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Introduction Martin Scorsese and Film Culture In March 2007 three veteran filmmakers of the New Hollywood, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, came to the stage of the Academy Awards to present the award for Best Director. The moment this occurred, it became obvious to anyone in the know who the announced winner would be. Martin Scorsese was the prohibitive favorite, a veteran of American cinema who had been nominated five times previously without a victory. Like the three presenters, Scorsese was a director associated with the New Hollywood of the 1970s. Further‑ more, he was widely regarded as the greatest of that generation and as arguably the best of all living American filmmakers. It became clear that the Oscar ceremony was carefully staged theater. Typically, the previous year’s winner presents the award. In this case, it would have been Ang Lee, the winner in 2005 for Brokeback Mountain. The Academy decided to break with this tradition and have Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg announce the winner. Scorsese was thus finally inducted into the Hollywood “inside” with his fellow New Hollywood directors. Scorsese’s acceptance speech tell‑ ingly made reference to the importance of film preservation and protect‑ ing Hollywood’s great tradition. Scorsese was both placing himself in this tradition while referencing his own work as a cultural historian. Even as he was accepting this symbol of middlebrow respectability, Scorsese attempted to remind his audience that his true passion was not his own filmmaking but the whole of film culture. As much as possible, Scorsese worked to mitigate the move to the mainstream of Hollywood produc‑ tion, a move signaled shortly before his Oscar win by his signing of a major production deal with Paramount studio, the first such production deal Scorsese had in several years. 1 2 Introduction This long‑awaited victory for Scorsese had little to do with either the quality of his film The Departed (2006) or with cultural prestige, especially within film culture as a whole. Paradoxically, it represented a risk of cultural status. Why this is the case is one of the many curiosities about American cinema that this book explores. As far back as Scorsese’s first studio film, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), the question has been asked: Has Martin Scorsese gone Hollywood? The answer to this question is much more complex than initially thought because the idea of Hollywood is a complicated one, especially in the contemporary envi‑ ronment. Many variations of the term now exist: Classical Hollywood, Old Hollywood, New Hollywood, Post‑Classical Hollywood, and even Independent Hollywood. In addition, Hollywood is now theorized in many ways within the film studies discipline. If Hollywood was simply a place, there could be a simpler answer to the question: Martin Scors‑ ese went to Hollywood in 1970, and he became a studio filmmaker in 1974. Since then, he has made most of his work, especially the films on which his critical reputation rests, for the major studios. But Hollywood is more than a place. It symbolizes something much more, and what it symbolizes is neither simply embraced nor rejected by Scorsese. Rather, it is a concept and idea that Scorsese has had to negotiate. This study examines the work of Scorsese and, with few excep‑ tions, covers Scorsese’s career in chronological order and is structured by Scorsese as an object of study. In this way, it is similar to most of the literature written about Scorsese thus far. However, it differs in almost every other way. Unlike other studies, a textual analysis of the style and themes of Scorsese’s feature films is not emphasized. Scorsese the auteur is less significant to this work than his place in the field of cultural pro‑ duction, and Scorsese as a filmmaker is less important than Scorsese as a cultural figure. Because of the vast amount of cultural activities in which he has been involved, examining the relationship among all of Scorsese’s various projects and how this has formed the figure known as “Scorsese” today is more productive. This analysis not only explains the various meanings that have developed around the idea of Scorsese, but also how these associations developed over the course of his career. My main argu‑ ment is that extratextual factors, rather than the films themselves, have led to his prestigious position as an artist. And because Scorsese is an American director working for the major studios, of utmost importance is how he has negotiated with...

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