Behind the Scenes: Blue Collar (Schrader, 1978) with Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel

From the author of Taxi Driver comes Blue Collar. The story of three men who spend their whole lives working to catch up. There's gonna be some changes, man, in the union. Big changes. Everybody know what the plan is? The plant just shot for plantation. I was on that picket line every day. That's right, man. I'm still paying the bills and the money out of bars to support my family. Who is it? Mr. Brown? Yes? Yeah, my name is Mr. Berg. I'm with the Internal Revenue. I don't want none. But according to the hospital records, you claim six and you only have three. I couldn't have all my kids in the hospital, man, you know. Here, see, we have Sugar Ray Brown. You've got Gloria Brown. You've got O.J. Brown, Gail Sayers Brown, Jim Brown, Stevie Wonder Brown. Who's Stevie Wonder? I was going to come by your house and see you, but I figured I'd better get man. Nobody comes near my house. Nobody I don't invite. And, you know, you should be done with that now you're behind schedule. This is company time, Bartoski. What are you telling me, man, that I'm going to be doing the work of three men? Let's move it. See, if you're dragging, you're always dragging the line. The thing I don't understand is why you let the union rip you off as much as management, you know? I do my job, can't nobody say no different. And I was my old man when I came to work here. I'm going to be my old man when I leave. That saves you all the time talking about. Man, that's our union. They ain't got nothing but one guard. Here's the safe. We'll talk to you later. Let's get it out. I kept the notebook. Why? I thought you threw all that stuff out. I hear you got something I want. We can change the union with this book, baby. What do you mean you won't, man? I don't talk to no government agent. And we can't be seen when he doesn't hate each other anymore. First of all, I know three guys did it. Two of them are black, one of them are white. How many of them sent you? Nobody. Who sent you? Nobody, man. We got the wrong house. How do I protect my family? I'm the only one who can protect you or your family. You're my friend, Jerry, but you think in white. The American dream. If you're rich, you can buy it. If you're anything else, you've got to fight for it. Blue collar. I'm Keith Gordon. I'm an American independent filmmaker, directed a bunch of movies, wrote a bunch of movies, produced a bunch of movies. Mostly in the last 10 years, I've been working a lot in television in the States. It started as an actor in the 80s and 90s. But before all of that and what led me to all of that was growing up and still now, I was an immense film buff. Love movies, love going to movies. I spent way too much of my adolescence in dark movie theaters, at revival houses, watching films back on film when they were still on film. Going to see every new movie that opened that sounded at all interesting. Blue Collar had a tremendous influence on me as a filmmaker, but also as a human being. And I think those are the really important films in our lives. And we all sort of have them, those movies that transcend just, oh, that's a really good movie to that's changing the way I perceive the world around me. And Blue Collar was one of those movies for me. And it's a movie that has gotten painfully forgotten, especially painful, because at least right now in America, it's an incredibly important film. I mean, it's probably the best American political film of the last 50 years. It's certainly the most important American political film of the last 50 years in terms of content. But perhaps why it didn't sort of survive and make a lot of money and be known by a modern audience as well is the very thing that makes it so important, which it's a very angry film. It's a very radical film. It's a it's a Marxist film. It's you know, we make a lot of movies in America that are political, but they tend to be soft. They tend to be liberal. They tend to be anti-war films. And I've made an anti-war film or anti-racism film. They're not stances that are dangerous or hard to take. We have documentaries that are much more politically edgy and will do satire. You know, we'll do Network or Dr. Strangelove, but but flat out statement, angry political films have not been part of the mainstream U.S. film dialogue. You guys in the UK have it much more. People like Ken Loach or whatever actually who do traffic and that we don't. So it was a very unusual film in that sense. And I think it's part of why it struggled. But it's a remarkable, remarkable movie. I mean, it it postulates that the reason American capitalism can succeed is that those at the top are very successful at pitting those at the bottom against each other. And that the way you stay in power is that you take the black and put them against the white. You take men, put them against women. You take the old, put them against young. And that's so much what my country is going through right now in the age of Trump. You know, we're now it's become immigrants. Now it's become. But that kind of angry hatred of each other, which is fostered and fed by those in power, because it's very convenient. If as long as the working classes are fighting each other, they're not fighting you. And this film doesn't just say that metaphorically, it doesn't hint at it. It's flat out makes that statement. It says it in words. And that's a very unusual and very powerful thing. And I remember at age 17, when the film was released in 1978, that that got me thinking about the world in a way I wasn't used to. And it got me thinking about politics and the role of workers and the role of owners in a way that I hadn't thought of before. And it has echoed with me ever since. And it's become part of how I see the sicknesses in how we create wealth. This started me down that road of thinking. And that's a big change for a film to make in your soul. Another place where the film had a tremendous impact on me was in the area of music. Occasionally, movies will change your taste in other areas. And I always think that that's a really cool thing that movies can do. I had never had an interest in classical music until Kubrick in Clockwork Orange and in 2001 played with classical music in ways that made me go, that's really interesting. Hearing Walter then, now Wendy Carlos's electronic versions of Beethoven was like, oh, that's amazing. And so then I started listening to Carlos's music. And he, now she, did a lot of work with Bach. And then I found I was listening to the originals, and it changed my taste forever. Well, Blue Collar did that to me with the blues. I was a white middle class boy. I didn't really know the blues. And I remember sitting in the theater, and Jack Nietzsche's incredible opening title music comes on, and it runs through the whole movie. And it's one of the great pieces of movie music of all time. I mean, just the music alone sets a world in a way that very, very, very rarely does music do in a film. And it's very rare to hear that kind of angry, edgy music in a film, certainly in an American film. And by the time that opening credit sequence was over, I was like, OK, I want more of this music in my life. So I went and got the soundtrack, and then I started buying Muddy Water records, and Howlin' Wolf records, and Robert Johnson records. And it became a part of my whole taste and vocabulary about music in the world. And again, it's rare, but wonderful when one piece of art can turn you onto a whole other area of art. And this film did that for me. And it's been part of me ever since. One of the things that's so remarkable about the film is that it's not a film that starts as an angry political movie. And that's part of why its anger is so effective in the end, is that Schrader does a very brilliant thing in making you feel at ease, making you feel at home, making you feel it's going to be OK. The film starts with a relationship between two black workers and a white worker that's actually quite ideal. I mean, they seem to look past race. They seem to be really close and really open with each other. The work seems tough and difficult, but basically there's a lot of humor in it. I mean, Richard Pryor's very funny. The film kind of goes along, and just like the characters, you're not aware of how dark things are getting until you're in it. And that makes the second half of the film, when things go from this lighter world to a very, very, very dark world and a very dangerous world, very powerful and very unsettling and very like being caught in a nightmare. And all these characters are caught in a nightmare, and it's changing who they are. It's not just what's happening to them exterior, but it's what's happening to their interiors as human beings. That's a very, very tricky thing to pull off, but the film does it brilliantly. It doesn't have loose ends sticking out. A lot of films that I think try to work with that kind of change of tone struggle because you become aware of what's happening. It's the movie's changing on me. Schrader somehow does it just so beautifully that you're not aware you're in a different movie until you're in that movie. And that really hinges to a large extent on the incredible performance that he got from Richard Pryor. And it's sort of important to remember that Pryor at this point hadn't been seen as a dramatic actor. He was a guy who had done comedies very, very, very successfully. And certainly his stand-up work had a lot of pain and rage and anger, but nobody had really tapped into that and put it into a fictional setting and into a character. And it was a pretty ballsy move on Schrader's part to get this guy who had never gone to those kind of places on screen and go, I trust that you can go there. And he got this incredible performance. And Pryor really becomes the voice of the tone of the film because he starts funny and light and playful. And then by the end of it, boy, it's gone places that rip your heart out and are frightful and disturbing and sad. It's also the best work and best role that Yafit Khodo ever had in a film. I mean, a brilliant actor, but just who never got his due and never got those kind of parts. And it also represented a chance for Harvey Keitel to go back to a kind of empathetic and naturalistic and vulnerable kind of character that he'd started with, but kind of got away from. He became more and more caricatury and played things in a very wild roles, which he's great at. But it's easy to forget that when he started in the early Corsese films, he was sort of the voice of an everyman. And this film allowed him to go back to that. And he has a very unusual combination because he definitely feels like a real working class street guy in the film, but there's a vulnerability to him that lets you in. And that's a hard thing to get to in terms of that balance. What's interesting is that as great as these performances are and all that, you know, Schrader, when he talks about the film, talks about how all three actors despised each other and it got worse and worse as the film went along, and they also hated him. And there's a story that he tells about how it got to the point where Pryor actually pulled a gun on him and said he wasn't going to do more than three takes of the scene. So somehow Schrader was juggling this, juggling making the film on a very limited budget, a very limited time schedule, and holding off the studio, who was busy freaking out at the end of the movie and going, you can't end where the film does end, which I won't discuss for those who haven't seen it. But so, and here he was doing all that, and this was his first movie. I mean, that would be an insane amount to take on your fifth movie, but he was doing it having never directed before. Now, certainly he knew film inside out, and he had written Taxi Driver, and he was already an incredibly influential figure. But it's one thing to write great film, it's another thing to be on a set with people of huge egos and studio people and dealing with all the things you have to deal with. And then to create a film that only reflects the best of that, that's a very rare and special thing. And, you know, it has an incredibly rich texture, which is also not something you see in American mainstream movies. The tactileness of the film, from that opening credit sequence through the film, you smell the ozone in the air in that car factory. You know what places feel like. The art direction is beautiful. I mean, just if you look at the posters on walls it's like everything's creating a very real and difficult world to live in. It's funny, you know, there's a list of great debut films, and to me this belongs on it. And obviously the one that everybody knows and everybody talks about is Citizen Kane, which is at the top of that list. But to me, this is, if not at the level of Citizen Kane, it's on that list. It's on that list of sort of how the hell did this person do this debuts. And to me, if you can be on a list with Citizen Kane, you've accomplished something very special. I look, if there's anything seriously wrong with the movie, it's that no one has seen it. That's really the biggest flaw of Blue Collar, is that it came out, it got these tremendously good reviews, but it basically played a bunch of the major cities and found a small dedicated audience, but it never found a big audience. And then it's gotten sort of forgotten in the sands of time. And I think if you're watching it again for the first time in a long time, you'll find what I find every time I go back to it, which is that it only feels more important, less dated and more of the moment with every year that goes by. And that's something very rare and very special. There were two reasons why we wanted to talk to Paul Schrader. The first is that he's had what they call a meteoric career, first as a writer, subsequently as a director. His scripts, they go through the list, include Taxi Driver and Raging Bull for Martin Scorsese, the first draft of Close Encounters of the Third Kind for Steven Spielberg, The Yakuza, which was an American-Japanese gangster film starred Robert Mitchum, Obsession for Brian De Palma, which was a kind of homage to Hitchcock's Vertigo, and Rolling Thunder, a film about a Vietnam veteran in America. His films as a director have been equally varied. The first was Blue Collar, a film about automobile industry workers in Detroit who find that their union is ripping them off as much as the bosses. The second was Hardcore, which was called The Hardcore Life in England, in which George C. Scott searches for his missing daughter in an underworld of porno houses and brothels. The third was American Gigolo, in which Richard Gere sells his body to the wealthy women of Beverly Hills that keeps his soul because it turns out that he's incapable of receiving love. The second reason we wanted to talk to him is that he's a unique figure in contemporary Hollywood. Unlike most of his colleagues, he's not a movie brat, so-called. That is to say, he didn't grow up on film and TV. In fact, they were denied him. He grew up in a strictly religious family and went to theology college. He didn't see films until he was 18. That means he doesn't have the same memories, childhood memories, of film that most of his contemporaries have. This perhaps explains the rather detached attitude he has toward the changes that are currently occurring in Hollywood. And it was those that we asked him about. I fell into some, you know, personal problems and non-fiction just wasn't doing a trick. My needs weren't being met by non-fiction. And I needed, you know, I needed fantasy. And I had to reach out for it. And screenwriting was a logical place to go because that was what I knew as a critic. I knew scripts. So that when I had to create stories to deal with my own life, I went to screenwriting. And that was when I wrote Taxi Driver. And I wrote Taxi Driver, you know, essentially as a script for myself. You know, there's really no market for it at the time. You know, when you look back at a script like that, it's clearly really not written for a market because, you know, no one would encourage you to write film on that subject matter. I think the first three complete scripts that you finished were all sold, which is quite a rare experience in Hollywood. Well, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I've been quite fortunate. I think I've only written about four scripts that haven't been made out of four or five out of 15. And, you know, that's just a very high percentage. I attribute this as much to calculation as to talent. You know, I just don't sit down at the typewriter until I'm really quite sure that I have a good script to write and that someone will want to see it. How then do you make a transition from being a successful writer to becoming a director? You know, again, a great deal of calculation. The easiest way into the film industry is as a writer. Because you're dealing with services rendered rather than services promised. You don't have to say, trust me, you know, I will give a great performance. I will direct a great film, have faith. You don't have to make anyone love you personally. You don't have to go to dinner. All you have to do is just give them the script. And if they want it, they'll pay for it. If they want it a lot, they'll pay a lot for it. And it doesn't matter what color you are, what your personality is, or what age you are. So I came into filmmaking rather easily because I came in with services rendered and they were bought. And therefore, there was no apprenticeship. To move on to the next step, which I decided, because I was neither fish nor fowl. I wasn't a writer in that my words were not being put on screen. And I wasn't a filmmaker in that I wasn't controlling the stories. So I decided that I had to be one or the other. I either had to be a writer, that is, do fiction or nonfiction. Or I had to be a filmmaker, that is, a writer and a director. And so I wrote a script with that kind of calculation in mind. A script that I could kind of ensemble script. This is Blue Collar, where you have a lot of plot and where you can get three talented young actors who will work at a low price so you can budget the thing at a level where someone will finance it. Well, I had three scripts in my pocket before I directed the first one. And I was on the set shooting hardcore when Blue Collar was released. So I was already protected. And I was on the set shooting Gigolo when Hardcore was released. And I had just written those three scripts, stacked them up behind each other, and set them up while I was making the others so that I had three shots out of the box. If one of them was successful, I would have had a career. One of them was. It's no secret that movies are going out of business. And we're on the verge of a major revolution, which I think will even be bigger than the change when Sound came in. And you're sort of protected from it here in Britain. But when it happens, which is happening right now, in the next five years, ten years, it'll be a major shakeout in what movies are. And I think it's all going to be for the better. The reason you're protected from it here is because you don't have that much commercial television. And I have a friend here who's directing the movie, Michael Mann, and he was saying how wonderful British television is because you can sit and watch it and think you've actually done something, which you don't have in American television. But when this shakeout occurs, it will bring, I think, much more freedom. At the moment, it is very, very difficult to do serious work in Hollywood. There is no taste in the marketplace for serious films. And if you just list off the films, all the high-quality films, with one or two exceptions, just aren't making money. And you just can't keep making French Lieutenant's Woman, no matter how good it is, if people aren't going to the cinemas to see it. And that is a problem. That is a financing problem, not a creative problem. So how do you see distribution moving? Well, there are, at the moment, five or so components of exhibition which are not coordinated. And those components are major theaters, the first run, the spectacle theaters, the sub-run, the small mini-box theaters. They are cassettes, commercial television, which is free, pay television, which you pay a monthly fee for the channel, and pay for view television, which you pay for a specific program, which is not repeated. Now, that is six forms of audiovisual release, four of which occur in the home, two which occur outside the home. These are totally uncoordinated at the moment. And no one of these forms of exhibition can afford to make films. So they have to get together to make films. And so now we're just seeing all kinds of bouncy financing schedules where cable television will put up a little bit first, then a studio will come in. Maybe a studio will put up some money first and then try to sell off different pieces. Until somebody steps in with some kind of organized form of release, you're just not going to get movies that are just going to keep losing money because everyone's exploiting everyone else. The cable companies are making money at the expense of the studios because they're buying the studio's product cheap. And the studios just have to stop the cable companies from doing this and get the cable companies in the business of financing, you know, in order to keep films being made. Now, my feeling is there's several ways this will go. And pay for view, I think, is the secret to it all. And I'll just explain what pay for view is because you don't have it here. We're just getting it in the States. Now we only have it for boxing, which is that you have a pay station, which you pay maybe $10 a month, and they show you continuous programming, 24-hour, usually movies about a year out of release, over and over again, you know, a dozen or so movies a week, which are just repeated. Then if they have a special event, such as a boxing match, they will code the signal so that your screen goes fuzzy. And unless you call up and say, I want to see that program, that boxing match, which will cost $15, they won't uncode it into your home, into your box. If you do, you do get to see that program. What this means is very, very important because a normal television show, at the moment, people walk in and out of. It's done in a lit room. You hear children, people are passing in and out of the room. It's sort of like white noise. And that's why people get so upset about television. They say, you know, how can you ever do anything creative on television because it's just like white noise? Well, the moment, hopefully, someone, you know, some parent puts down $10 to see this movie, you know, he's going to damn well get his $10 worth. And he's going to shut the kids up and turn the lights off and sit and watch the movie he's paid $10 to see because he knows it won't be repeated. Now, if that actually turns out to be effective, you then can use that piece of the puzzle to finance films. You can, because that knocks out so much of your costs. You don't have theatrical exhibition costs because there are no theaters. There's no sheets to clean, no heating, no air conditioning, no usherettes. There is no print cost because there's only one print that's projected at the same time. There's very little advertising cost because you're doing your own advertising on your own channel. And it's not that movies are so expensive. It is that exhibition is so expensive. Take a film like Cat People. It costs $13.5 million to make directly. In order for that film to break even, around $85 or $90 million would have to pass through the wickets. Well, where is that $90 million going? About half of it is going into exhibition costs, into the theaters. 30% of it is going to the studios to pay for their releasing, simply their releasing the film. Massive interest, you know, which is built up over the years. And it takes so long to collect the money that interest becomes a major factor. A film like Reds has to grow to half a million dollars a week just to pay for its interest. So it's not a minor factor. And it's going into advertising. Well, if you can do a pay-per-view, you get your money immediately. In fact, you get it in advance if you have a subscriber system. And you don't have any of these other costs. So that if I can get 5 million people to pay $3 to see Cat People, it would break even right there. As it is now, if 15 million people see it, it still won't break even. So that if we can create a system that lowers the unit, the number of units necessary to make the product viable, it is there, therefore, there will be more diverse product. Let's say there's 2 million, 3 million people out there who want to see the movie I want to make. And they will pay to see it. But I can't afford to make it at the price that they will pay. They won't pay $100 each. They'll only pay $5 each. So if I can get a system whereby each of their five dollars, you know, that, that, you know, that, what's three times? That's a million and a half dollars or the 15 million dollars? Who knows? Who cares? But if I can get their money, I can make money. I mean, I can make a movie that will fit into that slot. And it will, in fact, give me more freedom. You know, I will, as a viewer, I will pay for, if someone wants to do a series on contemporary painters, you know, a film like Jack Azan's Bigger Splash. They say that, and they say that, you know, if I give them $10, I will see a series of films like this. I'll pay that and see those films. Hopefully, hopefully. It's all so, excuse me, it's all so up for grabs. And, and, you know, come this Christmas, there's going to be the first pay-per-view experiment in America. Which will be offered pay-per-view before it's in theaters. Now, we'll see how that happens. Who knows? There's rumors now that Superman 3 may premiere as pay-per-view next summer. Obviously, this has the exhibitors up in arms. But this is good. The exhibitors should be up in arms because their world is collapsing. And the only way to get them to reorganize their world is to make them aware that it is collapsing. Do you feel nostalgic for the death of the film industry as it has been? No, no. I mean, I have no particular affection for movies per se. You know, art forms come and go. You know, you use the best tool at the best time. There are all kinds of musical instruments that we don't use anymore. There are forms of art, you know, from epic poetry to certain kinds of choral singing are no longer used. You know, who laments the death of the Chautauqua? The Chautauqua was a wonderful thing, but it is gone now. In the same way, movies as we know them may be gone. Silent movies went. You know, people shed tears, but that's the way it is. I think movies are so messed up right now that there's not even going to be that many tears shed when we lose these ugly little multiplex theaters if we can break it between the classy big theater experience and the classy home experience and get rid of the sort of junky gum on the shoes, bad projection, middle-brow movies which we have now.