When Martin Scorsese Found Out He’d Never Be As Rich As George Lucas

When you know you’re doomed from their perspective, and you know you don’t care because that’s the ethic you are determined to uphold from your perspective, you finally have a real shot at making it.

Not for them. Or at least, not for all of them.

For you.

It’s how art works.

From Peter Biskind’s book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, this quote shook me:

One day, Lucas stopped by Scorsese’s editing room. In a rerun of the dispute over the ending of Alice, he told Marty that he could gross an additional $10 million if De Niro and Minnelli walked off into the sunset a happy couple instead of going their separate ways. “When I heard him say that, I knew I was doomed, that I would not make it in this business, that I cannot make entertainment pictures, I cannot be a director of Hollywood films,” recalls Scorsese. “Cause I knew I wasn’t going to do it. I knew that what the two characters had gone through in that film, I had gone through in my own life, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to face myself or them if Bob and Liza were to go off together.

h/t Ed Williams - and, you should subscribe to Rough Cuts if you’re a movie nerd. Oh, and CT Reese’s YouTube channel, Watch With CT too.

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