A Personal Statement on Movies
And many of them said, He [Jesus] hath a devil, and is mad; why hear ye him? Others said, these are not the words of him that hath a devil. Can a devil open the eyes of the blind? John 10:20–21 KJV
My memory begins in a movie theater.
I was two years old, sitting on my mother’s lap, watching Snow White and The Seven Dwarves. It was the first movie I had ever seen.
When it was over, I told my mother, “I wanna see it again.”
I was four when I saw The Sands of Iwo Jima and cried for hours when John Wayne got shot.
Cagney and Bogart were my heroes. I watched every short by The Three Stooges before I learned long division. I would memorize the dialogue from dozens of movies and act them out with my brothers and our friends.
We played soldiers in the summer and I would come up with story lines and direct all the battles. I even wrote out exactly how many helmets and toy guns my dad needed to buy from the Army Surplus store.
At ten, my parents sent me to a Christian summer camp. Campers were allowed one elective activity. Out of about 400 campers, I was the only one who chose storytelling. The camp director asked me to choose something else so they wouldn’t have to offer that class that year.
I refused.
College
At the University of Virginia, my major was Systems Engineering, but I spent all the time I could studying movies. The university had a huge film library and I went through as many as I could and held screenings on Friday nights in my dorm lounge.
The night before a final exam in Deterministic Decision Models, I stayed up all night reading Scorsese on Scorsese. I wrote some short scripts and tried to make a couple of films, but I was never satisfied with the results, and I didn’t have the money or time to do what I wanted, the way I wanted it.
The Taping Room
I first applied to the dual-degree MBA/MFA program at NYU in 2016 because it seemed to be a perfect marriage of my skills and passions. A way for me to use my aptitude for business and logistics management to produce something that I loved. After getting to the final round of interviews for both schools and being rejected for the first time, I started working at a talent agency as their audition taping room reader.
Their taping room is a little bigger than a closet with soundproofing, no windows, and one blue wall, and I made movies there from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., five days a week, for almost two years.
I regularly worked all day without a lunch break. Officially, I was required to take breaks, but I would rather make tapes than eat. I acted as the client’s scene partner, recorded the performances, and edited and sent the completed tapes.
I worked with dozens of fantastic actors, from A-list to unknowns, and helped many of them book jobs. My love for the job helped me establish mutual trust and respect with the actors and I developed strong working relationships with almost all of the agency’s New York clients.
I still care very much about these artists and it was a great privilege to be a part of their work.
Moonlighting
A friend of mine is a Best Boy with the local electrician union and he does a lot of gaffing on film and TV sets. Sometimes when he needs an extra guy for an overnight shoot he calls me.
As a result, there were times where I worked a full day at the agency, worked all night carrying heavy lighting equipment around outside in New York winters, then went back to work at the agency in the morning.
Once, as the sun was coming up, my friend asked me how I was physically able to do all this manual labor and go back to the office again without any sleep.
I told him, “I love movies.”
Monument Valley
I went to the Sundance Film Festival for the first time last year and ended up meeting a famous large-format film photographer. We bonded over John Ford movies, and he invited me to help him lead a photography expedition into Monument Valley, Utah.
One morning, in the valley, we set out alone, each carrying 60-pound backpacks, and climbed up one of the monuments in the dark so we could capture an image of Monument Valley at sunrise.
Our Navajo guide said the climb was, “fatally unsafe.”
The Gangster Priest
The most personally important filmmaker to me, is Martin Scorsese. Consequently, the best way to explain my desire to pursue art and film making is through an examination of his life and work.
As a young man, Marty wanted to become a priest, but he lost his job as an altar boy because he would stay up late watching movies all night and could never wake up in time for mass on Sunday.
He was expelled from a junior seminary for fighting during prayers, and later failed the entrance examination to the divinity school at Fordham College.
Marty enrolled at New York University in 1960, earned a B.A. in English, and then an M.F.A. in film making.
He eventually gave up on becoming a priest to pursue a career in film. Marty said later that he wanted to try and use movies as a way of talking about God. Cinema as evangelism. Director’s chair as pulpit.
241 Elizabeth Street
As a shy, asthmatic, Italian boy growing up in Manhattan’s Little Italy, Marty was prone to coughing fits and couldn’t play sports, so he spent most of his time in church, movie theaters, or home watching movies on his family’s 14-inch black and white TV.
Marty hung out with a group of boys from the neighborhood and used his quick speech and sharp whit to become the jokester and chronicler of the group.
The storyteller.
Marty had deep religious convictions and seriously pursued the priesthood. Along with this came the conviction that the natural sexual desire he was feeling as a maturing young man would be punished with damnation.
Although he wasn’t a ladies man (his small stature and bad asthma made him shy and nervous around women) he had a great deal of emotional turmoil over his internal struggle with sexual temptation.
Into Egypt
While he was a student at NYU, he fell in love with a woman. They were married and had a daughter, Catherine Scorsese. Marty was a virgin at the time of the marriage.
His first divorce is seldom discussed, but it is clear that it caused the young religious film fanatic enormous pain and drastically altered his life.
Scorsese moved to Los Angeles to commit himself to film. He considered this a consummation of his betrayal of the church, his wife, his city, and his entire life up until that point.
In some sense, Scorsese considered this divorce and decision to pursue film making a betrayal of God himself. It represented to the young Christian zealot an acceptance of his eternal damnation, and a commitment to pursue that course to his own self-destruction.
In California Marty continued to learn and work in film making. He lived in a house on Mulholland Drive with Steven Prince, Neil Diamond’s road manager, and Robbie Robertson, lead guitarist for Bob Dylan’s backing group The Band.
Scorsese taught Robertson film, and Robertson taught Marty music, but in the process, Scorsese got much more involved with sex and drugs.
Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go
In 1972, Scorsese released Mean Streets, and first addressed the idea of a gangster priest. The film is about Charlie, a young gangster trying to move up in the local New York Mafia but who is held back by his Catholic devotion and his feeling of responsibility towards his cousin, Johnny Boy, who owes money to loan sharks.
Roger Ebert said, “Mean Streets is not primarily about punk gangsters, but about living in a state of sin.”, and Pauline Kael wrote that, “The clearest fact about Charlie is that whatever he does in life, he is a sinner.”
Scorsese’s voice-over narration opens the film by saying “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. All the rest is bullshit and you know it.”
It’s a movie about a sinner, Charlie, or really Scorsese, trying to atone for his sins. Scorsese tries to use film making as confession, as atonement, an attempt to make peace with God.
The Last Waltz
When Robbie Robertson and The Band decided to quit touring, Scorsese made a documentary called The Last Waltz about their last concert. In this documentary, one of the members, Garth Hudson, says that “There is a view that jazz is ‘evil’ because it comes from evil people, but actually the greatest priests on 52nd Street and on the streets of New York City were the musicians. They were doing the greatest healing work.”
Again Scorsese uses his authorship of the film to present The Band as sinful priests sacrificing themselves to do the work of God.
Blasphemy
The Last Temptation of Christ is the best film ever made about Jesus Christ.
Scorsese’s Jesus struggles with human temptations and pains. Marty said he was trying to make the point that if God does not endure the same pain and struggles as man, then what good is God?
In the end, the last temptation of Christ is simply to be a man. To have a wife, children, die in a bed in old age with loved ones around, and to lay down the obligations of Godhood. The movie is a beautiful meditation on the eternal conflict between the spirit and the flesh.
The Catholic Church called it an abomination. Scorsese received death threats and was labeled a blasphemer and a heretic.
But then again so was Christ.
Too Much Good Friday
By the late 1970’s, Scorsese’s drug addiction was out of control.
He would take enormous doses of Quaaludes to calm his neurotic insomnia and when Taxi Driver was at Cannes, he famously chartered a private jet to fly in more cocaine so he could stay for the award ceremony and accept the Palme d’Or.
In 1978, after the critical and commercial failure of his wildly ambitious achievement New York, New York, Marty fell into a depression and overdosed, spending four days in a hospital on the verge of death.
Jesus was only in the tomb for three days.
Scorsese credits Robert De Niro with saving his life by coming to see him and asking him to make Raging Bull.
Raging Bull is about a boxer named Jake La Motta destroying himself. He violently beats his brother Joey so badly that Joey refuses to speak to him again, he abuses his wife so much she leaves him, and he even smashes the championship belt he worked all his life to earn.
In February of 2014, I watched Raging Bull 15 times in just over a week. As much as I love movies, I have never before or since experienced such a consuming obsession with a single movie. At the time, I was experiencing a lot of emotional turmoil. I’d fallen in love with a woman I couldn’t be with and was torn between my religious convictions and my emotional and physical need for her. I was overwhelmed with anxiety and insomnia and was regularly having crippling panic attacks.
So I would lay awake nights watching Raging Bull over and over again screaming at my TV, trying to figure out what was causing my obsession.
It should be noted that Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplay for Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Last Temptation of Christ, and Bringing Out The Dead, wrote a brilliant thesis on transcendental style in film illustrating how film making style could be used to force the audience to come into contact with the “wholly other”, or “the transcendent”, and to then to make sense of this encounter in their own way.
In the context of Christianity, this may be compared to how an evangelist uses words to evoke an encounter with God. In a sense, Paul Schrader formalized the theory of cinema as evangelism.
Raging Bull ends with a dedication that is integral to the meaning of the entire film and it came directly from Scorsese.
There is an Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah will give sight to a man that has been blind from birth. In the gospel of John, Jesus heals a man blind from birth, so the Pharisees, seeing Jesus as a threat to their power, hire two false witnesses to condemn him for blasphemy.
Then the Pharisees call the blind man who Jesus healed and try to get him to condemn Jesus too.
This is the epitaph Scorsese selected for the end of Raging Bull.
So, for the second time, [the Pharisees]
summoned the man who had been blind and said:
“Speak the truth before God.
We know this fellow is a sinner.”
“Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know,”
the man replied.
“All I know is this:
once I was blind and now I can see.”
John IX. 24–26
The New English Bible
Remembering Haig P. Manoogian, teacher.
May 23, 1916 — May 26, 1980.
With Love and resolution, Marty.
With Eyes To See
Manoogian was Scorsese’s film professor at NYU. Manoogian taught his students to see and connected the idea of seeing with the essence of art and religion.
Haig’s textbook, The Filmmaker’s Art began with a quote from a Victorian critic named John Ruskin. “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, all in one”.
Scorsese said, “Jake LaMotta at least as he appeared in the film…helped me to see more clearly”.
Scorsese put poetry, prophecy, and religion into Raging Bull, and when I was obsessively studying it I had an epiphany.
Human beings require relationships. Relationships require communication. To communicate something important to you creates vulnerability, which requires trust. This must be mutual in order to establish a relationship. The motivation for this behavior is the natural inclination of all living things toward Love.
So art, in one sense, is an attempt to say “I love you.” and find someone to understand and say it back.
Further, the artist, by observing the world or humanity through their art, is observing the art of God. For what is the world but the art of God?
So if by knowing the art of Scorsese, I can know part of Scorsese, then by knowing the art of God, I can know part of God. This is the purest form of love since, as John says, “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is Love.”
Therefore, my obsession with Raging Bull, and all movies, comes from the fact that it allowed me to see. To see man, to see myself, to see Jake La Motta, to see Martin Scorsese, to see Love, and ultimately, to see God.
Behold, The Face of God
I cannot explain this exactly, but I saw a glimpse of the Almighty Living God in the film Raging Bull. And that is the mark of great and true art. It is a mental, emotional, and spiritual communion with the eternal force of Love that men have called God.
That is art. That is Cinema.
Therefore, if Martin Scorsese has indeed revealed God to me, through his vision, through his films, then he is as much a prophet as any Apostle that walked with Christ.
So he may be a violent, blasphemous, gangster, but he is also a prophet, an evangelist, a priest of the living God.
The Blind See
Bruce Bridgeman is a neuroscientist at the University of California in Santa Cruz. He was stereo blind from birth which means born without depth perception.
On February 16th 2011, Bruce bought a pair of 3D glasses and went to see Scorsese’s 3D film Hugo. When the film began, Bridgeman immediately received his sight. “It was just literally like a whole new dimension of sight,” Bridgeman said. “Riding to work on my bike, I look into a forest beside the road and see a riot of depth, every tree standing out from all the others”.
Martin Scorsese healed a man who was blind from birth.
But then again so did Christ.
Orson Welles
Now to make a final point, I must mention another hero of mine.
Orson Welles famously received a contract from R.K.O. giving him full control over making Citizen Kane. In Kane, a character says, “It’s no trick to make a lot of money if all you want is to make a lot of money.”
However, Wells did not make a lot of money.
In a 1942 letter, his producer George Schaefer wrote, “Orson Welles has got to do something commercial…God knows you have all the talent and the ability…We should apply that talent and effort in the right direction and make a picture on which we can get well.”
Both Welles and Schaefer were fired from R.K.O. later that year, but the lesson they learned has not been lost on me. Movies are a business, they must make money.
NYU
The dual MBA/MFA program at NYU is the only graduate program I have ever been interested in. I determined this after reading about the program, visiting the schools, and talking to several students and faculty, including the heads of the program itself and the admissions committee.
After years of lengthy application processes and interviews, I was recently rejected by both schools for the third, and likely final time.
I can offer no reasonable explanation for this other than my suspicion that because I love movies so much, I often sound like a pretentious jerk when I talk about them.
Which is fair.
I don’t mean to imply I’m some kind of prophet or anything, but I wanted to attend this program because what I want to do with my life is to serve God and make movies. These things appear unrelated to most people, but they are united in my mind and this program was the best way for me to pursue these objectives, with Love and resolution.
For whatever reason, there’s no room for me at NYU.
So instead I’m just going to make movies.
Either by God or if necessary, in spite of him.
The Eternal Damnation of Martin Scorsese
In a conversation with Roger Ebert following the completion of Raging Bull, Scorsese said that he believes that he will be damned to Hell when he dies because of his divorces.
Ebert, shocked by this assertion, asked Marty if he genuinely believed that.
“Yes,” said the gangster priest, “I do.”
Scorsese may believe himself a damned sinner, but as for me…
Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know, the man replied.
All I know is this:
once I was blind and now I can see.
