Mean Streets — the back room

Observation

A storeroom behind Tony's bar. Two men, a table, a bare light. Charlie has cornered Johnny Boy about the money he owes Michael, and he is patient, then pleading, then angry. Johnny Boy answers with a story: a card game, a raid, a fight, a man called Joey Clams, another called Joey Scala, and a debt he was going to settle until something happened. The story gets longer as it goes and makes less sense. Charlie keeps trying to steer it back to the money. Johnny Boy keeps not arriving. Somewhere in the middle both of them start laughing.

It is a two-hander with almost no camera movement, and it is the scene people remember De Niro for.

What the sources say it is

Ebert's description is exact: "Charlie is earnest, frightened, telling Johnny he has to pay the money. Johnny launches on a rambling, improvised cock-and-bull story about a poker game, a police raid, a fight—finally even losing the thread himself" ([[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged).

Scorsese's account is the one most people repeat:

In the scene in the back room between De Niro and Keitel after they meet in the bar, I thought it would be fun to improvise and show more of the characters. We realized that we liked Abbott and Costello a great deal, their language routines with inverted word-meanings done with wonderful timing.

— Scorsese on Scorsese, sos 43

"The scene was Bob's idea," he adds, and when he shot it "it was about fifteen minutes long, hilarious and clarified everything totally" (sos 43). It had to be cut down.

Who wrote it

This is the most interesting dispute in the film's history, because every witness was in the room and none of them agree.

Improvised. Scorsese, above. He also calls it "the long improvisation" in Kelly (unpaged), and says he "kept adding scenes" as they came out of rehearsal.

Scripted. Richard Romanus, who plays Michael, was there too:

I was there for the rehearsal that led to Bobby and Harvey's scene—the "Joey Clams, Joey Scala" scene. They would run a part of it and say, "Oh, that's good." Somebody was there writing it down. When Bobby did the scene, I think he was throwing some lines, mixing it up a little bit, but basically it was scripted.

— Kelly, unpaged

Written by the actor. Colin Tait went to De Niro's papers at the Harry Ransom Center and found the character notes, the rewrites and a note to Scorsese asking for "more of me, one scene, added" (smc 309). His conclusion: "This preparation by De Niro embodies writing rather than improvisation" (smc 312). The archive, he says, points "to De Niro as the scene's author" (smc 311).

Structured improvisation. De Niro's own account splits the difference. "We would find a structure for the improvisations and figure out how to pace it. It's not just freewheeling, it has to have a structure. Then we'd tape what we'd do" (Kelly, unpaged). That matches Scorsese's general description of the method: "Much of the improvisation in the film was taped at rehearsal and then scripted from those tapes" (sos 43).

So all four are true, of different moments in the same process. The words were found by two actors in a room, taped, typed up by someone else, shaped by the director, and played back on the day with some of it thrown away. "Improvised" names the first stage and "scripted" the third, and the film is the fourth. The useful lesson for Acting is that the binary is wrong.

Connotation code by code

Spoken language

Abbott and Costello are the right model. The comedy is in the gap between what is being said and what is being avoided: every sentence Johnny Boy speaks is about the money, and none of them is an answer. Scorsese's line on why this was the hard part: "the hardest thing for two actors to do is just sit down and talk" (sos 42). Fights you can get in two or three takes. Talk you have to earn.

Character

Scorsese reads the scene as a map of the whole relationship: "We see the shifting of trust, how Johnny trusts Charlie but, God, he's got his problems; and Charlie trusts Johnny, but he's using him" (sos 43). That last clause is the film's judgement on Charlie, delivered in the middle of its funniest scene. Charlie thinks he is saving Johnny Boy as penance; he is also using him to feel good about himself. See Church and street in Little Italy.

Camerawork

Almost nothing. For a film that tracks and slows and swings, the back room is shot plainly, because the performers are the event. It is the same choice Scorsese makes in the Taxi Driver mirror scene: when De Niro is building a character out loud, hold still.

Audience

The scene is the reason De Niro became, in the editors' phrase, "a hot property" after the film (sos 48). Francis Coppola saw the film and, as a result, cast him in The Godfather Part II (sos 49).

Compare

• De Niro wrote in the margins — three years later, the same actor's annotated script reshapes Travis Bickle, and the most famous line in Taxi Driver is his.
• Taxi Driver — the mirror — the other De Niro monologue to an audience that is not really there.
• Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending — another film where the people who made it describe different films.

Writing leads

• Watch for the moment the story loses its thread. Is it Johnny Boy losing it, or De Niro? Ebert thought you could not tell, and that is the point.
• Put the scene next to the pool-hall "mook" fight. One is talk that avoids a fight; the other is a fight that breaks out over a word nobody can define.