In 1980, Hollywood had learned how to print money, and the pictures audiences were paying to see looked nothing like the one Martin Scorsese was preparing. His was in black and white. Its subject was a middleweight fighter who beat his own life to pieces. Scorsese had no interest in boxing whatsoever and said so to anyone who asked.
The film cost $18 million, made back barely more than that, split the critics down the middle, and was widely expected to end his career. What went into making it was stranger than anything that reached the screen, including a collapse that nearly killed him and a sound library built partly out of elephant calls. It all started with an actor who would not stop asking. Scorsese had long insisted that anything with a ball was no good to him, that he found boxing dull and had never managed to grasp the sport.
So when Robert De Niro handed him a fighter’s memoir on the set of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, the answer was no. De Niro had come across the 1970 book while shooting The Godfather Part Two. He thought the writing was poor, but the man inside it held him completely, and he spent the next four years returning to the same director with the same request between other jobs, getting refused every time. Scorsese was not being difficult for its own sake.
He had grown up asthmatic in Little Italy, watching the street through a window instead of playing in it, and organized sport had stayed on the far side of that glass ever since. Producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler had also read the memoir and were willing to back a version of it, but only on one condition: Scorsese had to direct. That left the project parked behind a single man’s indifference, and the director’s own standing in Hollywood was sliding after the commercial failure of New York, New York. The stalemate held until a screenplay arrived, at which point the problem changed shape entirely.
The first writer hired came away convinced the material had already been filmed a hundred times. Mardik Martin, who had written Mean Streets with Scorsese, put it bluntly: the story was a fighter with brother trouble, wife trouble, and mob trouble. His draft satisfied no one, himself included. Paul Schrader took over in 1978 and reshaped it, adding the character of brother Joey where none had existed before, and giving familiar form to the undercooked steak scene.
A Florida jail sequence he wrote worried United Artists so much that executives began discussing giving the film the harshest rating possible, which would have meant no advertising and no theater chains. In November of that year, Steven Bach and David Field sat down with Scorsese, De Niro, and Winkler to tell them the picture could never find an audience. Field called the central character a cockroach. “He is not a cockroach,” De Niro answered, standing well back from the executives and speaking flatly.
Bach later framed the insult as a deliberate provocation that worked. The pass that finally settled the screenplay was written by Scorsese and De Niro themselves over roughly two weeks on the island of St. Martin, producing the television fixing scene and the closing dressing room monologue. Neither man put his name on the credits.
By the end of that summer, the project had almost died with its director. In a New York hospital ward over Labor Day weekend 1978, Scorsese lay bleeding internally, his body pushed well past what it could take after a long stretch of hard living. One of the doctors warned that a brain hemorrhage could arrive at any moment without notice. His second marriage had just ended.
His last picture had failed. By his own account afterward, he was surprised to find himself that close to the end of everything. De Niro came to see him and did not soften anything. He asked whether Scorsese wanted to die, whether he wanted to be around to see his daughter grow up and get married, whether he intended to make another picture at all.
Then he told him there was still one they could make together. Irwin Winkler has wondered since which half of that landed harder: the warning about dying or the warning about never working again. Thelma Schoonmaker, who had known both men for years, has called the visit an act of friendship in its purest form. A switch flipped in that room.
Scorsese stopped looking at the material as a sports story and started seeing a man he recognized, which is the only reason the film exists in the form it does. He agreed while lying in the bed, and he has credited De Niro with saving his life ever since. Years afterward, he explained what he had finally found in the material: “The ring becomes an allegory of life. ”
Something in the test footage was wrong, and nobody in the screening room could name it at first.
Scorsese was running 8 mm color material of De Niro sparring, watching it with the actor, cinematographer Michael Chapman, and the British director Michael Powell, who had become his mentor. Powell spotted it: the gloves were the wrong color. Fighters of that era wore maroon, ox blood, or black, and the modern pair on screen was pulling the whole image out of period. Scorsese agreed immediately, remembering the bouts he had watched with his father on kinoscopes at the local theater, all of them in black and white.
That was how the era looked to anyone who had lived through it. Color boxing pictures were everywhere in the wake of Rocky, and he wanted daylight between his film and theirs. He worried about color stock fading over the years, and he was also reluctant to put that much blood in front of an audience in color. In 1980, shooting a major studio release without color read to executives as a guaranteed way to lose money, and he went ahead regardless.
The casting of Joey came first. Joe Pesci had been a child performer, had recorded an album, had played guitar in a touring band, and had managed exactly one film appearance in a low-budget crime picture called The Death Collector. When nothing came of it, he went back to running an Italian restaurant. De Niro watched the crime film and pushed hard for him, and casting director Cis Corman had to track him down in person to make the offer.
Pesci needed persuading because he had a musical comedy act with his old partner Frank Vincent, and the production solved that neatly by casting Vincent as Salvy. The two leads lived and trained together before shooting so the sibling shorthand would be there on the first morning rather than the fortieth. It worked well enough that the friendship outlasted the film by four decades. One detail the picture never lets on is that Pesci was roughly six months older than the man playing his big brother.
The last major part went to someone who had never acted for money. Kathy Moriarty was 18, and the suggestion came from Pesci, who remembered seeing her in a photograph pinned up at a club. Scorsese and De Niro met her several times, won over by the husky voice and a composure that did not match her age at all. Her screen test was improvised, with De Niro feeding her lines she had not been given in advance, and she got through it without realizing at first that the crew were filming.
The Screen Actors Guild needed more convincing, so Corman laid ten photographs out side by side, Moriarty against the real Vicki LaMotta, and the resemblance closed the argument. Her hair was set with corn syrup to hold its period shape. During the pool sequence, the bees found her. The hair, by her own account, did not move an inch.
Her performance in that first job was nominated for an Academy Award. De Niro could have been one of the top twenty middleweights in the world. Jake LaMotta said that about the man playing him, and he had the standing to say it. The two worked together for close to a year at a New York gym with coach Al Silvani, going through something in the region of a thousand rounds.
LaMotta was in his mid-fifties by then and still capable of hurting his pupil. De Niro also entered three genuine bouts in Brooklyn billed as young LaMotta and won two of them. What that year bought the production turns up in every ring sequence: the footwork is real footwork, the exhaustion is real exhaustion. An actor who has only learned the shapes has to be edited around, but this one could be photographed doing the thing itself.
Boxing fills barely a twelfth of the running time of Raging Bull, a proportion that surprises almost everyone who hears it. The ring sequences also ran far past their schedule, swallowing close to six weeks of a shoot that had allowed for a fraction of that. Scorsese refused to film fights the way they had always been filmed, from the spectator’s side. He put one camera inside the ropes, operated by Michael Chapman working as a kind of third fighter.
Punches were choreographed like dance routines, each bout given its own visual grammar so that no two felt alike. Frame rates were changed inside a single unbroken shot. Smoke was pumped through the lights, and flames were lit beneath the lens to make the air ripple. The rings themselves changed as well: different sizes were built so LaMotta would read as smaller and more alone in the later fights.
Roughly $90,000 went on flashbulbs alone. All of that produced about ten minutes of screen time. Then the production stopped for close to four months. Nothing was filmed at all while the crew stayed on the payroll and waited.
De Niro spent that time eating his way through northern Italy and France to gain weight. There was no trickery available to him in 1979, and he wanted none offered. The producers had floated a padded suit early on and were turned down flat. He left at around 145 pounds and came back at roughly 215.
His posture had altered, his breathing had changed, and so had the sound of his own voice. Scorsese was alarmed enough by what the lens showed him that he shut the cameras down at one stage out of concern for his star’s health. Both men were overruled by the actor’s certainty about what the part needed. The performance that came back from that hiatus is the one that won De Niro the Academy Award.
The film was shot with real damage landing inside it. During one round of sparring between the brothers, De Niro landed a body shot that cracked one of Pesci’s ribs. Neither man stopped, because stopping would have cost the take, and that take is in the finished film. In the gym scene where Jake goads his brother into hitting him in the face, the two are genuinely connecting as well.
Scorsese was willing to let real damage land if it produced a result no performance could fake, and Pesci carried the cracked rib through the rest of the shoot without asking for the scene to be redone. Fifteen years later on Casino, he managed to break the same rib again. The blood was Hershey’s chocolate syrup, which photographs darker and thicker on black and white stock than any stage blood available. Sponges loaded with the stuff were hidden inside the gloves so impacts would spray on contact.
Reviewers at the time singled out the violence as the hardest thing about the entire production, and several wrote that audiences were fortunate it had not been shot in color. The ratings board might well have agreed. The gloves Michael Powell complained about ended up saving the film from its own certificate. No two punches in the finished film share a sound source.
Supervising sound editor Frank Warner built each one separately, auditioning options until he had a result that worked for that specific blow. The library he drew on was peculiar: elephants and horses supplied cries under the heavier shots, big cats contributed, melons and tomatoes were squashed for wet impacts, and a bass drum was detuned and run through effects. The flashbulbs were assembled partly out of rifle shots and smashed glass. Warner burned his effects tapes whenever a picture was finished, wanting to come at each new job with nothing left in the bank.
The consequence is permanent: nobody ever got him to explain how he built those punches, and whatever the method was, it went with him. No composer was ever hired for a major studio release in 1980, which was close to unheard of. Scorsese reached for Pietro Mascagni instead, using the intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana for the opening titles, a choice he and Thelma Schoonmaker arrived at by trying it against the slow motion shadow boxing and hearing straight away that it worked. Everything else came off his own shelves, assembled with Robbie Robertson from a personal collection of 78s, chosen on a single test: whether somebody in that decade would plausibly have heard them on a radio, at a pool, or in a club.
The assembly of the film began before the shoot had finished. Scorsese carried each day’s footage back to his New York apartment and worked on it after dark. The largest structural decision was made in the editing room with Schoonmaker. An early plan threaded LaMotta’s nightclub act through the whole story, and they abandoned it in favor of one long flashback with the stand-up material holding both ends.
Schoonmaker won her first Academy Award for it. In 2012, the Motion Picture Editors Guild ranked the best edited films ever made, and this one came first. One of the film’s most famous scenes was built on a surprise. Jake arrives at Joey’s kitchen table and asks his brother about Vicki in the ugliest way available to him.
In the coverage, Scorsese thought Pesci’s reaction was too controlled, and directed De Niro to go off script and push harder. De Niro turned the accusation on Pesci’s mother. Pesci had not been warned that the scene called for him to be attacked, which means part of what crosses his face is a man being genuinely surprised in real time. The real Jake LaMotta told the New York Times, after seeing the finished film, that he thought he looked bad in it, then added that he had come to accept it was accurate, that this was how things had been, and this was the man he used to be.
He had worked alongside De Niro for months, helping to rebuild the worst stretch of his own life in detail. He described watching the film as the first occasion he properly understood what kind of man he had been, and asked Vicki whether he had truly been like that. Her answer ran to three words: “You were worse. ” His brother Joseph sued the production for $2.
5 million over what he considered an unflattering portrayal. The Academy Awards that year did not happen on the evening they were scheduled. Hours beforehand, John Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan outside a Washington hotel, and the ceremony was pushed back by 24 hours.
It was only the third postponement in its history. Hinckley had acted out of a fixation on Jodie Foster, the young actress from Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Scorsese attended wearing a bulletproof vest with FBI agents dressed as guests seated around him. The results were thin against eight nominations, the most of any film that year.
De Niro won Best Actor. Schoonmaker won for editing. Best Picture went to Ordinary People. By the measure the industry cared about most, the release was a disappointment.
$18 million went into it and roughly $23 million came back, which did not clear the bar at the time. United Artists was collapsing in the aftermath of Heaven’s Gate and had neither the money nor the attention left to campaign for it. There was no real premiere; a print went by hand to a Manhattan theater and started running at noon. The reviews divided sharply.
Vincent Canby at the New York Times called it Scorsese’s most ambitious work and his best. Others went after the violence and after the refusal to make the central figure likable. Roger Ebert later named it the finest American film of the 1980s, and in 1990 it became the first film ever selected for the National Film Registry in its first year of eligibility. In 2007, the American Film Institute placed it fourth among the greatest American movies, behind only Citizen Kane, The Godfather, and Casablanca.
The closing scene was shot on the final afternoon of production and ran to nineteen attempts before Scorsese had what he wanted, with the thirteenth ending up in the film. What the actor recites into the mirror is the taxi cab monologue from On the Waterfront, the one about being a contender. Another option had been considered and dropped: an extract from Richard III was in the running until Michael Powell argued that Shakespeare had no business inside an American story. The picture is full of traces of Scorsese’s own life.
The wedding scene, which he was too ill to direct, was shot by his father, Charles, working from material modeled on his own wedding. The crucifix above Jake and Vicki’s bed is the one that used to hang above the bed of the director’s own parents. The final card is a dedication to Haig Manoogian, the film professor who taught Scorsese at NYU and died a few months before release. The dedication reads, “With love and resolution, Marty.
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A film everyone expected to finish a career became the work its director and its star are both measured against, and the further it gets from 1980, the larger it looks. The ingredients remain hard to believe: chocolate syrup, elephant calls, borrowed opera, one camera inside the ropes, and a star who rebuilt his own body twice, all of it now sitting near the top of every list of American cinema.