonard’s reflexes. The blow was so severe, De Niro said, that “we heard a crack—you could hear it on the soundtrack at the rushes.” As Marshall recalled, De Niro turned away immediately, staying in the scene, then turned back to reveal a stream of blood coming from his nose. “Bobby went on with the scene,” Marshall said, astonished. “We did nine more takes.” The next day, after X-rays confirmed the break, swelling and discoloration caused the production to halt for a week so that he could recover. In fact, De Niro was almost grateful for the accident: “I had my nose broken first when I was a kid,” he said, and Williams “straightened it out, knocked it back in the other direction.”
SURELY THE CHIEF appeal for De Niro of playing the role of Leonard Lowe was the chance to perform with his body in a way that he might if he were cast as, say, the Elephant Man onstage: a series of stillnesses, contortions, and spasms that, almost without the need for dialogue, tells the character’s fate. As it stands, Steve Zaillian’s script is painfully pointed and overdetermined (and, almost without saying, Oscar-nominated), and wherever the writing manages to be naturalistic or at ease Penny Marshall imposes a heartless sentimentality, insisting almost fascistically on specific emotional reactions, heavily underscoring her intent with pointed framing and cutting, with reaction shots that are meant to trigger mirrored responses in the viewer, and with a depressingly literal score by Randy Newman.
Still, De Niro is quite strong in the various phases of his role. Leonard is frozen; he thaws; he is restored to normal vitality; he becomes increasingly unable to control his body, first with facial tics and then with waves of spasms; he experiences short freezing spells; finally he returns to the “elsewhere” described by the elderly doctor (Max von Sydow) who first treated patients like him decades before. In all of it, you can see the depth of De Niro’s study and effort, and you are physically uncomfortable with his struggle, just as you might be if you were in the room with him. At times the performance feels a little bit like something whipped up for the workshop, but very often it’s painfully lifelike, and you can’t ignore De Niro for a second when he’s on the screen.
Ironically, given that we know (from the movie poster or DVD jacket, if nothing else) that Leonard will eventually emerge from his catatonic state, De Niro is arguably most compelling in the moments when he cannot move at all and sits or lies, his gaze alertly fixed on Sayer. There are three or four such episodes in the early going, and you find yourself looking deeply into De Niro’s eyes, in part because of the knowledge that he’s awake and cognizant in there (a condition that von Sydow has rightly labeled “unthinkable”), in part because De Niro has always been able to infuse silence with a gaze in such a way as to convey as much meaning as any passage of dialogue.
Unfrozen, Leonard regains his muscularity and speech slowly, so there is a gradual escalation in his motor abilities and his verbal fluency—another challenge that De Niro seems to relish. Fully recovered, Leonard is a man of simple affect and appearance, his shirts tucked in boyishly and buttoned all the way up to his chubby neck, whether or not he’s wearing his favored bowtie. He has old-fashioned ideas and a great store of knowledge (he has alerted Sayer that he’s awake inside his frozen body by writing out the phrase “Rilke’s panther” with a Ouija board); he’s a model of the efficacy of clinical psychology and pharmacological therapy.
But when Leonard starts to lose control of his body once again, the performance begins to be painted with the same broad brush with which the film has been directed. A rabble-rousing speech in which Leonard enlists a ward of able-bodied patients to his side in rejecting the rule of the administrators is as heavy-handed in its acting as its writing. From then, the physicality of the character becomes more and more the focus of De Niro’s efforts—and less and less easy to watch. Fully in the thrall of the sort of spasms you might see in someone with cerebral palsy, he gets so he can’t fix his gaze long enough on a page to read. Your heart goes out to him, partly because, even with the showiness, De Niro imbues Leonard with simple, recognizable humanity, partly because he has been so sweet with his doctor, mother, and nurses—as well as a girl (Penelope Ann Miller) to whom he has attached himself. Finally, he is “elsewhere” once again, frozen, dependent, the faraway look in his eyes infinitely more meaningful and pointed than it was at the start of the film.
Awakenings debuted in New York and Los Angeles in December 1990, in time for Academy Award eligibility, with a nationwide rollout planned for January. It outperformed Goodfellas at the box office, grossing more than $52 million and spending six weeks in the top ten—a second hit in a row. In fact, with Goodfellas still playing healthily, De Niro was enjoying his most successful combination of critical and commercial success since The Untouchables, maybe ever. In February, when Oscar nominations were announced, he was in the final running for the Best Actor prize, placing him in his first Academy Award race since Raging Bull. More impressive was that both Awakenings and Goodfellas were nominated for Best Picture, along with Ghost, The Godfather: Part III (which De Niro had lobbied Francis Coppola to play a role in) and the eventual winner, in one of the most often-cited instances of the Motion Picture Academy’s bland taste, Dances with Wolves, for which Kevin Costner aced out Martin Scorsese as Best Director. De Niro lost, in what nobody considered an upset or miscarriage of aesthetic justice, to Jeremy Irons for Reversal of Fortune. (Oliver Sacks wrote De Niro from London to say, “Sorry you didn’t get an Oscar—I was rooting for you.” But another character in the De Niro saga felt differently: Pauline Kael, Virginia Admiral’s onetime admirer and De Niro’s early champion, had long since turned on the actor, and his work in Awakenings was one of the last things she commented on before her 1991 retirement from criticism, declaring in an interview, “He does the tics and jiggles well. It’s in the quiet moments that he’s particularly bad. People get the idea that somebody is a great actor and it takes them decades to shake it off.”)
AFTER MAKING the move to CAA and acquiring the ability to command higher prices for his work and to have input into studio projects before the studio even acquired them, De Niro found himself wanting yet more control and earlier still in the process. He wanted to produce: to choose projects, select the creative team, pitch in on the script, cast actors, and help shape the PR campaign, even if he wasn’t going to appear in the film at all.
In part, he came to it because it was smart business—movie stars had routinely taken this sort of creative control of their careers, often helping others along, since the 1960s. In part, though, he came to it because he viewed his art on a kind of continuum with the art he’d grown up around—painting and writing—and was frustrated that his fame and wealth still didn’t bring him complete creative freedom: “A writer or a painter can control his work,” he explained, “but in movies it’s different. I see a tacky poster and I say, ‘Why was it done that way?’ Maybe I know a better way.” At the time he made that comment, he was already doing at least some producing work on We’re No Angels, and he had been actively working toward building a production company of his own, using the same meticulous practice with which he acted.
In part, he was driven by his new life. Upon divorcing Diahnne Abbott, De Niro bought a new apartment on Hudson Street, even further downtown than the Greenwich Village in which he’d lived almost his entire life. If the St. Luke’s Place townhouse was a family home appropriate to an up-and-coming actor and his wife, children, and pets, the new place was more befitting a bachelor prince—or a king, even. De Niro acquired the top floor of 110 Hudson Street, a building marked by Greek-style columns at the street level and, from De Niro’s 4,600-square-foot tenth-floor penthouse (complete with rooftop garden), expansive views of the Hudson River and the World Trade Center, mere blocks away. The neighborhood hadn’t yet become popular with developers, but it would soon have a trendy name: Tribeca. The area was a mix of underused industrial spaces and, for lower Manhattan, inexpensive housing, in large part because so many of the amenities that people expect from the city were lacking in the community. De Niro may have moved to Tribeca for the quiet, or for the bargains to be had in real estate (he convinced Harvey Keitel to buy a unit in the same building at around the same time). Or he may have done it because he already had a vision, however unformed, for a new sort of control over his career, not only a production company but an actual production facility.
Tribeca wasn’t an obvious choice for a home base for such a project. The film business per se had virtually no footprint in the area, despite the presence of adventuresome movie theaters and celebrity residents not very far away in more established neighborhoods. But in De Niro’s mind there was an idea of an office that would house his production company and be part of larger infrastructure—a complex of offices, say, or even a movie studio. And his new neighborhood had room in which to build such a thing.
Before he could tackle that, though, he knew that he needed a strong partner beside him who could do the things that he wouldn’t or couldn’t: talk to the press, drive hard bargains, say no a lot. He hoped eventually to choose a project from his producing workload to make his debut as a director, possibly acting in it as well. And for that, too, he would need a partner whom he could trust, someone who knew the movie business and could handle the high profile that working with De Niro in New York would entail.
He was as thorough in his search for a producing partner as he was in digging into an important role. “There were 20 people I met with,” he recalled. “I kept dragging it out.” Eventually he settled on someone, and, as was often the case when major Hollywood stars hung out a producing shingle, the perfect man for the job turned out to be a woman: Jane Rosenthal, a tall, energetic thirtysomething NYU film grad from Rhode Island with an impressively diverse resume and sufficient polish and energy to serve as the public face of a boss who preferred to show himself to the world when wearing the mask of a character.
Rosenthal had fast-tracked through Brown and NYU, had served as the youngest-ever (and first female) page in the Rhode Island House of Representatives, and had worked as an assistant to the director of the original Broadway production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. As a young hire at CBS television, she butted heads with Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder in the sports department, helped create Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt in the news department, then produced TV movies and miniseries such as The Burning Bed and Haywire for the entertainment division. After that, she served as a production executive at Universal Pictures, at Disney (where she met Martin Scorsese while overseeing production on The Color of Money for the studio), and finally at Warner Bros., which was where she was working when De Niro first encountered her.
“Bob was shooting ‘Midnight Run,’ ” she said. “We had a number of friends and acquaintances in common, so I wasn’t that shaken [when we met]. I did become something of a motormouth, since he’s so quiet.” Rosenthal was flattered to be asked by De Niro if she’d consider going into business with him. But she was chary, too. They spoke on and off about the possibility for nearly a year; Scorsese even tried to convince her to take the gig, and she told him bluntly, “I’m not going to develop scripts for some actor, no matter who it is.”
During their negotiations, De Niro’s plans grew bolder and more substantial. The production company, named Tribeca after the neighborhood in which he lived and in which it would be based, was just part of a larger vision that included an office building designed to serve the New York filmmaking community, with a restaurant or maybe a nightclub on the ground floor. He wanted Rosenthal involved with all of it.
On one hand, she knew it was a crazy prospect: “People in LA thought I was cracked to even think about moving to New York. Also to work with an actor who wasn’t known for producing or restaurants or real estate.” But De Niro appealed to the world-beating drive he sensed in her. The chance to build a production company from the ground up was unlikely ever to present itself to her again—and certainly not in Hollywood. “He said, ‘What do you want to be—a studio executive all your life?’ ” She took off to a desert spa to mull it over, and she came to a realization: “If I don’t do something new and challenging, I will emotionally and creatively die.” Besides, she missed New York. In her work developing films, she had come up with a trick designed to keep her visiting the city: hiring New York playwrights to work on scripts. “By hiring all these writers,” she confessed, “I could come back for meetings. I’m not happy in any city where I can’t hail a cab.”
Finally she succumbed to De Niro’s offers—“Look, if it doesn’t work out, you can always hostess at the [restaurant],” he told her, only half joking—and took the job. (It was a nearer thing than she knew. “There was one guy I nearly hired,” De Niro said, “and I feel like I got lucky because he didn’t take the job. But Jane held in there, she kept up on it, she was always ready to go.”)
Right from the start, their disparate working styles and personalities proved complementary. “I’m just the producer,” Rosenthal remarked about her role in De Niro’s working life. “Nobody’s supposed to notice me.” But De Niro, who could get lost in the details of a work project, appreciated that she had the same capacity and was willing to insist on it, not by mumbling to a director, as he so often did, but by presenting her wishes forcefully to collaborators. “She does all the real nuts and bolts,” he said. “I’m just there, hovering. She’s the one on the front lines.”
They looked mismatched. “She is Miss Glam, the fund-raising, producing person,” said film executive Stacey Snider. “She puts it all out there. He seems to keep it all inside and use his feelings for his profession.” But they had a common impulse to get work done and get it done right: “Nobody is as meticulous as Bob,” Rosenthal said, “but I like things to be perfect, too.”
Tribeca Productions started on a modest scale. Upon launching in 1988, with the pair working at first out of De Niro’s apartment, it owned the rights to a small clutch of projects. As Rosenthal described them, “One is an out-of-print novel and one a current novel. Another is a collection of home videotapes of a real person, and the others are original ideas from screenwriters.” De Niro funded the early going out of his own pocket, but soon they had a two-year nonexclusive deal with TriStar to produce and distribute. The discretionary fund included in that deal allowed them to acquire more material: the Native American–themed crime story Thunderheart; William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways; The Battling Spumonti Brothers, a comedy about Chicago politics; and a few other spec scripts, particularly crime stories. One of Rosenthal’s concerns in accepting the job was that she wasn’t sure there would be enough actual producing to do in New York; on that she was wrong.
That was plenty to deal with, but right from the start Rosenthal was wearing a construction worker’s hard hat along with her movie producer clothes, because De Niro’s notion of a physical space in which to house the production company was becoming a reality. De Niro bought a stake in a building at 375 Greenwich Street, on the corner of Franklin, one city block from his home on Hudson Street. It had long been the warehouse of the Martinson Coffee company, and it still bore painted advertisements on its brick exterior touting the fact, but De Niro and his investment partners, Stewart Lane and Paul Wallace, were turning the eight-story building into an office block dedicated to film professionals, with a high-end restaurant as a key ground-floor tenant.
The warehouse offered 60,000 square feet of space and was an almost blank slate, so bare-bones that there were only two telephone lines in the entire building. De Niro and his partners acquired it for $7.2 million in 1988, three years after it had been purchased for $4.25 million—a sign of how quickly Tribeca, for many decades an industrial district of no particular commercial or residential appeal, was becoming a hot neighborhood. They hired the architect Lo-Yi Chan to reimagine it, and they set to work on renovations almost immediately.
Even though the building was entirely unsuited to the purposes for which he imagined it, De Niro was keen on it because of its proximity to his home. “When I started my own production offices, we worked out of my apartment.…[Back then] the only place for film people to work was midtown. But it’s such a hassle getting there. I live down here, and the pace is so much quieter, more leisurely. I dreamt that I wouldn’t have to leave the neighborhood to work. Then the building came up for sale, and it just seemed perfect. We could have production offices, and we could have a screening room, and we could have a restaurant. And I could work near home when I was in New York. Things sort of snowballed after that.”
Throughout 1989, the entire building was remade, with Rosenthal overseeing the details that De Niro could be convinced not to oversee himself. Electrical, plumbing, and climate systems were rebuilt or installed; three hundred phone lines were put in; elevators and stairways were reconfigured; windows were carved out; a thirty-foot skylight was revealed beneath decades of paint and roofing. There were touches of luxury throughout, including solid oak doors, sandblasted exposed brick walls, and brownstone imported from China. On the top floor, of which De Niro would claim 6,900 square feet for his production offices, a deluxe bathroom, complete with Jacuzzi, steam shower, and bidet was installed. There was a THX-certified screening room, the first in New York, on the second floor, alongside a multipurpose party space.
The building was designed on the model of condominiums, with whole floors of it for sale outright and other portions available for rent. The first truly important buyer was Miramax Films, which was making a significant name as a producer and distributor of independent and foreign films; it took the entire third floor. De Niro’s friend and producer Art Linson took offices, as did, on a rental basis in the earliest years, the productions of New Jack City, Bonfire of the Vanities, and Awakenings. After a period of courtship with the space, Martin Scorsese, who had long been based in the Brill Building in Times Square, chose to stay uptown. But for a variety of small production companies, talent agencies, and even solo writers who just needed a room with a door that they could close to the outside world, the Tribeca Film Center, as it was finally dubbed, was a perfect Hollywood-on-the-Hudson.
De Niro showed the place off proudly, explaining that he built it as a home for a New York film community that could often feel insignificant because it was so decentralized in a city with so many other priorities:
I haven’t seen any film place in New York, or anywhere else, that’s really “complete.” Initially, the idea was to find a home where I could be and where filmmakers could be, to have offices and a restaurant where they could hang out and feel like a community—a creative center where you can get input and feedback from other people.… You just come up with ideas when you’re around people. I always tell people I work with, if you just spend time together, an hour or so, you’re bound to come up with something, especially if you have a problem you’re trying to solve, but even if you’re just trying to create.… With people just being around each other a lot, their presence is felt. So you say, “Let’s talk to so-and-so about this idea.” That would be a nice situation. The people are close; it’s like a little community.
The soft launch of the Film Center came in December 1989, and throughout early 1990 tenants kept rolling in as the work on their offices was finished. By the springtime, work was done, and, almost as if to cap it, De Niro hosted an evening in honor of Nelson Mandela, who was making his first-ever visit to New York. The guest of honor was asked to make a few comments in the course of the evening, and he did. “At the end of Mandela’s speech,” remembered Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein, “he talked about how, when he was in prison for 20 [sic] years, they would show a film every Thursday night. And he felt that those actors and actresses were his friends, and they kept his spirits up. I looked over and saw De Niro and Jane with tears in their eyes, and I realized that this was their dream; to build this building, to get people who love film involved, to create a community where this can happen.… I’ve already told De Niro that if he went on to buy more buildings, Miramax would keep expanding with him.”
*1 As late as 2013, more than seventeen years after his death, Burke’s home was excavated by authorities in search of human remains—which they discovered. In 2014, several of Burke’s associates were arrested for, among other things, the Lufthansa heist.
*2 Somewhat coyly, De Niro wouldn’t say whether he learned how to pistol-whip somebody from Hill. “Perhaps,” he replied when asked point-blank if that had been something they’d discussed. “I would ask him how this might have been done, or that, y’know?”