TV Reviews : ‘Films Are Life’ to an American Master Named Scorsese

Life, Martin Scorsese says, “is the hope of making another film.” The hope was born early. A new documentary about him, the latest in the excellent “American Masters” series on PBS, reproduces an elaborate story board he drew for a film while he was still a child, bedridden with asthma. “Produced and directed by Martin Scorsese,” says the juvenile printing in one confident panel.

“ ‘All This Filming, Is It Healthy?’: Martin Scorsese Directs” airs tonight at 9 on KCET Channel 28. The title paraphrases a line from Michael Powell’s 1959 film, “Peeping Tom,” about a mad camera assistant who photographs the fear in women’s faces just before he murders them. It is a favorite of Scorsese’s--symbolizing, so he tells his interviewers, the paranoia and the danger involved in making films.

“Films are life,” Scorsese says, “especially if they reach a certain kind of truth. Then you can learn from them.”

The documentary-makers, Joel Sucher and Steven Fischler, are former students of Scorsese, who gave them a long, candid interview and access to his location shooting on “Good Fellas,” his latest feature.

There are interviews with Scorsese’s parents, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci about “Raging Bull,” Steven Spielberg and other colleagues and admirers, including his boyhood mentor, Father Francis Principe.

Scorsese is a great storyteller, Spielberg says, who “defies the conventions of storytelling to make it more Marty.” He is refreshing, Spielberg adds, in a time when much filmmaking “has become a wasteland of homogenized milk.”

Scorsese’s first films, including a student short and his first feature, “J.R., or Who’s That Knocking at My Door?” reflected his Italian-American New York neighborhood, as did his first significant popular success, “Mean Streets,” which also launched his long collaboration with De Niro, his alter ego and protagonist again in “Good Fellows,” based on Nicholas Pileggi’s “Wiseguy.”

There are clips as well from “Boxcar Bertha” (his introduction to Hollywood work, via Roger Corman), the controversial “Taxi Driver,” “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” “Raging Bull” (whose awesome power can be felt even in brief excerpts), “The Color of Money,” “After Hours” and “The Last Temptation of Christ.” (A sly cut by editor Martin Toub jumps from a crowd jeering Christ in the film to the placard-waving throng of protesters of the film at Universal.)

Even his most admittedly commercial ventures carry Scorsese’s personal stamp, as in the feeling for New York in “After Hours,” the cinematic flair of the pool sequences and the documentary flavor in “The Color of Money.”

As the expert documentary makes clear, Scorsese, his stature among filmmakers secure, remains adamantly independent, living from film to film in hope of the next.