Los Angeles Times, CA
Oct 19 2007
Mardik Martin
A new documentary
By Robert W. Welkos, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 19, 2007
Ask Mardik Martin how tall he is, and the rumpled, white-haired,
barrel-chested USC screenwriting professor replies good-naturedly: "5
feet 4. I used to be 5 feet 6 but had back surgery and they shortened
me. I’m not joking. I lost a couple of spine rings, or whatever they
call them. Look," he pauses, "short isn’t exactly the end of the
world."
Nor, one might add, loss of fame, fortune and having your name on the
credits of big Hollywood movies.
Professor
It’s been decades since he wrote "Raging Bull"
(sharing screenplay credit with Paul Schrader). Yet today, while
virtually everyone knows that Martin Scorsese directed the classic
1980 boxing movie starring Robert De Niro, few outside of a certain
generation in Hollywood or in the rarefied world of academic
cineastes have ever heard of Mardik, the name he is affectionately
called by his students and friends.
Now 70 and light years from the era when he and his New York
University film school buddy Scorsese collaborated on "Mean Streets,"
"New York, New York" and "Raging Bull," Martin is not bitter seeing
the great heights to which Scorsese has ascended in the intervening
years. In fact, watching Scorsese finally win the Academy Award for
best director for "The Departed" this year made Martin very happy.
"He has kind of been waiting for it for years," Martin told The
Times. "He’s still a good friend. Unfortunately, he’s in New York
most of the time. I’m not too crazy about New York, so I don’t go
there that often. But I think Marty is great. I think, visually, he’s
without peer."
Today, Martin will receive his own moment in the spotlight when a new
documentary titled "Mardik: From Baghdad to Hollywood" is screened at
5 p.m. at the ArcLight in Hollywood as part of the Hollywood Film
Festival. The 82-minute film by producer-directors Ramy Katrib and
Evan York and producer Jeff Orsa chronicles what the filmmakers note
is Martin’s unlikely journey from Iraq to NYU film school, from
busboy to writing "Raging Bull," from being the hottest writer in New
York to losing it all in L.A., and from forsaking his craft to
becoming a favorite screenwriting teacher at USC. The film features
interviews with Scorsese, director Amy Heckerling, producers Irwin
Winkler and Gene Kirkwood, author Peter Biskind and others.
"We couldn’t believe that this man who was living in this normal
apartment [in Studio City] was the writer of ‘Raging Bull,’ " said
Katrib, the founder and CEO of DigitalFilm Tree, a Hollywood
production and post-production company. "We would just go to his
house and hang out. He was a wealth of information. He would usually
start by screaming at us saying, ‘That was a dumb question!’ He
wouldn’t terrorize us, but he’d say, ‘Just get to the point!’ Most
teachers tend to be flat. He was dynamic. He would always use a
real-life story to illustrate a point."
Raised in Baghdad in an Armenian family, Martin said his love of film
was inspired by American movies.
"You have to understand," he said, "Baghdad, even then, was filthy,
dirty, disgusting, with dust and sand. Then you see Betty Grable in
unbelievable Technicolor and the beautiful scenery in the background.
It’s like another dimension, it’s like finding paradise."
At 18, he was sent to America by his father so he wouldn’t have to
join the Iraqi army and also to get an American education. But not
long afterward, his father lost his business when revolution swept
Iraq in 1958. Martin supported his schooling by working as a busboy
and then as a waiter at Toots Shor’s famous restaurant in Manhattan.
It was at NYU that he met Scorsese. "We spent a lot of time together
aside from writing," he noted. "We had like 15 ideas, a lot of ideas.
‘Let’s do this, let’s do that.’ "
"Everything [Scorsese] did coming out of NYU is basically Marty and
Mardik," Katrib said. "They were like a team."
They made a documentary about Scorsese’s parents called
"Italianamerican." Martin did the pre-production interviews. "I put
the answers down on paper," he recalled. "You don’t ask questions if
you don’t know the answers already."
But it was 1973’s "Mean Streets" that catapulted their careers.
Audiences marveled at the gritty dialogue. "They think it’s all made
up on the screen, which is untrue," Martin said, noting that he
achieved the realistic dialogue by reading what he had written into a
tape recorder until the lines were just as he envisioned the actors
doing them.
"Mean Streets" changed not only their careers but also those of the
movie’s stars, Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel.
"The whole situation became suddenly a different world for us,"
Martin said. "I stopped teaching and moved to L.A. I got a couple of
jobs, did some documentary-style writing for some people. I signed
with Chartoff/Winkler" (the producers of "Rocky").
He reteamed with Scorsese on "New York, New York" and recalled how
"they had to shoot whether the script was ready or not. That was the
problem." But he adds: "Right now, I think it works better than it
did then. Years have done justice to it."
Still, it is "Raging Bull" that he will be most remembered for. He
spent a year and a half researching the life of boxer Jake LaMotta.
"De Niro wanted to make ‘Raging Bull,’ but Marty didn’t [because] he
hated boxing and sports," Martin said.
"Bob and I sat down and watched every boxing movie ever made — not
to copy, just the opposite, not to do what other people had done,"
Martin recalled. They convinced Scorsese there was a movie in it by
having him visualize scenes, like fighters’ blood spraying the crowd.
But Hollywood was changing. "Star Wars" and "E.T. the
Extra-Terrestrial" highlighted the new world of computer wizardry in
films. "I can’t write that kind of stuff," Martin said. His scripts
were, after all, rooted in realism, not fantasy.
As is so common in Hollywood, he found himself unable to get his
projects up and going.
"He was the original writer on ‘Carlito’s Way’ and then he made fun
of one of Al Pacino’s movies and ended up losing the account," Katrib
said. "He was nitpicking ‘Scarface.’ When he talked to us about it,
he said . . . he didn’t think it was a good story."
There was another project he hoped to make about a famous
photojournalist of the 1930s known as Weegee, but somebody else beat
him to the punch with a similar movie. "When it bombed, nobody would
touch my story."
Along the way, Martin had become hooked on cocaine. He used the drug,
he said, not to party but "only to keep me up" at night so he could
keep writing.
"He speaks out about it to his students," Katrib said. "What teacher
says, ‘Hey, kid, don’t do that’?"
Martin eventually lost his house and his personal belongings. One of
the movie’s poignant scenes has Martin expressing regret that he
never fathered any children. He was married for six years, he said,
but writers and marriage do not make for stable relationships.
He is in his 11th year of writing a book about screenwriting. He said
he likely will have to take time off from teaching to finish the
work.
On Nov. 4, Martin will be honored with a lifetime achievement award
at the 10th annual ARPA International Film Festival at its gala
awards banquet held at the Sheraton Universal Hotel.
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