Martin Scorsese has been one of America's most critically acclaimed filmmakers for more than twenty years. Scorsese was a youngster who spent a great deal of time in movie theaters. He was studying to become a priest, but he dropped out of the seminary after his first year, and eventually landed at N.Y.U. film school. He made several well-received student shorts, including It's Not Just You, Murray, his first gangster movie, and Who's That Knocking at My Door, which starred a young Harvey Keitel. With fellow Little Italy native Robert De Niro, Scorsese made the gritty and disturbing Mean Streets and the brilliant Taxi Driver, the movie that supposedly drove John Hinckley, Jr. to try to assassinate Ronald Reagan (he claimed he was trying to get the attention of Jodie Foster, who played a twelve-year old prostitute in the film). Scorsese tried a change of pace for 1975's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Scorsese's finest work from that period, though, is Raging Bull (1980). Filmed in black-and-white, it was based on the rise and fall of boxing champion Jake LaMotta and contained the performance of a lifetime by DeNiro (he put on over fifty pounds to play LaMotta in his later years). Raging Bull earned an Oscar for DeNiro and nominations for Best Film and Director. Scorsese followed with the comedy After Hours and a sequel to The Hustler titled The Color of Money, which not only earned Paul Newman his first Oscar, but proved to Hollywood that Scorsese could handle big-budget productions. The Oscar-winning GoodFellas was a brilliant, bloody study of the Mafia and a return to classic Scorsese. He followed with Cape Fear, the beautiful Age of Innocence, a film based on Edith Wharton's book and set in turn-of-the-century New York, and Casino. Scorsese's 1997 Disney release, Kundun, a film about the life of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, so incited the outrage of the Chinese government that the studio hired Henry Kissinger as a consultant for its delicate dealings with officials.
