In 1978, Martin Scorsese shot a documentary called “American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince” about his friend, a former Neil Diamond roadie and drug-addict best known for playing the small role of Easy Andy in “Taxi Driver.” Considered Scorsese’s “lost film,” the documentary was never released, though it lived on in bootleg copies.
In it, Scorsese interspersed home videos of Prince’s childhood with his narrations of his wild stories, including a particularly outrageous one about the time he plunged an adrenaline shot into the heart of a girl who had overdosed on heroin. The scene was made famous by Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” and Prince also tells the story in Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life.”
Read More: ‘Silence’ Review: Martin Scorsese Delivers a Gorgeous Crisis-of-Faith Drama
In a recently published video, one can hear Prince’s original version of the story that inspired Tarantino, alongside the famous scene it inspired,...
In it, Scorsese interspersed home videos of Prince’s childhood with his narrations of his wild stories, including a particularly outrageous one about the time he plunged an adrenaline shot into the heart of a girl who had overdosed on heroin. The scene was made famous by Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” and Prince also tells the story in Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life.”
Read More: ‘Silence’ Review: Martin Scorsese Delivers a Gorgeous Crisis-of-Faith Drama
In a recently published video, one can hear Prince’s original version of the story that inspired Tarantino, alongside the famous scene it inspired,...
- 1/26/2017
- by Jude Dry
- Indiewire
With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.
Always Shine (Sophia Takal)
With the excess of low-budget, retreat-in-the-woods dramas often finding characters hashing out their insecurities through a meta-narrative, a certain initial resistance can occur when presented with such a derivative scenario at virtually every film festival. While Sophia Takal‘s psychological drama Always Shine ultimately stumbles, the chemistry of its leads and a sense of foreboding dread in its formal execution ensures its heightened view of...
Always Shine (Sophia Takal)
With the excess of low-budget, retreat-in-the-woods dramas often finding characters hashing out their insecurities through a meta-narrative, a certain initial resistance can occur when presented with such a derivative scenario at virtually every film festival. While Sophia Takal‘s psychological drama Always Shine ultimately stumbles, the chemistry of its leads and a sense of foreboding dread in its formal execution ensures its heightened view of...
- 12/2/2016
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
DoP behind Taxi Driver, The Lost Boys and Michael Jackson’s Bad to receive lifetime award.
Cinematographer Michael Chapman, two-time Oscar nominated for Raging Bull (1980) and The Fugative (1993), is to receive a lifetime achievement award at Camerimage.
The 24th International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography will be held in Bydgoszcz, Poland from Nov 12-19.
When he retired from filmmaking in 2006, Chapman’s left a legacy of more than four decades of film images places him among the elite of Us cinematographers.
Born near Boston in 1935, Chapman’s most important partnerships was with Us director Martin Scorsese, his collaborator on several film projects.
A few years before Raging Bull, they had made Taxi Driver. During the second half of the 1970s, Chapman also worked on Scorsese documentaries The Last Waltz and American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince.
After making his directorial debut in 1983 with All the Right Moves - starring a then unknown [link=nm...
Cinematographer Michael Chapman, two-time Oscar nominated for Raging Bull (1980) and The Fugative (1993), is to receive a lifetime achievement award at Camerimage.
The 24th International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography will be held in Bydgoszcz, Poland from Nov 12-19.
When he retired from filmmaking in 2006, Chapman’s left a legacy of more than four decades of film images places him among the elite of Us cinematographers.
Born near Boston in 1935, Chapman’s most important partnerships was with Us director Martin Scorsese, his collaborator on several film projects.
A few years before Raging Bull, they had made Taxi Driver. During the second half of the 1970s, Chapman also worked on Scorsese documentaries The Last Waltz and American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince.
After making his directorial debut in 1983 with All the Right Moves - starring a then unknown [link=nm...
- 7/6/2016
- by michael.rosser@screendaily.com (Michael Rosser)
- ScreenDaily
"You talkin' to me?"
It's the 40th anniversary of "Taxi Driver" (released on February 8, 1976), the movie that gave Robert De Niro his most famous line, put Martin Scorsese on the map, proved that the pre-teen Jodie Foster was an Oscar-worthy thespian, and (most notoriously) was cited by John Hinckley as an inspiration for his assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.
In honor of the film's anniversary, here are 25 things you need to know about how Travis Bickle came to be.
1. The script, by Paul Schrader (pictured, left), was semi-autobiographical. After a divorce and a break-up with a girlfriend, he wrote the movie while living in his car, feeling suicidal, obsessing about guns and pornography, and having spoken to no one for weeks. As he recalled in 2013, "Taxi Driver" was "an exorcism through art," and it worked.
2. Martin Scorsese saw the script as early as 1972, but didn't yet have the clout to make it,...
It's the 40th anniversary of "Taxi Driver" (released on February 8, 1976), the movie that gave Robert De Niro his most famous line, put Martin Scorsese on the map, proved that the pre-teen Jodie Foster was an Oscar-worthy thespian, and (most notoriously) was cited by John Hinckley as an inspiration for his assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.
In honor of the film's anniversary, here are 25 things you need to know about how Travis Bickle came to be.
1. The script, by Paul Schrader (pictured, left), was semi-autobiographical. After a divorce and a break-up with a girlfriend, he wrote the movie while living in his car, feeling suicidal, obsessing about guns and pornography, and having spoken to no one for weeks. As he recalled in 2013, "Taxi Driver" was "an exorcism through art," and it worked.
2. Martin Scorsese saw the script as early as 1972, but didn't yet have the clout to make it,...
- 2/5/2016
- by Gary Susman
- Moviefone
Nearly every one of the great directors who came of age in the 1970s -- including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich, Michael Cimino -- had his own personal Waterloo. Within five to ten years of their breakouts, they'd each shot a massive flop, an epic where ambition and ego had outraced maturity and restraint. Coppola had "One from the Heart," Spielberg had "1941," Friedkin had "Sorcerer," Bogdanovich had "At Long Last Love," and Cimino (most infamously) had "Heaven's Gate." In Scorsese's case, the iceberg was his lavish musical "New York, New York" (released 35 years ago this week, on June 21, 1977). Its failure not only marred his career, it nearly killed him. The disaster may have begun with Scorsese's stylistic approach to the movie, a clash between incompatible filmmaking modes of the old Hollywood he admired and the new Hollywood he'd helped replace it with. It was...
- 6/20/2012
- by Gary Susman
- Moviefone
This post will self-destruct in two weeks...well, not exactly, but the videos below will be since Google unceremoniously announced the end of Google Video over the weekend that they are putting a kibosh on the video service as of April 29th that unlike the one they eventually bought, YouTube, allowed users to upload video longer than 10 minutes. This development won't be mourned by many, as the video quality was never that great and since 2009, users lost the ability to upload videos, so it became something of a barren wasteland in terms of content.
However, unrestricted by time and largely ungoverned, the site also became the place on the Internet where cinema's orphans could be widely seen, either because they now belong to the public domain or because issues legal or otherwise have prevented their release through traditional means. Naturally, this meant there was plenty of piracy on the site of more recent films,...
However, unrestricted by time and largely ungoverned, the site also became the place on the Internet where cinema's orphans could be widely seen, either because they now belong to the public domain or because issues legal or otherwise have prevented their release through traditional means. Naturally, this meant there was plenty of piracy on the site of more recent films,...
- 4/18/2011
- by Stephen Saito
- ifc.com
When we last checked in with producer and director Tommy Pallotta, he was talking about distributing his latest documentary, American Prince, through BitTorrent for free download by filesharers... but he hadn't done it yet. Now he has. You can download the torrent uploaded by the filmmaker himself here at Mininova. And here's the description on the page: In 1978, director Martin Scorsese turned his camera on his friend and roommate, Steven Prince, with his lost documentary American Boy. Best known for his role as the gun salesman in Taxi Driver, Prince was a true-life raconteur, actor, ex-drug addict, and road manager for Neil Diamond. To Scorsese, Steven's life was more fascinating than what any screenwriter could dream up, it had to...
- 6/15/2009
- by Scott Macaulay
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Tommy Pallotta, producer of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, has released his new film, American Prince, directly into the bit torrent file-sharing community. The film is a sequel to Martin Scorsese's little-seen documentary American Boy, which amounted to almost an hour of actor Steven Prince telling tales, reportedly true tales from his life, to a small audience of friends. One of these stories was used in Pallotta's Waking Life, in fact - retold by Prince and then converted to the digitally rotoscoped style of that film. Another formed the basis for one of the most memorable scenes in Pulp Fiction, and I'll include Prince's version of that story at the bottom of the post. Pallotta has told Torrent Freak that he sourced much of the archive material used in American Prince from the internet. Yes we used material from BitTorrent and YouTube for American Prince and no, we...
- 6/12/2009
- by Brendon Connelly
- Slash Film
I returned home from Austin yesterday and am still suffering from SXSW Separation Anxiety. Shawn Levy of The Oregonian sums it up well: "Frankly, music people are nuts compared to the film people (who are nuts compared to the interactive people). And as Austin seems genuinely nuts itself, the whole thing works out nicely."
SXSW kept rolling along, even without me and Shawn. While downtown streets were filled with crowds and music, the film venues had somewhat lighter attendance, making it easier for out of town visitors and local residents to catch up with repeat screenings of buzz titles like Alexander the Last, Goodbye Solo, My Suicide, Made in China, and Humpday.
Tonight, an attendee exulted over getting into the Playboy party and seeing Jane's Addiction, while a film critic observed "people in pirate gear blasting 'Kickstart My Heart' in front of [the] Austin Hilton," and another writer "accidentally had another five-movie day.
SXSW kept rolling along, even without me and Shawn. While downtown streets were filled with crowds and music, the film venues had somewhat lighter attendance, making it easier for out of town visitors and local residents to catch up with repeat screenings of buzz titles like Alexander the Last, Goodbye Solo, My Suicide, Made in China, and Humpday.
Tonight, an attendee exulted over getting into the Playboy party and seeing Jane's Addiction, while a film critic observed "people in pirate gear blasting 'Kickstart My Heart' in front of [the] Austin Hilton," and another writer "accidentally had another five-movie day.
- 3/20/2009
- by Peter Martin
- Cinematical
More than 30 years ago, Martin Scorsese decided to spend an evening -- more than a day, really -- filming his friend Steven Prince as he told all kinds of strange and fascinating stories about his life. The result was the short documentary American Boy, which had no official release in 1978 but floated around "unofficially" for decades. Tommy Pallotta saw one of these bootleg copies when he was in college, and never forgot it. He and Richard Linklater included one of Prince's stories from American Boy in Waking Life. And more than 30 years after American Boy, Pallotta and Linklater spent a similar evening hearing more of Prince's tales, which are the backbone of Pallotta's documentary American Prince. Both films screened back-to-back at SXSW.
Steven Prince in American Prince has mellowed a lot -- he sits comfortably in a chair sipping cognac and genially relating stories about his years in Hollywood. You...
Steven Prince in American Prince has mellowed a lot -- he sits comfortably in a chair sipping cognac and genially relating stories about his years in Hollywood. You...
- 3/20/2009
- by Jette Kernion
- Cinematical
Sub-theme for me at SXSW this year: Fair Use. A day after posting my article on Tommy Pallotta about his American Prince, which employs a Fair Use strategy to include film clips illustrating doc subject Steven Prince’s life in the movies and relationship with Martin Scorsese, I run into Gerard Peary, who is here in Austin with his doc For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism. His film includes interviews with critics like Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, Harry Knowles, Karina Longworth and Elvis Mitchell, and it also includes clips from the films they talk about. For the latter, rather than formally licensing the clips from the rights holders, Peary relies on the doctrine of Fair Use, which holds that limited...
- 3/16/2009
- by Scott Macaulay
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Click image below to view full poster
Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster and two clips for American Prince, a documentary directed by animator/filmmaker Tommy Pallotta, who was a producer on Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. The film takes a look at Martin Scorsese's 1978 documentary American Boy, which never has had an official release, and which only a few people have seen (generally as a bootleg). Pallotta follows up with the film's subject, Steven Prince, 30 years after Scorsese's film. Prince is probably best known to many of us as the guy who played the gun salesman in Taxi Driver, but apparently both documentaries reveal an extremely colorful life. I can't wait to find out the details.
Gallery: 'American Prince' Poster
American Prince will have its world premiere at SXSW this Saturday, March 14, with an encore screening on Tuesday, March 17. Scorsese's American Boy will be shown right before this film,...
Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster and two clips for American Prince, a documentary directed by animator/filmmaker Tommy Pallotta, who was a producer on Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. The film takes a look at Martin Scorsese's 1978 documentary American Boy, which never has had an official release, and which only a few people have seen (generally as a bootleg). Pallotta follows up with the film's subject, Steven Prince, 30 years after Scorsese's film. Prince is probably best known to many of us as the guy who played the gun salesman in Taxi Driver, but apparently both documentaries reveal an extremely colorful life. I can't wait to find out the details.
Gallery: 'American Prince' Poster
American Prince will have its world premiere at SXSW this Saturday, March 14, with an encore screening on Tuesday, March 17. Scorsese's American Boy will be shown right before this film,...
- 3/10/2009
- by Jette Kernion
- Cinematical
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