New York, New York: Martin Scorsese’s Miserabilist Musical Misfire

With New York, Scorsese did his version of an old-school movie musical, where bombastic, extravagant numbers merged with moments of honest, volatile drama. In order to achieve that, he got some heavy-hitters to join his team. He hired cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs (who lensed many of Peter Bogdanovich’s films, including his musical At Long Last Love) and Oscar-winning production designer Boris Levin (West Side Story) to make the visuals lush and shimmering. He recruited John Kander and Fred Ebb (Minnelli’s go-to songwriters) to pen new tunes, including the title theme, which would go on to become mostly known as a signature number for Frank Sinatra.

Scorsese, frequent collaborator Mardik Martin and Scorsese’s then-wife Julia Cameron extensively rewrote Earl Mac Rauch’s wisecracking script. But the shooting script (which actually wasn’t done by the time cameras started rolling) hardly mattered during production. Scorsese, who was already getting a rep for encouraging actors to improvise, basically told the cast to do and/or say whatever came to them and just ride it out. In one scene, De Niro accidentally smashes a door window when he knocks on it, prompting him, Minnelli and the other actors in the scene to briefly acknowledge it and keep it moving.

The director also felt he needed to do a lot of blow. In Peter Biskind’s 1998 New Hollywood history Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Scorsese admits that he used cocaine as both a creative tool and a crutch: “I kept pushing and shoving and twisting and turning myself in different ways, and I started taking drugs to explore, and got sidetracked a lot of the time.”

Scorsese was practically fueled by the white stuff while making New York, something he later admitted made things worse. “I was just too drugged out to solve the structure,” he said in Easy. He found a drug buddy in Minnelli, with whom he had an affair during filming. One of the more memorable passages in The Andy Warhol Diaries has the pop artist recalling the time Minnelli and Scorsese showed up on the doorstep of fashion designer Halston looking for—in Minnelli’s words—“every drug you’ve got.”

In the end, the $14 million movie only grossed $16.4 million. At the time, audiences were more interested in Scorsese’s New Hollywood pal George Lucas’s latest, Star Wars. (In Easy, Biskind details how Lucas constantly worried that his film would bomb and New York would be another Oscar-nominated success. Fun fact: George’s then-wife Marcia was an editor on both films.) Even critics who usually dug Scorsese weren’t particularly fond of this. In his Boston Phoenix review, David Denby described it as “a tragically screwed-up film” and “an unstable compound of ‘40s Hollywood artifice and gritty modern despair.” The critical and commercial failure of New York turned Scorsese into a bigger mess. He separated from his wife and fell even more into drug-fueled debauchery, eventually deciding to sober up after health problems led to some dire hospital stays.

Yes, New York, New York was a major-studio experiment—a miserabilist musical—that didn’t work. (Some would say that Damien Chazelle did a more successful version of this with the Ryan Gosling-Emma Stone musical La La Land in 2016.) But, hey, at least we got one nice song out of it.

Craig D. Lindsey is a Houston-based writer. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @unclecrizzle.