context ·After Hours (1985)

The Last Temptation collapse, 1983

Paramount cancelled Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ with the sets built and the costumes made. After Hours was the film he made to survive it, and nearly everyone involved reads it as that year turned into a comedy.

themes
character
context
personal
commerce
production
scorsese

The datum

By 1983 Scorsese had wanted to film Nikos Kazantzakis's novel for years. Paramount agreed. Pre-production ran through most of the year, with locations in Israel:

It went on and on like this until the budget of the film was about $12 million and the schedule was ninety days. It wasn't going to be a big spectacular or a real epic. It was to be a film about people.

— Scorsese on Scorsese, sos 95

Then everything went wrong at once. Irwin Winkler asked for "another ten days' shooting and a further $2 million. I think that was the final blow, together with the campaign being mounted by the Moral Majority" (sos 95). Winkler's The Right Stuff opened and "took a dive at the box-office" (sos 96). Paramount pulled out. "By this stage we had the cast, the sets had been built and the costumes made (I discovered in 1987 that the shoes were eventually used in King David)" (sos 96). A last attempt at half the cost ended "just two days before Christmas" when Barry Diller said, "We just don't want to make it. It's not worth the trouble" (sos 97).

What it did to him

Scorsese's line, in an oral history decades later: "It wasn't just the cancellation of a movie, it felt like the cancellation of my viability in the movie business" ([[After Hours oral history outtakes (2023)]]). In the library he is calmer about it:

At this point, instead of acting out my rage, I went inside, tried to take care of myself and figure out what to do. The answer was to make a film — any film we could get our hands on — and immediately.

— sos 97

To Kelly he admits he was "almost relieved, because the picture was becoming too big" (Kelly, unpaged).

How it shows in the film

Amy Robinson, who produced After Hours: "Marty's always saying, in interviews, that trying to get Last Temptation made was his own personal After Hours for him—that kind of nightmare. And doing After Hours was getting it out" (Kelly, unpaged).

Ebert makes the mapping exact. During Last Temptation, "Executives kept reassuring him that all went well, backers said they had the money, Paramount greenlighted it, agents promised him it was a 'go,' everything was in place, and then time after time an unexpected development would threaten everything." And in the film:

In After Hours, each new person Paul meets promises that they will take care of him, make him happy, lend him money, give him a place to stay, let him use the phone, trust him with their keys, drive him home—and every offer of mercy turns into an unanticipated danger. The film could be read as an emotional autobiography of that period in Scorsese's life.

— Scorsese by Ebert, unpaged

That is the Personal context at its most useful: not a claim that the film is "about" Scorsese, but a structure (promise, reassurance, collapse, repeat) that he lived and then built.

The commercial lesson

The other half is Commerce. Schoonmaker: "With After Hours we started working in a very disciplined manner, not wasting money or time. Marty realized that the kind of films he makes don't necessarily have a big commercial value, but he wanted to keep making them. Therefore, he had to make them cheaper" (Kelly, unpaged). It worked, and not everyone liked it: "When I subsequently went to Hollywood to promote my next film I found, to my surprise, some people resented that we had made it for so little" (sos 101).

Last Temptation came back. When After Hours went to Cannes in 1986, the plan was to announce the film again, "saying it could be made for $5 million in Egypt" (sos 122). Universal made it in 1988.

Disputes

Four days or four weeks. Scorsese says the film "was cancelled four days before shooting was supposed to begin" (sos 96). To Kelly he says "four weeks before shooting was to have started", and Ebert repeats four weeks.
The budget. "About $12 million" (sos 95); "$19 or $20 million", Scorsese in an onstage conversation printed by Ebert; 20 million, says Ballhaus (msk 125).
The schedule. "Ninety days" (sos 95); "a ninety-nine-day shooting schedule" (Kelly, unpaged).

Related: After Hours (1985), Martin Scorsese, Independence, 1973 for the last time he made a film this way.

Go on, then

scene After Hours — back at work A plaster statue falls out of a burglars' van at dawn, cracks open, and the man inside walks through the gates of his office and sits down at his terminal. Rescue or sentence? The film was shot without an ending, and it shows the seams on purpose.
context Church and street in Little Italy In the neighbourhood Scorsese grew up in, the two powers were the wise guys and the priests. Mean Streets is a film about trying to answer to both.
context The Craft turns on its own coven The first hour is about four girls getting power. The second is about taking it back from three of them. The film never reconciles the two.
context The returning veteran, 1976 Taxi Driver never says the word Vietnam after its first ten minutes. The war is in the jacket, the scar and the insomnia — and the film's authors disagree about whether it is there at all.
scene After Hours — the diner A man alone with a Henry Miller paperback, a woman at the next table who knows the book, and a camera that pounces. Ten minutes that set up the whole night, and borrowed more than anyone admitted at the time.
film After Hours (1985) A word processor goes downtown for a date, loses his last $20 out of a cab window, and cannot get home. Scorsese's comedy of paranoia, shot in forty nights for $4 million after Paramount killed The Last Temptation of Christ.