Book Excerpt: Inside 'The Last Waltz'

An exclusive book excerpt: From Scorsese's cocaine stash to Neil Young's white "booger," plus highlights from the flick by Joni Mitchell, The Band, and Van Morrison.

Traveled all day yesterday, so today—another guest post special. This one, courtesy of old friend Steve Wasserman, publisher at Heyday Books, is an exclusive excerpt from the book just out this month by Jonathan Taplin, The Magic Years: Scenes from a Rock-and-Roll Life. As I’ve noted in previewing the book (twice) awhile back, Taplin is well-known to rock fans as road manager for Dylan and The Band, among others, and—by the way—also helped put together both The Concert for Bangla Desh and The Last Waltz. Did we mention that he also produced Marty Scorsese’s Mean Streets? Today he reveals how he got Scorsese to take on The Band’s farewell, plus what happened when Marty was faced with a Jodie Foster/John Hinckley threat—and the saga of getting rid of Neil Young’s cocaine “booger” in the final cut of The Last Waltz. Enjoy, then share, comment or subscribe (it’s free).

Marty, Robbie and Some Classic Coke

By Jonathan Taplin

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When Mean Streets opened the New York Film Festival, Pauline

Kael wrote an eight-page review celebrating the originality of

the film. She pointed out one fact about Marty Scorsese that had

turned out to be true for all time. She felt he was an original art-

ist who would spend his life trying not to compromise his vision.

Whether it was the dark anger of Taxi Driver or the anguished

questioning of faith in The Last Temptation of Christ, Marty’s

movies always reflected the passion he had for getting them

made, and he often spent years trying to get them produced in

the way he envisioned them. The few times he did a “job” like

Cape Fear, the results are far less satisfying.

For me the greatest example of his being willing to risk every-

thing in pursuit of an obsession was The Last Waltz. In 1976

Robbie Robertson came to me with an idea: the Band wanted

to call it quits and put on a final concert with all of their favorite

musicians as guests, and they wanted to film the concert and put

out an album. The question was how to raise the film above the

level of an average concert documentary. I suggested that Marty

Scorsese—both a fan of the Band and a student of the music film

genre, having edited Woodstock and some documentaries on

Elvis—might be interested in the concept.

Robbie had already gotten Bill Graham to agree to put on the concert at

Winterland in San Francisco on Thanksgiving night, and Eric Clapton,

Van Morrison, Neil Young, Muddy Waters, Joni Mitchell, and Bob

Dylan had agreed to perform. I knew that Marty was ten days

into the shooting of New York, New York, his first big-budget

movie, starring De Niro and Liza Minnelli, but I figured it was

worth at least asking. [Joni Mitchell, below, “Coyote”]

The chances of him being willing (or legally able) to shoot

our documentary in the middle of his New York, New York pro-

duction schedule were slim, but Robbie and I decided to give it

a shot. I arranged a meeting with Marty at 9:30 the next night

at his MGM Studios office.

When we arrived, we were greeted by Stephen Prince, Marty’s

hangout guy and assistant. If you’ve seen Taxi Driver,

Prince is the fast-talking gun dealer that sells DeNiro

the .44 Magnum pistol, and for Marty in real life he was

bodyguard, driver, and coke connection all rolled into one.

Prince was quietly famous in Marty’s circle for an incident

that had occurred six months earlier, in the spring of 1976, while

they were prepping New York, New York.

One day while opening his mail, Marty had come across

an envelope on which the address was constructed

of letters and numbers cut from a newspaper. Thirty

years of watching movies in which people get

letters like that spooked him, and as he told me recently, he opened

the letter “with a sinking feeling in my heart.”

He took out the letter, which was also written with cut-out

newsprint. It read: If little Jodie wins the Academy Award for

what YOU made her do, You will DIE.

Marty freaked. Jodie Foster, who was fourteen years old, had just

been nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of a

teenage prostitute in Taxi Driver.

Stephen’s solution was to call the FBI. He went to the couch,

picked up the phone, and dialed a number. He had boasted sev-

eral times about being connected to the FBI, but everyone had

thought it was bullshit. But sure enough, he was soon talking to

an agent he knew on a first-name basis, and we listened as he

described the situation and then hung up.

“The FBI will be here in twenty minutes.”

Marty cracked. “What! What about the coke in the office?”

“We’ll get rid of it!” Then Stephen picked up the phone and

dialed one of the editors. “Bring a large film can to Marty’s office.”

In a few minutes the editor was walking out with ten grams

in a can just as the FBI agents walked in….

When the agents left with the evidence, Marty’s first reaction

was his usual reaction to anything stressful: rage. He had torn

so many phones out of the wall that the MGM phone guys had

rigged a special cable that would just unplug when he yanked it,

and Marty asked his staff to give him breakaway water glasses

and breakaway chairs, just like the stuntmen use, for his periodic

office rages.

“Prince, you idiot. Now I’m gonna have a goddam FBI agent

on my ass twenty-four hours a day, even in the fuckin’ toilet. I’m

in pre-production on the biggest movie of my life. And I’m snort-

ing a gram of coke a day. Where is this supposed to happen?”

Stephen cowered in the corner as the telephone hurtled his

way. “I’ll figure it out, Marty. I promise.”

The postscript was that it turned out that the letter had

probably been sent by a man named John Hinckley, Jr.

Eighteen months later, when Robbie and I were making Carny with

Jodie Foster and Gary Busey, Hinckley showed up and tried to

get hired as an extra. He had by that time sent so many letters to

Jodie that her mother had a permanent security company work-

ing for them, and I had to throw Hinckley off the set three times

before the police of Savannah, Georgia, threatened to lock him

up and he left town. A few months later he turned his rage on

Ronald Reagan, injuring him and several security personnel in a

gun attack. I never did understand how his obsession with Jodie

fit into that assassination attempt except as further evidence that

Hinckley was not well. [The Band, “Don’t Do It”]

The night I introduced Marty Scorsese to Robbie Robertson,

a partnership was formed that has survived for more than forty

years. That they should become both close friends and artistic

collaborators was perhaps inevitable given their similar world-

view. On a philosophical level, both men were grounded in a

spiritual tradition (Marty wanted to be a priest, and Robbie felt

close to the Six Nations spirituality) that they had abandoned in

their teenage years and eventually come back to after a journey

into the ninth circle of hell. But throughout their personal jour-

neys of pain, both had survived their struggles and refused to let

the past compromise their artistic vision. Robbie never tried to

make a pop record, and Marty never tried to make a franchise

film.

The crazy times weren’t all behind them, though, and in the

two years after they met, they went through a level of mutual

madness that was pretty extreme. While we were editing The

Last Waltz, they both lived in a house Marty owned on Mulhol-

land Drive. All of the windows had blackout drapes, and they

used to boast that they stayed up late enough to see the sunrise

every morning before retiring to their separate bedrooms, where

they would sleep until four in the afternoon….

When we finally had the rough cut of The Last Waltz ready,

we decided to have a screening for our friends and the United

Artists brass at the Cary Grant Theater on the MGM lot. It

was the first time we had ever projected the film, and we were

thrilled that the decision to shoot it in 35mm had created a

sense of being on the stage that was at that time rarely seen in

rock-and-roll documentaries. Everything was going beautifully,

until we got to the Neil Young song “Helpless.” I was sitting right

behind Neil’s manager Elliot Roberts, and by the end of the first

verse of the song, the twenty-foot-high close-up of Neil revealed

something we had never seen on the editing bench: a large piece

of cocaine was slowly falling out of Neil’s right nostril.

[Neil Young, below “Helpless.”]

The more he put his heart and soul into the song, the farther the

rock of coke tumbled. Elliot began to slip lower in his

seat until he seemed to disappear. The audience of cognoscenti

began to titter, and by the time the tune was finished, people

were in near hysterics. When the movie finished, Elliot turned

to me and said we had to take Neil completely out of the movie,

despite the beauty of his performance. I asked for a week to see

what I could do.

The next morning, I showed up at Pacific Title, a first-rate

film optical house, with the reel of Neil’s song. They put it on the

Moviola with a magnifying glass, and the fifty-eight-year-old

dean of the house, Roy, looked at the film while I explained Mr.

Young’s embarrassment that a piece of snot had fallen out of his

nose during his performance. He asked me to come back in two

days while they addressed the problem.

When I returned, Roy told me he had invented a “traveling booger

mat” with which he would re-shoot each and every frame by moving

a small black dot over the offending spot. A week later we had

our film back, with the coke rock magically erased. The bill

was a mere $10,000. Needless to say, Elliot didn’t think it was a

recoupable expense from Neil’s royalty account on the soundtrack,

and I agreed to eat it.

Looking at The Last Waltz nearly a half a century later, it

is an astonishing film that captures a group of musicians at

the height of their craft. The Band never played better. Their

songs—from “Up on Cripple Creek” to “The Night They Drove

Old Dixie Down”—represent the realization of a hundred years

of American folk, country, and rockabilly flowing through the

vessel of four Canadians and a man from Arkansas. But just as

importantly, their backing from players like Muddy Waters, Van

Morrison, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell,

and Dr. John also captured for posterity the very best music of

a generation.

It is a film for the time capsule, filled with truth

and sorrow, but always based in the essential notion that this

wonderful wellspring of American music that flowed from the

churches and bars of the Mississippi Delta could be shared by

musicians from Arkansas, Ontario, Ireland, England, Tennes-

see, Louisiana, and Vancouver. There was common ground.

[Van Morrison, below, “Caravan”]

“Essential daily newsletter.” — Charles P. Pierce, Esquire

“Incisive and enjoyable every day.” — Ron Brownstein, The Atlantic

“Always worth reading.” — Frank Rich, New York magazine, Veep and Succession

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. His new film, Atomic Cover-up, just had its world premiere and is drawing extraordinary acclaim. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.