November 15, 2007 | LAUREN BARBATO, DAILY TROJAN
Bull Market
Mardik Martin Reflects On His Classic Film
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| Mardik Martin, who wrote the script for Raging Bull was honored with the ARPA Foundation's Lifetime Achievement award. |
Laughing, he turns and says, "I make more [money] from this film now than I did all those years ago."
After a roller coaster of a career, 70-year-old screenwriter Mardik Martin accepts his newfound accolades with a somewhat bothersome wave of the hand. These recent honors include the Writer's Guild of America naming Raging Bull as one of the 101 Best Screenplays of All Time; the ARPA Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award, which Martin recently received at its latest International Film Festival; and a documentary of Martin's life, Mardik: From Baghdad to Hollywood.
Even though he's an esteemed figure in the screenwriting world, many who list Raging Bull as their favorite film do not know his name, let alone that he's a professor at USC.
"I knew of his work before I knew him," says screenwriting professor Paul Wolff. "Mardik's an original; there's no one else like him."
Like the theater, Martin is a relic of the past, from an era when film was rooted in realism and commercialism was unheard of.
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| A documentary of Martin's life, Mardik: From Baghdad to Hollywood recently premiered at the Arclight in Hollywood. |
During his early years as a film student at New York University, the ideals of wealth and fame hardly crossed his mind. Sitting in his office, a dozen or so scripts splayed out across the otherwise barren desk, I asked him if he ever had any intention of becoming a director. Isn't that every young film students dream?
"In that time, you needed your own camera to study directing," Martin explains. "The school had nothing; it's not like it is now. I didn't have any money, and I didn't want to deal with that [competition], so I started to write. Paper was cheap."
Though giving all his attention to screenwriting might have seemed like a act of practicality at the time, to see Martin living any other lifestyle is impossible. He is the epitome of a writer: cigarettes, unstable romances and an almost irritating humility concerning his work. And like most screenwriters, Martin willingly doomed himself to a life beyond the spotlight, watching his friends become famous as his name remained in tiny print at the bottom of movie posters.
"But that's what happens to every screenwriter," he says. "The director takes all the credit. Its just part of the course."
He pauses to glance at the Mean Streets poster nailed to the wall. "But I'm not saying that about Marty. At least he's honest."
While Martin was indeed a writer before he met Martin Scorsese in the hallway of NYU's Tisch building, the pair's collaboration was without a doubt innovative, influential and ultimately successful. During their years at NYU, film consumed the two men's lives.
"We used to stay up every night till dawn, watching movies," Scorsese says.
"We had so many ideas," Martin adds. "We just wrote and wrote."
As he revisits his old stomping grounds in Manhattan nearly 40 years later, the wet snow falling lightly on his knitted cap, Martin is reminded of the stories that came from these neighborhoods.
"I would drive around and pick up hookers, but not for the sex," he says in all seriousness. "I would bring a tape recorder and pay them $100 for their stories … that's how we got a lot of the [stories] for 'Mean Streets.'"
Ramy Katrib, one of the producer/directors of the Mardik Martin documentary, says Martin "was a wealth of information … He would always use a real-life story to illustrate a point."
All those drives around Manhattan's dirtiest districts paid off, since it was the gritty dialogue and characters from the 1973 film Mean Streets that catapulted the careers of Martin, Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro. Soon after, Martin moved to Hollywood, signed with producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler and made several movies, notably Valentino, New York, New York and the newfound masterpiece, Raging Bull.
"I was always amazed by the sheer and brilliant honesty of the writing [of 'Raging Bull']," Wolff says. "It shows life the way it really is."
Which is only fitting for the man who claims that in order to find a good character, a writer must pull from real life.
"You have to observe the world," Martin says. He's a little too good at observing, his intense brown eyes catching all my nervous tics - the toe tapping and hair twirling. After a moment, Martin claims I need more confidence and conviction in my voice.
"What, are you ashamed of your name?" he asks me, almost a little too forcefully, as I squirm in my rather uncomfortable chair.
Yet his colleagues and students insist that this is Martin's way of showing affection. As Katrib explains, "He would usually start by screaming at us … He wouldn't terrorize us, but he'd say, 'Just get to the point.'"
Just get to the point. Said like a true screenwriter, accustomed to brief descriptions and fast-paced scenes completely devoid of any fluff. This is the exact philosophy Martin applies to his life, hastily shaking his head at the words "resentment" or "regret." He prefers not to linger on the years following Raging Bull, the time when his love affair with Hollywood came to an end.
While it is Raging Bull that he is most remembered for, Martin insists the impact of the film was miniscule at the time. "[Raging Bull] didn't do very well at the box office, and by that time, we were already established," he says.
After Raging Bull, Martin was unable to produce another one of his screenplays. He wrote many, including what he believes is the best script he's every written, On the Spot. As Martin said, however, his life was simply running the screenwriter's course.
"You know, when you spend a year or two writing a script, it becomes your baby," he says. "Then, when it doesn't get made, it's like having a stillborn." He pauses to shuffle through his students' scripts. "It hurts, but it's usually never your fault. It's the producers' or the directors' or something happened to the actor … It's usually never your fault."
There's a hint of wistfulness in his voice, which he quickly wipes away with his smile. And even now, living in a regular apartment in the Valley, unmarried and without any children of his own, Martin still finds he has nothing to regret or resent, no matter how much I press him. Being the realist he is, to have even written a screenplay is an admirable accomplishment, let alone writing Mean Streets and Raging Bull. And being the screenwriter that he is, Martin approaches his life like a screenplay, one scene at a time.
"What goes up, must come down," he says constantly - to his documentary crew on the snowy streets of New York, to me in that fluorescent-lit office.
And it looks like in his current scene, Martin is up once more.
| Associated Person: | Mardik Martin |
