Martin Scorsese is nothing short of a master filmmaker, and the news he was teaming up with Mick Jagger and Boardwalk Empire co-conspirator Terence Winter for Vinyl, a TV series set in the 1970s record industry was, er, music to our ears. Season 1 of Vinyl starts February 15 on NEON.
Read on as Paul Casserly delves into the close relationship between film and music that’s been a constant feature of Scorsese’s storied career.
Scorsese. The word itself is musical and open to a little leeway on the pronunciation front. Nowhere near as big as with the whole Bono or Bowie thing. Most say scor-say-see rather than the correct scor-sez-ee, as we learnt via the man himself, when he called Vinnie on Entourage.
Bono/boner, tomato/tomarrrto, let’s just call him Marty. The man immediately brings to mind Italian Americans, the Mafia, and Robert De Niro before he became Adam Sandler. What else comes to mind? Blood and pasta? Comedy and cadavers? Catholicism and machismo? What about music? Yes, music, that has always been a huge part of the story. He loves music more than gangsters.
In 1978, Marty seemed to create the very notion of concert film with The Last Waltz, which not only captured the end of Robbie Robertson’s The Band as a touring enterprise, but, more notably, it collected in its net the icons of the era who guested. Muddy Waters, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Diamond, Eric bloody Clapton! Legend has it that Neil Young appeared with a visible sugar-booger (cocaine) hanging from his nostril, which had to be removed in a pre-digital post-production technique known as ‘rotoscoping’. Not that Neil looks at all wasted in this clip.
Marty had been asked by Robertson to make the film because he liked Scorsese’s use of music in Mean Streets, with its mix of the Rolling Stones, The Ronettes and the Italian crooner Renato Carosone. There was only one other concert film, The Rolling Stones film Shine A Light in 2008 in which Marty also appeared hamming it up with a slightly prickly Mick Jagger.
His music documentaries have likewise been superb. The Apple/BBC co-pro Bob Dylan, No Direction Home, captures the enigmatic folk god like nothing else and I’ve watched the masterful George Harrison opus for HBO, Living In The Material World, three times now – and will again. He also contributed a 90-minute episode to the 7 part series The Blues, where he joined directors Wim Wenders and Clint Eastwood. Word has it that he’s currently chipping away at a Ramones biopic and has hand in a Grateful Dead documentary. Like rust, Marty never sleeps.
Strangely, Marty’s only foray into an actual ‘musical’ is widely considered to be a low point of his career. The oft-forgotten New York, New York was a love letter to the city and the Hollywood musical era, but it actually stands up pretty well, and shows the director trying out many of the tricks and turns he’d employ for the rest of his career. Just watching the trailer is to flash forward through Goodfellas and to the opening episode of Boardwalk Empire.
It’s also a reminder that despite her talent as a singer there is something vaguely terrifying about Liza Minnelli. I think it’s the eyes.
Like Boardwalk, Marty is on hand to direct the opening episode of Vinyl. Could there be a more perfect intersection of the best of cinema, classic rock and the best of golden age TV? Scorsese, Jagger, Winter. As with Boardwalk, Vinyl is Terrence Winter’s baby, but like his previous work, including The Sopranos, it’s all constructed upon a world practically built by Scorsese. The roots go back to Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, but it’s Goodfellas that remains the template for so much that followed. Along with Bobby Darin and The Chantels, the soundtrack to that great work also included The Rolling Stones (of course) who performed Mannish Boy with Muddy Waters. The Stones were there all the way, in Mean Streets it was Jumping Jack Flash that played as De Niro walked on. And despite not being one of the Stones tracks performed in Shine A Light, their Gimmie Shelter was put to good use in no less than three Marty flicks, Goodfellas, Casino, and The Departed. Each time it was the perfect bed for voice-overs of the leading men Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson.
He’s a loyal bugger old Marty, but what’s a little repetition in career filled with such a staggering embarrassment of other musical riches? You may have loved The Wolf of Wall Street scene when Jonah Hill pleasured himself to Margot Robbie and Romeo Void’s Never Say Never?
Or perhaps you’re more of Jackson Browne fan, and let’s be honest that scene from Taxi Driver with Travis, a gun, a TV and Late For The Sky was a perfect cocktail.
I’m still haunted by Elmer Bernstein’s reboot of Bernard Herrmann’s Original Score for Cape Fear, which sets the tone of scaring the bejesus almost as well as the Saul Bass credit design. Don’t forget that Michael Jackson video for Bad, a two-part epic that clocks in at 16 minutes.
But, if I had to pick one Marty/music moment, it’s that scene from Goodfellas, as Henry (Liotta) takes Karen (Bracco) down into the nightclub. It sums up Scorsese’s ability to entertain, explain, dissect and direct. It was just one small line in Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy, on which the film was based, but Marty spun that into cinematic magic. In one long steadicam take and with one track, (And Then He Kissed Me) Marty takes us into a world that many of us have never left.
Season 1 of Vinyl starts February 15 on NEON.
