HE WAS SPENDING TIME AT HOME, ENJOYING A RELATIVELY sedate year, his burning drive to work somewhat quenched by the global receipts for Meet the Parents, going about the daily routines he liked to observe when he wasn’t off somewhere making or selling a film: jogging along the West Side Highway, walking to the office, dropping into one of the restaurants he owned for a bit of lunch, doing something with the kids, dining out or attending some sort of event in the evening with a date on his arm—often his estranged wife. The summer was just about over, and he wasn’t using the beach house or the country house much. It was a crisp and clear Tuesday, and he had to be at the Film Center first thing in the morning.
And then he went home and watched the world change.
“I left a meeting right after they hit the World Trade Center,” he remembered. “I went to my apartment, which looks south, and I watched it out my window. I could see the line of fire across the North Tower. I had my binoculars and a video camera—though I didn’t want to video it. I saw a few people jump. Then I saw the South Tower go. It was so unreal. I had to confirm it by immediately looking at the television screen. CNN was on. That was the only way to make it real. Like my son said, ‘It was like watching the moon fall.’ ”
The twin towers of the World Trade Center had dominated the view from his home for decades, and now they were gone. Like everyone else, he was uncomprehending, wounded, mystified, helpless. But he felt it a little more personally than many others. It was his neighborhood that had been hit—he lived only about eight blocks north of Ground Zero—and it was devastated.
He reacted well in a crisis. First thing was cleanup and recovery, and he and Drew Nieporent made a commitment to feed the rescue workers at the site of the attack, serving thousands of meals of sandwiches and hot soup and getting the food through the streets from the kitchen to Ground Zero by avoiding the streets altogether: they ferried it along the Hudson, installing a makeshift kitchen on one of the daytime cruise ships that in normal times offered tours of the city.
When fund-raising telethons and events took place, De Niro was present without hesitation: the America: A Tribute to Heroes program, broadcast on more than thirty TV and cable networks, and the Madison Square Garden concert and telethon honoring first responders. He appeared in a new round of “I Love New York” ads aimed at getting tourists to commence visiting the city anew. When a documentary commemorating the attacks was made for television, he served as its narrator.
The devastation appeared never to be far from his mind. In October, when he was presented with recognition for lifetime achievement at the Gotham Awards, an event hosted by the Independent Feature Project to celebrate New York moviemaking, he said tersely, “Proud as I am of this, it seems not as important after what has happened.”
Quietly, he was crafting a bigger response. He and Rosenthal were planning an event that would focus positive attention on lower Manhattan, even as a wound lay gaping in what used to be its most visible point. It would be a means to bring people, money, and constructive energy to a neighborhood that still seemed like a tomb weeks after the attacks. “Bob felt personally insulted by what happened down here,” reflected Harvey Weinstein, and De Niro and Rosenthal were determined to respond.
They had in mind a film festival to be held the following spring, focusing, like Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival, on independent moviemaking. They discovered that the name Tribeca Film Festival was already being used, as a placeholder if nothing else; there was even a fledgling website dedicated to it. Through the aegis of the not-for-profit Tribeca Film Institute, they negotiated with the founder of that enterprise, the artist Nicole Bartelme, to buy the title, and in December, De Niro, Rosenthal, New York governor George Pataki, Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, and others held a press event to announce the first Tribeca Film Festival for the following spring, with American Express stepping in as the chief sponsor to the tune of a couple of million dollars.
At first they said they’d program forty features and a similar number of shorts, but when they finally got around to announcing the full lineup in the spring of 2002, the festival boasted 150 titles, shorts and features combined, culled from more than 1,500 submissions. There were world premieres, including Tribeca’s own production of About a Boy, featuring Hugh Grant in an adaptation of a bestselling novel by Nick Hornby, and Insomnia, a remake of a Swedish crime thriller starring Al Pacino and directed by Christopher Nolan. There were independent films from around the world. There were films with themes drawn from the experience of September 11, an entire block of children’s films, and a restoration of Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata anchoring a selection of classic films curated by Scorsese. The judges for the awards included Helen Hunt, Kevin Spacey, Frances McDormand, Barry Levinson, Julian Schnabel, Isaac Mizrahi, and Richard Holbrooke; speakers on the various panels dotting the festival would include Susan Sarandon, Alan Alda, and Sidney Lumet. And the event was granted a massive boost when George Lucas agreed to a premiere screening of Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones as the centerpiece of a closing-night gala.
Rosenthal wasn’t entirely sure they could pull it off. “I keep reminding myself I’m going to make mistakes,” she said. “I know that no matter what I do, some important person will feel snubbed. I just hope people will understand we’re only doing this to try to help downtown.” Whether there were any bruised egos among the boldface names or not, the moviegoing public responded to the glitter, the hoopla, and the chance to reclaim lower Manhattan. More than 150,000 tickets were sold to the screenings, talks, and parties, a truly impressive number considering that the festival ran a mere five days. There were grumblings about “Hollywood East” and about how few films actually made in the neighborhood were included in the festival, but these were relatively few, and the thing was undeniably a hit.
They decided to make it a yearly event. “This neighborhood is my home,” De Niro said. “I’m committed to it, and that’s what this festival is about.” In 2003, there were more than 200 films in the festival; the following year, they broke the 250-film barrier and augmented the springtime film festival with the first (and only) Tribeca Theater Festival in October, a fortnight of plays, readings, and discussions. By 2006, the total number of titles in the film festival had climbed to 274, which turned out to be the high-water mark. Over time, festival organizers pared back just slightly to an average of some 200 titles per year.
The trick for Tribeca was to distinguish itself from all the world’s other film festivals, especially the biggies like Sundance (held in January in Park City, Utah), Berlin (February), Cannes (May on the French Riviera), Venice (August), and Toronto (September). Each had its own peculiar identity, history, savor. Tribeca seemed a mishmash in comparison: not curated to represent a small selection of high-quality work, like Venice or the venerable New York Film Festival (October at Lincoln Center); not a market for emerging talent or work available to purchase, like Sundance or Cannes; too early in the year to serve as a launching pad for awards season, like Toronto.
Jane Rosenthal liked to remind the press that there was a reason for the festival to exist beyond the movie screen. “It wasn’t started as a traditional film festival,” she said. “My sole goal was to bring people back downtown.” But a decade on, downtown Manhattan was fully alive again, and the festival was moving along under its own momentum. De Niro came, rightly, to see it as part of his legacy, “part of the tradition of New York, part of the fabric, that I hope will be what it will be in years to come.”*1
AFTER MORE THAN thirty years in the movies, his became one of those names people thought of when they thought about giving awards. One of the most prestigious was the Life Achievement Award of the American Film Institute, which had been presented in a gala (filmed for television) since 1973 to such icons as John Ford, Orson Welles, Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Elizabeth Taylor, Jack Lemmon, Sidney Poitier, Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, and, in his own generation, Steven Spielberg, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, and Martin Scorsese. In late 2002, the AFI announced that De Niro would be presented with the honor the following spring, and the ensuing gala was as pomp-filled as could be hoped for.
De Niro was lauded by a range of his collaborators and friends, from Scorsese (“He has an extraordinary genius to be able to transform himself, to simply be, just be the person he’s playing, not act but become and command and inhabit the character”) to Jodie Foster, who remembered his transformative instruction on the set of Taxi Driver (“Although I had already been working for nine years, no one had ever trusted that I was capable of understanding what an actor really does.… I am grateful to you, Bob. You make a fine Henry Higgins”). There were Joe Pesci, Robin Williams, Leonardo DiCaprio, Billy Crystal, Harvey Keitel, Edward Norton, and James Woods, the last of whom brought down the house by describing Once Upon a Time in America as being about “an older man reviewing his life as a thug—not unlike tonight.” The evening began on a solemn note with a filmed appearance by Gregory Peck, who had died earlier that day at age eighty-seven. And when De Niro finally spoke at night’s end, he brought the affair full circle: “This isn’t easy for me, but it isn’t so bad as I look back on my life and all these movies.… Good night, and good night, Gregory Peck.”
The following year, he accepted an award for his civic work from the Citizens Committee for New York and agreed to be toasted and lightly roasted at a dinner benefiting the American Museum of the Moving Image. You could do good things simply by putting on a tuxedo and saying a few words, he’d learned; though he never lost his reputations for reclusiveness and recalcitrance, he willingly attended such events as these and the many, many events to which Grace Hightower dragged him in her capacity as a philanthropist and socialite.
AND WHILE OTHERS were celebrating him, he came to celebrate himself. As he approached his sixties, with decades of moviemaking behind him, he confronted his lifelong pack-rat tendencies and discovered that he’d amassed a treasure. Since the days when he had first cluttered up his mother’s 14th Street apartment with all those thrift store costumes, he had built, almost accidentally, a huge archive of materials to do with his acting career, his business ventures, and the simple stuff of life: not only written materials such as scripts and memos and research notes but trunkloads of costumes and props from his film career, from the baseball bat used by Al Capone in The Untouchables to the garish suits from Casino, boxing gloves from Raging Bull, and old makeup kits to which he ascribed some sentimental value.
It was an impressive collection—invaluable, truly—but what in the world to do with it? The first inkling he had that there was real worth in it came in 2001, when the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens worked with him to mount an exhibit dedicated to his collection. Robert De Niro: Costume and Character opened in February 2002 and ran for the better part of a year, drawing tens of thousands of visitors through a truly unique tour of an actor’s work as seen, in effect, from the inside out. De Niro may no longer have been making the epochal sorts of films that launched him, but it was clear that even his lesser roles had consumed him at the level of character creation. Costumer Rita Ryack, who dressed him for several films, remarked on the wardrobe he wore in The Fan, much of which came from J. C. Penney’s: “He looked like a million bucks. He’d say, ‘This suit looks too expensive,’ and we’d say, ‘But it cost $125 and it’s made from Teflon!’ He just looks really good in clothing; he just has the kind of shoulders that make him dress wonderfully. So you have to work very hard to dress him down—that’s an interesting challenge.”
The collection made curators around the country aware of what kind of treasure De Niro was sitting on, and they came courting. Finally, in 2005, he reached an agreement with the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas, Austin, a massive research facility filled with manuscripts, artifacts, and every imaginable sort of original material from significant figures in literature, art, politics, theater, and film. The Ransom Center’s jewels included items from Stella Adler, David Mamet, and others whose lives and work touched on De Niro’s (Paul Schrader’s papers would eventually find a home there, too). And De Niro’s bequest was one of the largest in the collection: two eighteen-wheelers delivered wardrobe cases, trunks, and literally hundreds of banker’s boxes filled with notes, memos, letters, annotated scripts, photographs, sketches, and so forth, dating from his days in student theater and dinner theater in the 1960s through the films he made in 2005.
He was up for donating material, even very revealing material, but he could not be persuaded to tell his story on the page. In early 2004, word surfaced that De Niro and Scorsese would co-author a memoir about the eight films they’d made together and some of the issues that bonded them, such as growing up in Manhattan and losing their fathers (Charles Scorsese, a staple character in his son’s films, died at age eighty just months after the senior Robert De Niro passed; they were in the same hospital at the same time during their final illnesses, and De Niro always made a point of dropping in on the elder Scorsese whenever he visited his own dad). The book never surfaced, though, and in 2013 De Niro declared that he simply wouldn’t know where to begin his memoirs and that he couldn’t imagine he’d ever write them.
IT WAS OFTEN remarked that De Niro had stopped working hard in the 1980s, perhaps with Raging Bull. But the films he made in that decade, which included some of his finest if less-recognized performances, simply didn’t bear that out. He had done The King of Comedy, The Untouchables, Once Upon a Time in America, True Confessions, and so on: a film a year, more or less, of some palpable quality. Nor, in fact, did his work in the 1990s constitute sleepwalking: there were more films than ever, and if the roles were not as challenging, the productions were, in the main, ambitious and varied and nearly always had something of genuine interest either in the subject matter or, especially, the collaborators. In those ten years, he almost always worked with notable directors: three Scorseses, two Levinsons, a Mann, a Tarantino, a Frankenheimer, a Cuarón, a Branagh, and so on.
But after the success of Meet the Parents, the arithmetic he did in choosing roles changed, and he began making films out of dubious material with scripts and co-stars and directors that left audiences puzzling why De Niro was involved. He was accused of taking roles to support Tribeca, but Meet the Parents and We Will Rock You were hits, and the production company wasn’t so big as to require constant cash infusions. He had multiple homes, children with three women, and a deluxe lifestyle to support, and that might explain some of the pace of his work. But it didn’t necessarily explain the quality of the projects. His peers—Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson—also appeared often in films that seemed lesser than their talents could command. But De Niro outdid them all in frequency, and, alas, in the relatively low ambitions of the material he seemed again and again to select.
The first film to truly mark a dip in his interest in his work was City by the Sea, a potboiler by This Boy’s Life director Michael Caton-Jones based on an Esquire magazine article by Mike McAlary about Vincent LaMarca, a homicide detective who learns that his son is wanted for murder. James Franco was cast as the younger LaMarca, which sounds like an exciting possibility until you realize that most of their scenes together are telephone conversations, with each actor standing on a set alone on what was probably the other fellow’s day off.
The $60 million production was shot during the winter of 2000–2001 and held from release until September 2002, when it grossed a mere $22.4 million and scored the rare coup of angering the residents of two New York–area beach towns: Long Beach, Long Island, where the film was set and the real-life events actually took place, and Asbury Park, New Jersey, where it was filmed. People in both places felt their respective communities were made to seem more squalid and dangerous than they really were. They could take comfort in the knowledge, then, that very few moviegoers had bothered to leave themselves open to the possibility of acquiring that impression.
After just a few months off, De Niro was playing a cop again in Showtime, which shot in the spring of 2001 and was released just about a year later. It was a satire of the media, but far more strictly a comedy than 15 Minutes, with De Niro as a crusty LAPD veteran forced to appear in a reality TV series in which he’s partnered with a wacky patrolman, played by Eddie Murphy. The film was directed by Tom Dey, who had previously delivered the similar—and successful—buddy comedy Shanghai Noon with Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson. And Dey was sharp enough to see what he was working with in De Niro and Murphy: “Bob is very technical. He adheres to the script. Eddie improvises a lot. Eddie, who is a very physical comedian as well, may have the last word in a scene, but Bob usually has the last gesture, something economical, just a facial movement, perhaps.”
Economical was an interesting word choice. In a deal finalized after the walloping success of Meet the Parents, De Niro was paid $17.5 million of Showtime’s $85 million budget. Which meant that he was paid more than the picture made in its opening weekend: $15 million, en route to an anemic $38 million gross.
HE STILL PROTECTED his privacy zealously. In 2002, for instance, he sued the Celebrity Vibe photo agency for circulating a photo in which he and Sean Penn blew out the candles on their joint birthday cake (they were both born on August 17) at a private party held in the rooftop garden of De Niro’s penthouse. And yet, because of the line of work he’d chosen, his private life could sometimes become a matter of public record.
For instance, in September 2003 De Niro was visiting a Manhattan urologist whom he had been seeing regularly for more than twenty years. The visits had begun in 1980 when De Niro was experiencing trouble urinating freely, particularly after sexual activity. He was examined thoroughly, and he was diagnosed with inflammation of the prostate, a frequent and often harmless condition, particularly in a man of thirty-six years of age; De Niro left with a few prescriptions and no other treatment.
Three years later, when his father was diagnosed with prostate cancer, De Niro decided to become more vigilant about his health and told his doctor he wanted to be examined three or four times a year, a schedule he maintained regularly thereafter. At each visit his prostate was examined physically and blood tests were taken, and always he was deemed healthy. Over time he asked the doctor about a few discomforts to do with the urinary tract: a burning sensation upon urinating, hesitancy in the urine stream, and nocturia, the need to get out of bed to urinate several times throughout the night. Examinations found him healthy on all of these occasions, and he was so little troubled by the condition that he chose not to take the medication prescribed to curtail his nighttime visits to the bathroom.
Over the years, levels of the bloodborne protein PSA, which when elevated indicate prostate disease, had always been in the normal range, though they had risen over time, as happens in many men; an upward trend in the PSA doesn’t necessarily indicate cancer. Still, in the later summer of 2003, the combination of his family history and the widely publicized prostate cancer episodes of Rudolph Giuliani, Joe Torre, and John Kerry inspired De Niro to get even more serious, to seek out a second urologist and to have a biopsy taken of his prostate, which was the most definitive way to identify or rule out cancer. “I decided to be even more proactive about monitoring my prostate health,” he said. “I was concerned because of my age, and because [my PSA] was rising a bit. Although everybody was telling me there’s no problem, I still was concerned because my father had died from it and I just wanted to be a little more proactive.” On October 10, 2003, he had a biopsy taken.
Three days later, De Niro was in a Manhattan clothing store being fitted for costumes for a new film, Hide and Seek, which was set to begin shooting on October 27 and in which he would play a widowed New York psychiatrist whose daughter begins to have supernatural visions. As a routine part of the pre-production process, he was given a medical examination in the store by a doctor working for the producers and the insurance company that protected the production against delays and interruptions caused by health problems in essential members of the cast and crew. That exam raised no flags, and as a result, De Niro and the production were forthwith insured by Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company to the tune of $2 million.
Two days after that, De Niro learned from his urologist that his biopsy had come back positive for prostate cancer.
It was, of course, staggering news. De Niro had just turned sixty, approximately the same age his father was at the time his cancer was diagnosed, and even though the thought of cancer had always loomed over him, he declared himself “shocked” in a statement his spokesperson revealed to the world a week later. In the years since the senior De Niro’s cancer had been discovered, the survival rate of prostate cancer patients had dramatically increased from 67 percent to 97 percent, a trend attributed in large part to public awareness of the disease and an emphasis on screening and early treatment. The elder De Niro had struggled for a decade before succumbing, but his son was fortunate to have caught his condition earlier, almost without symptoms to prompt him to look for it. Given the very early detection and De Niro’s overall fine health—he still worked out regularly to keep himself trim—his chance for a complete recovery was excellent.
On December 1, he went into Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital, Manhattan’s premier cancer treatment facility, to have surgery to remove the cancerous tissue; there were no complications of any significance, and his recovery went well. And by late January, he began production on Hide and Seek.
In October 2006, long after the shoot had wrapped, Fireman’s Fund sued De Niro for fraud and misrepresentation, claiming that he had bent the facts when he was examined on October 13 of the previous year and declared that he had never had cancer and had never been treated for prostate illness—both true on the day. The case went to trial, and in March 2008 a California court found in De Niro’s favor, a decision upheld by the Court of Appeals of California in June 2009.
That was a gratifying result, though not nearly as gratifying, of course, as being free of a disease the fear of which had loomed over him for so long. And there was another positive outcome: during the time of his treatment, the person whom he could most rely on and who looked most vigilantly after him turned out to be his wife, Grace Hightower, who just a year or two before had been living apart from him and trading barbs with him in court and in gossip columns.
Somehow, despite the acrimony and the court visits and the splashy tabloid headlines of just a few years prior, the problems between them vanished. Not right away, not in so public a forum as their quarrels and split had been afforded. But by the summer of 2003, Hightower and Elliot were once again living in Tribeca with De Niro, she helped stage his sixtieth-birthday party at Le Cirque, and they traveled to Montecatini, Italy, where they were feted by restaurateur Sirio Maccioni at a gala dinner at which Andrea Bocelli sang.
Perhaps it was the counseling in which they took part, per the judge’s orders. Or perhaps it was the growing recognition that Elliot was facing challenges greater than those that caused friction between his parents. Although no diagnosis would ever be made public, De Niro would occasionally allude to having a child who suffered from an emotional disorder, a description that didn’t fit either the oldest kids, Drena and Raphael, who were adults embarking upon independent lives and careers, or the twins, who were attending school along with their peers.
Whatever the reason, the reunited couple seemed determined to make it last. In November 2004 they renewed their vows in a civil ceremony on the grounds of the farmhouse De Niro owned in Ulster County in the Hudson Valley. This time it was a bash, with 150 guests including Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, Harvey Keitel, Chazz Palminteri, Tom Brokaw, Ben Stiller, and all of De Niro’s children. Guests gathered around an indoor pool while two justices of the peace (“So they can make sure this one sticks,” De Niro joked) supervised an exchange of rings. A meal from Nobu, a raspberry napoleon cake baked by Daniel Boulud, and cases of Veuve Clicquot were served, and the newly recommitted couple danced to Tina Turner’s rendition of “Simply the Best.”
IN 2002, he made two pictures. Analyze That, the sequel to the 1999 film that changed his life and career, was another milestone for him: a $20 million payday. But it was a film that nobody involved with it seemed to want to make. “I don’t know if I hoped it would go away or I thought it would go away,” writer-director Harold Ramis said when it was released. As Ramis explained, De Niro was relatively enthusiastic to revisit the big hit, Billy Crystal was “reserved,” and he himself was “skeptical … When I go to the movies, and when I feel people are just flogging the franchise, I resent it.” (As proof, Ramis and his collaborators had, in fact, successfully resisted the pressure to make a third Ghostbusters film for more than a decade.)
Even with De Niro’s salary more than doubling since the first film, when he was paid $8 million, Analyze That was made for a lower budget, $60 million compared to $80 million. All the more disappointing, then, that it should make only $32 million total, compared to the previous film’s $107 million. It didn’t help that the reviews were almost universally (and deservedly) condemnatory. But such notices didn’t always put audiences off. Rather, it seemed as if moviegoers were beginning to smell out the quality of De Niro’s recent films before they were released.
His next picture didn’t reverse the trend: Godsend, a sci-fi-ish thriller about human cloning shot for approximately $25 million in the fall of 2002 by director Nick Hamm. De Niro’s role was tiny—how else, at this point, could the budget stay so low?—and so was the film’s impact: it earned back only $14.4 million when it was released in the spring of 2004.
That delay, in fact, meant that in 2003, despite all of the energy he was putting into work, De Niro failed to appear in a new release in North American theaters—the first time since 1982. He worked that year: he provided a voice for Shark Tale, an animated movie that combined Finding Nemo with The Godfather, and he appeared, even more randomly, as the Archbishop of Peru in an adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey that was shot in Spain and also featured Harvey Keitel, F. Murray Abraham, Kathy Bates, Geraldine Chaplin, and Gabriel Byrne.*2 Both pictures surfaced in American theaters long after they were shot: Shark Tale to robust business in October 2004 (with a gross of $161 million, it would be the third-largest box office in De Niro’s career), San Luis Rey to puzzlement, obscurity, and $42,880 in ticket sales in June 2005.
IF IT SOUNDS crass to think so much about the cost and earnings of these films, it at least provides some sort of context to explain why they were made. And no film would prove that point more obviously than Meet the Fockers, his second sequel to hit multiplexes at Christmastime in two years. As with Analyze That, he would command a $20 million fee and Tribeca Productions would be involved in the creation and the profits. But whereas Analyze That churned over old ground tiresomely, Meet the Fockers was enlivened by the addition of Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman to the comic mix, which turned out to be a canny choice. Playing the parents of Ben Stiller’s Gaylord/Greg, the pair were sex-mad, drug-friendly hippies utterly unlike either their son or his in-laws. De Niro would be asked to do the same things, more or less, as in the first picture, but the context would be significantly wilder.
There were several iterations of the script, including one by David O. Russell, the indie auteur whose Flirting with Disaster with Stiller had been a smart, if small, hit. But, really, none of that mattered. De Niro had almost nothing to do except show up on the Los Angeles sets, play happily with Hoffman and Stiller, and think about other projects. Fockers was an even bigger hit than the original, claiming the top slot in the box office charts for three weeks compared to Meet the Parents’s four (a result of being released in the competitive Christmas season), but grossing $279 million in North America and $237 million abroad—nearly double the first film’s earnings and easily the top-grossing film in De Niro’s career.
Meet the Fockers was still holding its own at the box office in January when the delayed Hide and Seek debuted in the number one spot at the American box office. Another potboiler made by another little-known name (the Australian actor-turned-director John Polson), it echoed The Shining and The Sixth Sense in depicting a fractured man (a widower, De Niro) living in isolation with a child (his daughter, played by Dakota Fanning) with apparent extrasensory knowledge of some horrible secret. The reviews, as they seemed to be for all of De Niro’s films now, were dismissive. But the film was a hit, grossing $51 million against its $25 million budget. When it finally dropped out of the box office top ten, the same week that Meet the Fockers did, De Niro had completed the most commercially successful two months of his career. Did it matter what anyone actually thought of the films and his work in them?
*1 Some years later, the Tribeca Film Festival expanded well beyond walking distance of the Tribeca Film Center and Ground Zero. From 2009 to 2012, in partnership with the Qatar Museums Authority and the Doha Film Institute, there was a Doha Tribeca Film Festival, an effort to bridge the cultures of the Arab and Western worlds across the rupture that was defined in part by the September 11 attacks. The festival proved sufficiently successful that Tribeca pulled out of it in 2013, satisfied that it had helped launch a sustainable event that would continue to grow and to encourage filmmaking in the region.
*2 Marking, by the way, his first role as a pre-twentieth-century character since Frankenstein and, with The Mission, only his third ever.