SCENE

The cult-classic filmmaker recounts a life growing up on the mean streets.

New York–born Ferrara might have been a foot soldier for the mob, but “a wise guy is a killer, a made man, and you had to be 100 percent Italian to be in that club.” Scratch Ferrara, whose mother was Irish. His all-Italian father, however, was a wheeler-dealer, an occasional bar owner but “mostly a bookmaker, and it’s a good business unless you start being your own customer.” Perpetually broke, the old man funded Ferrara’s first movie, a porno timed just right for the mid-’70s seedy Times Square market—except it didn’t make much of a stir. (Years later Ferrara discovered the truth behind the financing, and suffice it to say that the old man always worked an angle.) Then Texas Chainsaw Massacre came along, and Ferrara noticed that “by the second weekend there were twice as many people there as week one.” Voilà: The next film was a blood-soaked horror flick. More generic films followed until Ferrara hit his stride, first directing an Elmore Leonard adaptation, then King of New York with the emblematic, supremely weird Christopher Walken. Ferrara is perhaps best known for his film Bad Lieutenant, originally written for Walken in the title role, fortuitously filled by Harvey Keitel. A confessional accompanies his account of the film’s origins and fortunes: “By the time we were making Bad Lieutenant I had a serious crack habit,” Ferrara writes, and in time he came to be addicted to many other substances, including heroin, of which he says, “If you never tried it, don’t….If there is nothing else you take from this book, take that.” Point taken, but there are plenty of other lessons here on how films are made and financed, how they come and go, and how no one knows how they’ll fare once they get to the screen.

A candid portrait of a tarnished moment in film’s last golden age.