idea ·Mean Streets (1973)

Corman offered to make it Black

Roger Corman would fund Mean Streets for $150,000 if every character were Black. Scorsese nearly said yes, then couldn't see them in church.

formula
character
atomic
production-story
commerce
blaxploitation

After Boxcar Bertha, Scorsese took the script to Roger Corman, who was then making money on Black-cast action films:

So Roger said to me, 'If you want to make Mean Streets, and if you're willing to swing a little' — I'll never forget that phrase - 'and make them all black, I'll give you $150,000 and you can shoot it all with a non-Union crew in New York.'

— Scorsese on Scorsese, sos 39

Kelly says Scorsese "was so anxious, he actually considered this" (Kelly, unpaged). He turned it down for a reason that is really a claim about the film:

But I soon realized that I just couldn't see those black guys in church, or at confession. It just wouldn't work. The plot wasn't really anything, it was the characters that mattered, so I stuck to my guns.

— sos 39

Why keep it. Because it shows what a Formula is from the financier's side. To Corman the story was a crime plot, and any milieu could be swapped in: the blaxploitation cycle was the milieu that was selling. To Scorsese the plot "wasn't really anything"; the film was a specific community's relationship to a specific church. The offer and the refusal are two theories of what a genre film is.

It also cost him: the offer was New York, non-union and ready to go. Refusing it meant Los Angeles, another backer and a smaller share of real Little Italy on screen (New York was Los Angeles). See Independence, 1973 and Commerce.

Go on, then

context Independence, 1973 Mean Streets was self-produced by two first-timers, shot non-union with a Corman crew, and sold to Warner Bros., who released it for two weeks. A case study in what independence bought and what it cost.
film Mean Streets (1973) Four young men in Little Italy, a debt nobody will pay, and a would-be saint who keeps putting his hand in the fire. Scorsese's first film in his own voice, made in Los Angeles for almost nothing.
idea Nobody agrees whether Johnny Boy dies A gunman played by Scorsese empties a pistol into the car. Critics have him killing Johnny Boy, sparing him, or leaving it open. The film doesn't say.
idea The hand in the flame Charlie holds his fingers over a flame three times in Mean Streets: a votive candle, a match, a kitchen grill. It is his private theology, and it recurs in Taxi Driver.
idea New York was Los Angeles The definitive Little Italy film was mostly shot in Los Angeles, with garbage added to the streets. What couldn't be faked were the hallways.
idea The Craft got better as it got older Mixed reviews, a surprise hit, then three decades of reappraisal that inverted which half of the film people take seriously.