Some movies are prescient or ahead of their time but audiences and film critics often don’t notice until many years after the original release. Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976), written by Paddy Chayefsky, is one example, but so is The King of Comedy (1983), which unlike Network, was a major box office bomb for director Martin Scorsese and received mixed reviews from the critics. Yet, it seems more relevant than ever about the cult of celebrity and the public’s obsession with the rich and famous. Although The King of Comedy was promoted as a comedy, some critics and moviegoers found the film too dark and disturbing and felt Rupert Pupkin, the title character, was just as delusional and dangerous in his own way as Travis Bickle, the anti-hero of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976).
Based on a screenplay by Paul D. Zimmerman, a former film critic for Newsweek, The King of Comedy focuses on Pupkin, an avid celebrity autograph hound and would-be stand-up comic with delusions of appearing on television in his own talk show. To accomplish his goal he begins stalking renowned comedian Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis) in a desperate bid to appear on his top-rated program. Naturally, he meets resistance on all fronts until he hatches a scheme to kidnap Langford with the help of another celebrity stalker, Masha (Sandra Bernhard). With mission accomplished, Pupkin then stuns Langford and the authorities with his ransom request: He demands a spot on Langford’s TV show where he can perform his pathetic stand-up act before a national audience.
The screenplay for The King of Comedy was in development for years and Zimmerman was initially inspired to write it after watching a TV show on autograph hounds in 1970 and reading an Esquire article about a man obsessed with talk show hosts. In Martin Scorsese: A Journey by Mary Pat Kelly, Zimmermann recalled that the man in question kept a diary in which he assessed each Johnny Carson show: “Johnny disappointed me tonight,” he would write. The talk shows were the biggest shows on television at the time. I started to think about connections between autograph-hunters and assassins. Both stalked the famous – one with a pen and one with a gun. I wrote a treatment and then worked with Milos Forman on a screenplay. We ended up with two versions – one he liked and one I liked.” Forman eventually dropped out of the project and Paramount, which had optioned the screenplay, lost interest after a three-year delay.
Somewhere during the making of The Last Waltz (1978), Zimmerman sent his script to Scorsese, who liked it but was already committed to making a movie about Borscht Belt comedians with screenwriter Jay Cocks, a former film critic at Time magazine (It never happened). Scorsese passed Zimmerman’s script on to Robert De Niro, who at the time was in talks with Israeli producer Arnon Milchan about playing Moshe Dayan, the former Israeli Minister of Defense, in a biopic. De Niro fell in love with Zimmerman’s script and Milchan soon took over as the producer of The King of Comedy with Scorsese agreeing to direct it after Raging Bull (1980).
While Zimmerman made revisions to the final screenplay, Scorsese and De Niro turned their attention to casting with particular interest in the role of Jerry Langford. Johnny Carson was obviously the ideal choice but he turned the offer down. Other possibilities that didn’t pan out included Dick Cavett, Orson Welles, Frank Sinatra, and Sammy Davis, Jr.
Eventually Scorsese considered other Las Vegas entertainers, especially Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, but gravitated toward Lewis because of his dynamic showmanship during the annual telethons he hosts for cerebral palsy. Once Lewis accepted the part, Scorsese was completely obliging to his star, allowing him to wear his own clothes and to craft his own performance as Langford. The director also solicited advice from the showbiz legend about being famous and how he experienced that. Lewis later commented on Scorsese and De Niro’s collaboration, saying, “They don’t know celebrity…They only know anonymity. You could walk by Bobby De Niro today, you wouldn’t know him…They needed me to tell them about celebrity. And we wrote together. Paul Zimmerman and Marty and myself, we wrote the things that they had never heard about.” One of those stories ended up in The King of Comedy. It was the sequence where an older female fan wants Langford to say hello to her nephew on the phone and he refuses. She screams at him, “You should get cancer. I hope you get cancer!” (from King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis by Shawn Levy).
Lewis even suggested a new ending for the film which he felt was an improvement over Zimmerman and Scorsese’s final scene. In Lewis’s version, Langford escapes from Masha and races to the studio in time to see Pupkin get gunned down on the set. Luckily, Scorsese stood firm on his original ending but Lewis enjoyed working on the film anyway and promoted it heavily when it was released.
As for the rest of the cast, Scorsese added Diahnne Abbott (De Niro’s wife at the time) as Pupkin’s current girlfriend, Shelley Hack (of Charlie’s Angels TV series fame) as Langford’s formidable secretary, and Sandra Bernhard as Pupkin’s unhinged friend Masha.
Bernhard was only 26 years old at the time and just starting to receive a lot of attention for her stand-up comedy act, which she began developing in 1977. She had only appeared in a supporting role in one previous feature film, Cheech & Chong’s Nice Dreams (1981) and The King of Comedy was her first major film role. In an interview with Matthew Jacobs for Vulture, the actress recalled that she “auditioned three times” for the part. “It was really last minute. I think they were down to me and one other actress, and I really don’t know who that other actress is…Everybody wanted it because it was such an unusual role. You just didn’t see roles like that for women back then.”
Bernhard also admitted that a lot of her performance was improvised such as “the entire dinner scene where Masha and Rupert kidnap Jerry and bring him to her apartment — I mean, it had an outline, but all that stuff where I was just doing a monologue to Jerry, who was taped up, was stuff from my act and stuff in the moment.” In fact, the only time Bernhard had any difficulties on the set was with Lewis in that famous scene. “He was in it [masking tape] all day, but they found a way to put it on like a cast with tape around it so he could get up and move and go to the bathroom and have a break. The funny story is, when he hits me, originally he wanted me to do a stunt where I spin around in those high heels and fall into the glass table. I was like, “No, I cannot do that.” He kept trying to convince me and show me how. That was the only time I turned to Marty and said, “Marty, you’ve gotta step in here. I am not going to risk my life and health for that.” So eventually it was just me up against a wall and I just fell into a pad.”
Scorsese had his own problems with making The King of Comedy. For one thing, he didn’t feel like he was adequately prepared when filming began but was forced to start earlier than anticipated in order to avoid an impending directors’ strike. Then he encountered logistical problems while filming on the streets of New York City due to the difficult demands of unions and city officials. The whole process physically exhausted him and he personally didn’t enjoy filming some scenes in the movie. In Scorsese on Scorsese (edited by David Thompson and Ian Christie), the director confessed: “It was a very strange movie. The scene when Rupert Pupkin turns up uninvited at Jerry’s house was extremely difficult for everyone. It took two weeks and it was just so painful because the scene itself was so excruciating.”
Still, Scorsese forged ahead and was supported by some of the best crew people in the industry including cinematographer Fred Schuler (Stir Crazy, Arthur), art directors Edward Pisoni (The Sopranos TV series) and Lawrence Miller (Desert Bloom), production designer Boris Leven (The Sound of Music, The Andromeda Strain) and film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who has worked on many of Scorsese’s films since Raging Bull.
Musician Robbie Robertson of The Band, who had worked with Scorsese previously on the 1978 concert film The Last Waltz, was hired as the musical director for The King of Comedy and he assembled a killer soundtrack which was released on LP. Among the songs were “Come Rain or Come Shine” by Ray Charles, “Fly Me to the Moon” by Frank Sinatra, “Back on the Chain Gang” by The Pretenders, “Swamp” by The Talking Heads, “Wonderful Remark” by Van Morrison, “Rainbow Sleeves,” a Tom Waits song performed by Rickie Lee Jones, “The Finer Things” by David Sanborn, and Robertson’s own composition, “Between Trains.”
When The King of Comedy was released in the U.S. in 1983, the reviews were decidedly mixed. Some critics were almost hostile in their reactions such as Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, who wrote, “The Director, Martin Scorsese, must have decided to give us the cold creeps, the shots are held so long that we look for more in them than is there. Scorsese designs his own form of alienation in this mistimed, empty movie, which seems to teeter between jokiness and hate. It’s The Day of the Locust in the age of television, but with a druggy vacuousness that suggests the Warhol productions of the 60s.” Gary Arnold of The Washington Post, was equally dismissive, writing. “King of Comedy aggravates the problem it’s supposed to illuminate. Far from clarifying the nature of a creepy social pathology, the movie assumes an attitude of smug, unjustified superiority toward every character in sight and the cockeyed spectacle of pop culture in general.” Even Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times had reservations about the film, saying “Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy” is one of the most arid, painful, wounded movies I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to believe Scorsese made it; instead of the big-city life, the violence and sexuality of his movies like “Taxi Driver” and “Mean Streets,” what we have here is an agonizing portrait of lonely, angry people with their emotions all tightly bottled up. This is a movie that seems ready to explode — but somehow it never does.”
Still, there were plenty of positive reviews such as Vincent Canby’s piece for The New York Times, which stated, “It would be difficult to describe Martin Scorsese’s fine new film, The King of Comedy, as an absolute joy. It’s very funny, and it ends on a high note that was, for me, both a total surprise and completely satisfying. Yet it’s also bristly, sometimes manic to the edge of lunacy and, along the way, terrifying.” The King of Comedy also earned several accolades: it garnered five nominations from BAFTA including Best Original Screenplay (which it won), Martin Scorsese was nominated for the Palme d’Or for the film at the Cannes Film Festival, and Sandra Bernhard won Best Supporting Actress for her role as Masha from the National Society of Film Critics.
Scorsese later said, “People in America were confused by The King of Comedy and saw Bob as some kind of mannequin. But I felt it was De Niro’s best performance ever. The King of Comedy was right on the edge for us; we couldn’t go any further at that time.” And Sandra Bernhard added, “I always say it was prescient, and everyone thinks I’m saying precious. I don’t think people know what that word means.”
Despite losing money at the box office and branded a failure by the executives at 20th-Century-Fox, who released it, The King of Comedy is now considered one of Scorsese’s masterpieces and an overlooked gem. Film reviewer Thomas Butt of Collider, writes, “The King of Comedy manifested into a prophetic piece of art, as the digital age and social media world only heightened the entitlement of the average entertainer creating a false sense of importance about themselves.” The film “pulls no punches in its view of society, and when Rupert is perhaps the best that it can offer, then it is clear that something is rotten at the core. Because he is equally representative and a product of a culture of obsession with fame and celebrity that is omnipresent today, Rupert Pupkin is still the most deranged protagonist ever under the direction of Martin Scorsese.”
The King of Comedy has been released on various formats over the years but the best option is probably the multi-format Blu-ray/DVD released by 20th-Century-Fox in March 2014. The disc includes deleted and extended scenes, a conversation with Scorsese, De Niro and Jerry Lewis on the film and a featurette on the making of the movie.
Other Links of Interest:
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/interviews/martin-scorsese-king-comedy
https://collider.com/the-king-of-comedy-martin-scorsese
https://www.vulture.com/article/king-of-comedy-star-sandra-bernhard-answers-our-questions.html
https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/jerry-lewis-the-king-of-comedy
Cinema Sojourns 