GQ magazine UK edition has a excellent story on Martin Scorsese's RAGING BULL.

New book with some great insights about the process of making this crucial movie that transcends simple analysis.

The legend of Raging Bull

Story by Thomas Barrie

Goodfellas? Fuhgeddaboutit. Taxi driver? See you later, copper! No, the most crucial Scorsese /De Niro joint was a film that the director didn’t want to make. Now, 40 years after it’s star won the lead actor Oscar, a new book collates all the tales from the ringside seats, including, of course, Marty and Bob’s. From blood-spurting prosthetics to 1000 rounds with the real LaMotta, here’s how an unlikely biopic saved not just Scorsese’s career, but his life.

One Monday morning during the lockdown, Robert De Niro emailed Jay Glennie out of the blue. He was typically straight to the point: “Can I talk to you now?”

“Oh, my word,” Glennie remembers thinking. “This doesn’t sound good.” He and De Niro had been speaking on and off over the previous weeks and months, over Zoom and on the phone, meticulously picking through details of the production, 40 years earlier, of Raging Bull for the book Glennie was writing. Sometimes they will talk for hours at a time, as De Niro corrected or confirm anecdotes Glennie had heard or read elsewhere. The book was nearing completion. But for De Niro to call Glennie urgently, there had to be big news. He picked up the phone. “I spoke to Joe last night. He’s on board. “

Glennie couldn’t believe his luck. To secure Joe Pesci‘s cooperation on a book about Raging Bull was a coup. Pesci’s team had already politely declined Glennie’s request for a phone call three times - “Mr. Pesci doesn’t give interviews, thank you.” - but when Bob asks, well, that’s different. Nor was Pesci the first person De Niro had helped bring on board; he had helped Glennie gain access to people such as Gloria Norris, Scorsese‘s production assistant on the Raging Bull by giving the book his blessing. “Invariably,” says Glennie, I’d pick up the phone after the interview was set up and one of the first things they’d say was, “I spoke to Bob and he said that you’re OK.” Everything is run past him, such is the respect they have for him.” Glennie dropped everything and began planning his rewrite.

De Niro was happy to suggest Pesci take part on the book because he’d already given extensive interviews from Glennie’s previous book which charted the production of Michael Cimino‘s The Deer Hunter (Glennie has also written a story of Performance, Trainspotting is in the works). The author presented De Niro with a copy of the book, One Shot: The Making of The Deer Hunter, and when asked what was next suggested Raging Bull. In March 2020 Glennie was presented with the perfect excuse to make it a reality. What originally started as a lockdown project written in the office at the end of his garden has now become the ur-text of the making of Raging Bull, a play-by-play account of the 20th century’s definitive sports movie. It is released this month (June 2021).

Only Taxi Driver and perhaps GoodFellas can rival Raging Bull for the title of a Scorsese‘s most important film. Its a sordid prison of a film - watching it is like being locked in a concrete cell for two hours with a guy who wants to beat the very plasma out of you. At the heart of it is De Niro’s Jake LaMotta, a hunk and a husk of a middleweight boxer, who dreams - along with his brother and trainer Joey (Pesci) - of becoming the world champion, even as he is overwhelmed by the violent and sexual urges that bubble up inside him.

Glennie’s history is full of important characters, from Pesci and writer Paul Schrader to Scorsese’s longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker and the ingenue actor Kathy Moriarty who plays LaMotta’s young wife, Vikki. Between them, they were Scorsese’s enablers-in-chief; one by one, each brought something essential to the film and often their actions had a cinematic quality themselves. Picture Schrader, lurking in the darkened restaurant and bar on LA’s Melrose Avenue called Nickodell next-door to Paramount, drinking heavily while he reworks the script throughout 1978. Pesci before he is hired to play Joey, enters as a jobbing actor coming off the back of what Glennie calls a “going nowhere” film called The Death Collector. He lives above Amicci’s, the talion restaurant that he manages in the Bronx. Moriarity, barely 17, is plucked from a nearby neighborhood after winning a pair of high heels in a swimsuit competition staged at New York nightclub Hoops; Pesci sees her photo pinned behind the bar and urges her to send it to the film’s casting director.

Further anecdotal detail enriches Glennie’s book throughout. The crew used a trick dating back to the black-and-white films of the 1940s, he recounts, whereby thick chocolate syrup was used as fake blood, because it contrasted better in monochrome. There was a single accident on the set, when De Niro, using Pesci as a punching bag for the training scene between the LaMotta’s brothers, cracked Pesci’s rib despite his protective gear. Listen closely and you can hear Pesci groan for real. Other characters float in and out of Glenn is narrative - Al Pacino, Pauline Kael, Dino De Laurentiis, Norman Mailer. The cast was colorful,but, at its heart, the making of Raging Bull is the story of two most important figures: Scorsese and De Niro.

Like all great Italian-American sagas, the tale of Raging Bull began with a celebratory gathering.

By the time De Niro came across LaMotta‘s book, the ex-boxer was broke and busy divorcing his fifth wife.

Robert De Niro first met Martin Scorsese at the Christmas party at the Time critic Jay Cocks’ Lower East Side apartment in 1971, hosted by Cocks and his girlfriend, Verna Bloom. Scorsese and Cocks had been friends since Cocks covered Who’s That Knocking at My Door, Scorsese‘s first film made while the director was still at New York University; in 1969, Scorsese had accompanied Bloom and Cocks on their first date to see Susan Sontag’s abstruse art film Duet for Cannibals. He was the only one of the trio not to fall asleep in the cinema. De Niro had been invited to the party by Bloom, with whom he had starred in two one-act plays the month before. He also knew Brian de Palma having made his film debut in De Palma’s The Wedding Party (1969), shot in 1963. At Cocks’ party, it was De Palma who formally introduced Scorsese and De Niro.

The two hit it off immediately. In 1973, they collaborated on Mean Streets.

Taxi Driver in New York, New York would follow in the mid-to-late 1970s but before that, De Niro headed to Italy to shoot The Godfather Part II on location for Francis Ford Coppola. While sequestered in rural Sicily, De Niro passed the time by reading Jake LaMotta‘s memoir, Raging Bull: My Story. He was hooked from the start. The book had everything: struggle, rage, jealousy, oppression, but also resilience, brotherly love, sacrifice.

Raging Bull is often named the best film of the 1980’s,but really it’s the last hurrah of the precending decade: LaMotta was the perfect New Hollywood antihero, the culmination of a tradition that began with Warren Beatty in 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde. The boxer eventually died in 2017, having lived for 95 breakneck years. Most of them has been defined by violence. He did three years in juvie as a teenager, at Coxsackie reformatory, which was nicknamed “The Bucket of Blood”. He thought, for years, that he had killed a bookmaker as a youth while beating him with a lead pipe and that guilt – the belief that he was murderer – drove him to fight relentlessy in a ring for much of the rest of his life. THe mob also had a major presence in LaMotta’s life. It was impossible to box in New York in 1940’s without drawing the attention of organized crime and LaMotta paid his dues: he was introduced to throw a fight in front of 18,000 fans at Madison Square Garden in return for a later shot at the world middleweight title – which he won in 1949.

Suuposedly, LaMotta would prepare for a major bout by working himself up into a hormonal rage, then dousing his erection in iced water to frustrate himself sexually. He was jeously obsessed with his wife, Vikki, a beautiful young woman hailing from a tough part of Bronx and poor parenting. She met LaMotta at 15, at a local swimming pool. Glennie call her a “child bride”; she and LaMotta married at 16, when she got pregnant. LaMotta was controling and physically abusive and would beat Vikki while she tried to hide under bath towels in the family home. Eventually, as LaMotta’s career began to decline, along with their relantionship, she took their three children and fled.

By the time De Niro came across LaMotta’s book, the ex-boxer was broke and busy divorcing the fifth of his seven wives (when the film came out, LaMotta and Vikki had been divorced for 23 years) THe autobiography that would so captive De Niro had been written with the help – and, by all accounts, embellishment – of the boxer’s friend Peter Savage and a writer named Joseph Carter, to try to turn this pulpy, swaggering account into a film. What was more, he knew who had to direct it.

Scorsese, though, was the nadir of his career. Severely hooked on drugs and divorcing for the second time, on Labor Day weekend in September 1978 he started coughing up blood at the Telluride Film Festival. “He was bleeding from the mouth, bleeding from his nose, bleeding from his eyes,” recalls Mardik Martin, cowriter on Raging Bull, in Glenie’s book. “He was very near death”. Scorsese was haemorrhaging, the sheer volume of his drug use overhelming his organs.

De Niro visited him in hospital and , much as he would persuade Pesci to talk to Glenie for the book 40 years later, talked Scorsese into doing the film. The director had previously turned down the material, claiming he saw nothing of interest in it, but there and then he commited to a do-or-die “kamikaze” approach to it. He had become convinced that there was no apetite in America for the sort of auteur-led films he wanted to make, anyway, and planned to flee the US to work in Europe at the first opportunity. Scorsese firmly believed Raging Bull would be his last Amnerican picture.

If you conceive Raging Bull as a sports film, it makes no sense for Scorsese to make it. He has since admitted, freely, to hating sports and having no interestin boxing, even . His first instintc in 1978 was to make the film without shooting the fights at all, until a chance conversation with Norman Mailer in which the writer , a huge box fan, explained how significant a boxer LaMotta had been.

But think of it as a religious story – of redemption, grace and sins of wrath, gluttony, lust, pride – or as a film about Italian American masculinity and there are few filmmakers better equipped to do it. In 1974, Scorsese had made his documentary Italianamerican and by 1978 was already more interested in making his long term pet projects Gangs Of New York or The Last Temptation of Christ than Raging Bull. But, ina a way, he created a film that had similar themes to both, a close study in machismo and absolution. In Glennie’s book, Scorsese says as much. “It isn’t a movie about boxing,” he says. “It is a movie about a sinner looking for redemption.” He knows, now, that the moment he identified with LaMotta himself, at his lowest, he understood how and why he needed to make Raging Bull,