“We were out of step and we’re out of time”: The movie that almost killed Martin Scorsese’s career
While some filmmakers would no doubt be content to play it safe having enjoyed plenty of success returning to the same modes of storytelling in quick succession, Martin Scorsese has never been one to remain stuck in any given genre for too long.
When he went out of his way to intentionally mix things up and broaden his cinematic horizons, though, the results were so disastrous it had a massively detrimental effect on his career. The passage of time has allowed the notable misstep to take its place among the upper echelons of his esteemed back catalogue, but at the time the immediate prognosis was dire.
Scorsese made five features between 1973 and 1980, four of them starred Robert De Niro, three of them are stone-cold classics, just one under-performed at the box office, and their combined Academy Awards haul topped out at three wins from 15 nominations, so it would be fair to call it the hottest period of the director’s initial upwards trajectory.
As a result, there was pressure on Scorsese to continue that momentum and follow up Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, New York, New York, and Raging Bull with a worthy successor, and he was supremely confident that razor-sharp and jet-black satirical showcase The King of Comedy was the perfect way to do it.
When viewed through a modern lens, he was completely correct, because the deceptively dark descent into madness and obsession is comfortably one of Scorsese’s finest-ever features. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the initial consensus, leaving it to be cast adrift by ticket-buying customers and overlooked by critics.
In the aftermath of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, the entire complexion of the industry was beginning to shift yet again as the ‘New Hollywood’ movement spluttered out, and as one of its figureheads, Scorsese was among the first in the firing line. Backed by one of the ‘Big Five’ studios in 20th Century Fox, earning a meagre $2.5million from cinemas against production costs of $19million was catastrophic.
“The last studio movie I made in Hollywood, The King of Comedy, was considered the flop of the year,” he told Tom Shone. “No-one would come near me.” Scorsese saw his first attempt at mounting The Last Temptation of Christ fall apart at the seams, leaving him in danger of being exiled to the fringes of cinema.
His follow-up After Hours was a minor success all things considered, but it’s telling the next movie for Scorsese was the one and only time he directed a sequel to somebody else’s movie, getting into bed with Disney of all companies to helm Cool Hank Luke legacy successor The Color of Money under the Mouse House’s Touchstone subsidiary, which turned out to be the right call.
Comparing himself to “a wounded person trying to get back into shape,” working with big stars like Paul Newman and Tom Cruise in an Oscar-winning hit blew some fresh wind into his sails, but Scorsese was smart enough to know The King of Comedy was the wrong film and the wrong time, one that had a detrimental effect on his short-term prospects.
“This was not a film that was dealing with the worlds of Raging Bull or Taxi Driver or Mean Streets, it was totally different,” he reflected. “We were out of step and we’re out of time, we’re in the wrong time.” Someone so talented was never going to be written off completely, but things could have nonetheless turned out differently in the 1980s had The King of Comedy been treated the way then that it is now.