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11 1 Scorsese and the University [The first film class] was a three‑hour course, once a week, called “The History of Motion Pictures, Television and Radio.” Most of the kids took the class because they thought they wouldn’t have to do anything much except watch films and get two credits for it. But Haig was brutal! He would talk so fast—even faster than me—and he described everything in great detail from the very beginning. . . . Haig would come on stage, hit you with a lecture for one‑and‑a‑half hours, then show a film. Once he showed Stroheim’s Greed and a student asked why there was no music. Back came the answer, “Do you think this is a show? Get the hell out!” He would weed people out, semester after semester. The idea was to be as serious about it as possible—serious in the sense that you could argue, laugh and joke about the films, but you really had to be there for the love of cinema. —Martin Scorsese1  One of the goals of this book is to analyze Scorsese’s films and his career beyond the formal features of his work, and an examination of his relation to academic institutions is a fruitful place to begin. The reception and mediation of Scorsese’s cul‑ tural work within academic and popular circles can be traced back to this university connection. But the university also offers an opportunity to examine Scorsese within a very different environment than the prof‑ it‑driven world of Hollywood where he would eventually work for the majority of his career. Pierre Bourdieu has analyzed the field of cultural production as comprising two subfields: “restricted production, in which 12 Hollywood’s New Yorker the producers produce for other producers, and the field of large‑scale production, which is symbolically excluded and discredited.”2 In Scorsese’s case, this division among the two subfields is represented geographi‑ cally: he attended New York University from 1960 to 1965 and worked part‑time as an instructor until 1970, when he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in Hollywood. This part of Scorsese’s biography is emphasized within the literature, especially nyu’s role as an intellectual breeding ground. James Cole Potter acknowledges nyu as a prestige institution and reiterates this romantic, auteurist discourse, describing how at nyu Scorsese developed “an artistic sensibility from which he has not wavered.”3 Ultimately, Potter’s lack of detail and examination in the comment reflects his broader aims of textual analysis over context, a recurring trend in Scorsese literature. This chapter illuminates the com‑ plex relationship between Scorsese and the university, as well as between the university and Hollywood. With this goal in mind, different questions need to be addressed. What was the reputation of nyu at the time? Did this help establish Scorsese’s reputation in a way that would not have been possible if Scorsese had been a graduate of a West Coast institution such as Francis Ford Coppola or George Lucas? Potter’s statement about nyu’s prestige certainly makes sense retrospectively, and Scorsese’s “New York‑ness” has been important in the making of his critical reputation, but was this the case at the time? Can Bourdieu’s concepts of restricted and large‑scale production be mapped onto nyu and Hollywood in the unproblematic way that has been so often implied within the literature? And finally, how do these questions impact on the way Scorsese’s film‑ making activities at nyu are understood? Scorsese entered nyu in 1960, eventually becoming a film major and continuing on to complete a master’s degree. Scorsese’s filmmaking career began with his work at this institution: the short films What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (1963) and It’s Not Just You, Murray! (1964), the feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door (a.k.a. J. R. and I Call First) (1966−1969), and the collective student documentary Street Scenes 1970 (1970). The current availability of these titles differs significantly, and these differences are telling. Who’s That Knocking at My Door is the only one of the titles with a wide release on dvd. The short films have had limited home video runs and are available for rental on 16mm through Kino International (an art cinema distributor) and for screening at such institutions as the George Eastman House in Rochester. They have also become available in...

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