That Time Martin Scorsese Sent Me a Letter

Well, he signed it anyway.

This is Martin Scorsese directing the Christmas party scene from his mobbed-up 1990 sociological dig, Goodfellas. That, of course, is Robert De Niro on the left. I know for a fact that De Niro is wearing silk underwear there to help him get into character as Jimmy “The Gent” Conway and that he got to keep all the clothes he wore in the movie. He grabbed armfuls of suits off the racks when they were wrapping things up.

Since several very long-time friends I have celebrated with and mourned with over the past forty or so years work as assistant directors on big-time movies and TV shows, I’ve often had access to information and situations that are not available to your average filmhead.

For instance, I once hung out for an hour at the Chelsea Hotel on W. 23rd St. (Sid stabbed Nancy there!) because I was tipped off that, at some point, the exceptionally healthy Swedish actress, Lena Olin, who I thought was terrific in Paul Mazursky’s Enemies, a Love Story, would be walking by wearing a costume consisting of a suit jacket, a lace teddy, garters, and spiked high heels. This was on the set of a Peter Medak movie called Romeo Is Bleeding that features a scene where Olin gets hot and heavy with a thoroughly convinced Gary Oldman. Thus the memorable outfit.

Those who had already seen Olin strut her stuff the previous afternoon—including a heterosexual female friend of mine, I might add—said it was worth the price of admission (free) and that I could eat lunch from the craft service table (also free) while I chatted with my friends and the crew waited for Olin. I even got to talk to Medak for a couple of minutes between camera setups, not that I had much to ask him about what it was like to make Zorro, the Gay Blade.

So I chatted and I ate a sandwich; Olin, as promised, looked 100% movie star-style amazing, and I had another story to tell when it was all over. Anyone who knows me will confirm that I like to tell a good story.

Too bad the movie was godawful.

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I also made a big screen appearance in the San Gennaro Festival sequence in Francis Ford Coppola’s decidedly non-classic money grab, The Godfather Part III. I had moved to New York just a couple of months earlier and was still jobless, so my buddy, Mike DeCasper, landed me work as an extra.

Here’s a photo of me posing with the character actor who played the parade’s grand marshal. This guy is in Goodfellas, too. You might remember him as the smarmy mob lawyer who defends young Henry when he gets “pinched” for selling stolen cigarettes in the movie’s prologue.

I’m smack in the middle of the screen during the establishing shot of “my” scene, front and center. Mike showed me exactly where to position myself so they couldn’t possibly cut me out. I look the way I do in the above photo, except that I’m wearing my wraparound Ray-Bans and I’m eating an Italian sausage and peppers sandwich. Then, in the very next shot, I’m standing in the middle of the street, sans sunglasses, where a mounted cop is riding by on a horse. You can’t miss me.

Joe Mantegna’s character, Joey Zasa, takes a handful of bullets to the back during the scene. In fact, much of the set explodes into pieces as it gets shot up by machine gun-wielding goons. I ran like hell, right on cue, when the weapons team started firing actual machine guns...minus the actual bullets, of course.

It was quite convincing.

Here’s the sequence, if you want to take a look. (The cinematographer on this is the legendary Gordon Willis, who also shot Annie Hall, Manhattan, and All the President’s Men, not to mention the other two Godfathers. That’s probably my favorite part of the whole thing).

So yeah— I’m in a Godfather movie.

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Then there’s the time I posed with the severed head Jodie Foster uncovers in The Silence of the Lambs.

Here’s that photo.

This was at least ten months before The Silence of the Lambs saw the light of day, so I didn’t jump quite as high as you did during the movie when Clarice discovered this gruesomeness in a dusty storage space out in New Jersey.

I just thought, “Hey— I know that guy's head!

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All of this was a blast, but my favorite story of this type concerns the time Martin Scorsese sent me a letter.

Sort of.

In 1989, two of my best buddies, Chris Swartout and the already name-checked Mike DeCasper, had left Gainesville, FL for the bright lights, overpriced housing, and great hot dogs of New York City. I would follow in a year or so to pursue screenwriting. New to the movie industry at that point, Chris and Mike were working as lowly production assistants on an upcoming Martin Scorsese picture that was then called Wise Guys. The name would later be changed to Goodfellas so it wouldn’t be confused with a relatively recent hit TV series.

I was visiting Manhattan when Chris and Mike attended their first production meeting for the film. I remember the three of us excitedly digging through a copy of the Goodfellas script on a concrete bench in front of Rockefeller Center. We were practically squealing over it.

I was especially taken with the “how to properly slice garlic when making spaghetti sauce in prison” sequence.

I need to backtrack at this point, though, to set up the story I’m supposed to be telling. When Chris and Mike were still students down at the University of Florida, I shared a huge house with Chris and several other movie-crazy friends of mine. We watched and re-watched tons of motion pictures together and often got into verbal sparring matches when trying to select our next title at the video store.

Another one of my best friends, Christian Keathley, who’s now a respected film and media culture professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, was quite taken with a 1974 Richard Lester movie called Juggernaut. Lester, as you may know, directed A Hard Day's Night and Help!, as well as several other well-regarded, often darkly satirical movies.

But I just didn’t care about a movie where some guy threatens to blow up a cruise ship. I didn’t want to spend two hours of my life sitting through Juggernaut, regardless of Lester’s connection to my beloved Beatles, and nothing the other guys said or did could convince me otherwise.

It got to the point that it became a running joke between us. When somebody said, “Let’s watch a movie tonight,” somebody else would often say, “How about Juggernaut?!”

Then we’d laugh and end up watching anything except Juggernaut.

Anyway, Chris and Mike moved up to New York City, and they were working on Goodfellas.

One day, they called me and held the phone up so I could hear the piano coda from “Layla” booming out of some speakers while Scorsese had a camera slowly creep around a pink Cadillac containing two murdered corpses. He was choreographing the camera movement to the music. That’s cool as hell, and I’m sure you remember the moment in the movie.

But I’m digressing again. That’s still not the story I’m telling.

The actual story opens by my saying that Chris and Mike hit it off with Scorsese on the Goodfellas set because Scorsese will happily talk about movies from the moment he rolls out of bed in the morning until he climbs back in at night. Mike and Chris knew their stuff, and he’d occasionally shoot the bull with them about their favorite pictures when there was a bit of downtime.

One day, during one of their bull sessions, Chris told Scorsese about his friend, Paul, and the entire Juggernaut situation. Scorsese said I was making a mistake; Juggernaut is great and one of his favorite Richard Lester movies. I really should watch it.

This gave Chris an idea.

A few days later, I was watching TV down in Gainesville, knowing nothing about Chris and Mike’s conversation with “Marty,” as they now called him, when I decided to go out and get the mail.

I found a letter addressed to me with a Warner Bros. logo on the envelope. I opened it up, and this was the typed letter contained within, dated 7-11-89. I still have it in a box somewhere.

Paul,

Please watch Richard Lester’s “Juggernaut” as soon as possible. You should listen to your friends. They know a well directed, exciting action thriller when they see one.

It was signed, “Thank you, Martin Scorsese.”

That’s right, arguably the greatest director of the 1970s had sided with my friends and was now pretty much demanding that I watch Juggernaut. Chris typed the letter up and showed it to Scorsese, who read it and said, “Yeah, I’ll sign that.” Originally it said, “We know a well-directed…etc.,” but Scorsese crossed out each “we” and wrote “they.” Apparently, he was comfortable with calling Joe Pesci his friend, but he was having problems committing to me.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed that he played along, and I laughed out loud. Then I went out and rented Juggernaut.

And I loved it.

It’s not an action movie or even a thriller, not really, and its disaster movie-style poster is so misguided it appears to be advertising another picture altogether. Although there are bombs hidden on a cruise ship, the narrative unfolds more like a multiple character study that’s very funny and quite singular in its conception; there are more dry, cynical jokes in it than you get in most straight comedies. Juggernaut wasn’t what I expected it to be at all.

I had been...wrong.

The next day, I wrote a response and sent it to Chris to give to Scorsese. This is what I said:

Dear Mr. Scorsese,

I watched Richard Lester’s “Juggernaut,” as you suggested, and liked it a great deal. I felt, however, that it needed more guns and pasta.

Sincerely,

Paul Tatara

When Chris handed the note to Scorsese on the Goodfellas set, Scorsese burst out laughing and walked around showing it to various members of the crew. I suspect that, given the general uneasiness even brilliant filmmakers can have when shooting a new movie, it helped him feel like he was on the right track. After all, there may not be a film in all of American cinema that has more guns and pasta in it than “Goodfellas.”

That would have been the end of it had Chris not been hired about a year later as a production assistant on Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear down in Chris’s native state of Florida.

Here’s a clip from Cape Fear, in case you’ve forgotten the tender approach Scorsese took to guiding such understated material (a tattooed guy we know named Chuck is in the corner cell when De Niro is exiting the prison, but that's another another story).

I know what you’re thinking— he’s so obviously influenced by Renoir!

I can’t stand Cape Fear.

Scorsese hadn’t laid eyes on Chris since the last day of filming Goodfellas, and production assistants don’t go breaking into conversations to slap five with a legendary director when he’s shooting a big movie, even if they kinda know the guy. But during Chris’s first day on the Cape Fear set, Scorsese noticed him standing there with his headset and walkie-talkie, and they had this exchange:

Scorsese: “Hey! I didn’t know you were working on this, too!”

Chris: “Yeah, I’m from the area, so they wanted people who know where everything is around here.”

Scorsese: “Good. Great! Hey. Tell your friend— no guns or pasta in this one, either!”

Unfortunately, Cape Fear also lacked good taste and the slightest sense of reality. But I didn't write to tell Scorsese that when I saw it. If I ever see him on the street here in New York, though, I am absolutely going to let him know I’m the “guns and pasta guy.”

Should I bump into De Niro, I will not mention the silk underwear.