3 emerging New Music Industry events you may want to attend:

1. Trigger Creative 2012 - June 28-29
http://triggercc.com 

2. Music 4.5 - June 29
http://www.music4point5.com 

3. Future Music Forum - September 20-21
http://www.futuremusicforum.com 

---by Seth Godin

If you have a list of 1000 subscribers or 5,000 fans or 10,000 supporters, you have a choice to make.

You can create stories and options and benefits that naturally spread from this group to their friends, and your core group can multiply, with 5,000 growing to 10,000 and then 100,000.

Or you can put the group through a sales funnel, weed out the free riders and monetize the rest. A 5% conversion rate means you just turned 5,000 interested people into 250 paying customers.

Multiplying scales. Dividing helps you make this quarter's numbers.

Since it’s launch, MusicianWages has been well received by the musician community. Dave Hahn and I have been very pleased to see our pet project grow into an informative hub for all types of musicians. We believe this growth is due to our commitment to integrity and quality content, and as long as we find the articles on our site useful, you will too.

Sometimes, though, people get upset and send nasty emails. Most of them are ignored, but I felt this recent one deserved a response. The author is upset because we’re selling some contact lists from the Chronicles of a Cruise Ship Musician blog. Since he didn’t include a valid email address, prohibiting us from writing him back, we decided to respond publicly.

These lists are the first products we have ever sold from the site, and perhaps all our readers deserve an explanation of why we’ve opened the MusicianWages Shop after four years of giving away all our information for free.

Here is the email from “Joe” and our response.

You suck. I have been at your site before and you were all cushy cushy with all the agents. I thought your site was a cool idea at first. But you really don’t have a clue as to what real musicians wages in the real world are. I’ve been pro for 25+ years and know a lot of musicians. And now I see you are selling the list of cruise ship agents. Well there goes any respect I have for you. Obviously your not making enough money as a musician. You’re going to end up working for an agent before too long. Sad. Last time I visit the site.

Well Joe, sorry you feel that way. I hope you’ll read this response and have a better understanding of what Dave and I do, what MusicianWages is all about, and why we’re selling these lists.

Dave and I are keep very busy working as full time musicians. Dave plays keyboards and conducts on Broadway, which is one of the best paying steady gigs a musician can get these days. I’m a freelance guitarist playing with different bands, subbing on musicals, and earning income from my own recordings (sales, royalties, licensing, etc.). We’re both members of our local AFM chapter and are well aware of union and non-union wages for a variety of musician jobs.

While continually building our careers, Dave and I have written extensively on everything we know about being musicians. We’ve shared all this information for free, on MusicianWages. We are the only people that run the site, and we do it for the love of sharing practical advice and helping others.

The website does generate some money, but not very much. We are far better professional musicians than we are professional bloggers! For the last several years we’ve basically been breaking even, making enough to cover monthly maintenance costs and hire professionals to help us with things beyond our skill set. However, we aren’t trying to make a living from this website, we’re trying to make a community of musicians.

When the two of us started MusicianWages four years ago, Dave’s articles about working as a cruise ship musician were a central part of the website’s launch. He had written extensively about the gig while playing on ships in 2004 because before he got the gig, there was simply no information online to prepare him for life as a cruise ship musician. His articles filled a void, which has made them very popular, and everybody researching cruise ship gigs finds MusicianWages in the top of their search results.

Dave’s only experiences on ships, though, were contracts in 2004 and 2007. I’ve never played on ships. We really don’t have any new information on the scene, with the exception of some contributions by other cruise ship musicians. Nonetheless, that section of the site has always been popular and we regularly receive emails from people wanting to know how to get a gig on a cruise ship.

In response to the many emails asking us, “How do I get do I get a cruise ship gig?” and all the resumes and links we receive from readers thinking we can place them on a ship, we decided to create these lists.

The Cruise Ship Talent Agency Directory and The Cruise Line Entertainment Department Directory were both created through time intensive research. The How Do I Get A Cruise Ship Musician Job eBook is a collection of articles from our website compiling answers to the 30 most asked questions about the cruise ship gig.

All of the information in these resources is freely available online for those who take the time to do their own research. Because we invested our own time and money compiling the information and presenting it in clean, easy to read eBooks, we decided to make them our first products to sell. We are charging for the convenience, for the time we’re saving you, not for exclusive information.

No agents, agency, or cruise lines were involved in or benefit from the creation and sales of these lists. We receive no commission on any cruise contracts signed by anybody that buys these lists. Most of the money we make from these lists goes back into the site or helps us develop other projects that we hope will help us and our fellow musician.

The musician industry isn’t the only place you’ll find these kinds of resources. After college my wife was applying for a very specific job in an industry where she had little experience. She bought a book that taught her about the industry, the position she wanted, and how to prepare for the interview. She studied the book cover to cover, tidied up her resume, nailed the interview, and got the job.

Similarly, we believe these lists are a very valuable resource for talented musicians that have everything it takes to play the gig, but don’t know much about it.

If you don’t want to work on a cruise ship there are plenty of other ways to make a living as a musician. Dave and I both have steady careers on land, as do many of the site’s contributors. We strive to keep MusicianWages full of pragmatic, useful information culled from the experience of professional musicians. This information will always be available for free.

By BRUCE WEBER

Dick Clark, the perpetually youthful-looking television host whose long-running daytime song-and-dance fest, “American Bandstand,” did as much as anyone or anything to advance the influence of teenagers and rock ’n’ roll on American culture, died on Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 82.

A spokesman, Paul Shefrin, said Mr. Clark had a heart attack at Saint John’s Health Center on Wednesday morning after entering the hospital the night before for an outpatient procedure.

Mr. Clark had a stroke in December 2004, shortly before he was to appear on the annual televised New Year’s Eve party he had produced and hosted every year since 1972. He returned a year later, and although he spoke haltingly, he continued to make brief appearances on the show, including the one this past New Year’s Eve.

With the boyish good looks of a bound-for-success junior executive and a ubiquitous on-camera presence, Mr. Clark was among the most recognizable faces in the world, even if what he was most famous for — spinning records and jabbering with teenagers — was on the insubstantial side. In addition to “American Bandstand” and “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” he hosted innumerable awards shows, comedy specials, series based on TV outtakes and the game show “$10,000 Pyramid” (which lasted long enough to see the stakes ratcheted up to $100,000). He also made guest appearances on dramatic and comedy series, usually playing himself.

But he was as much a businessman as a television personality. “I get enormous pleasure and excitement sitting in on conferences with accountants, tax experts and lawyers,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1961. He was especially deft at packaging entertainment products for television.

Starting in the 1960s, Mr. Clark built an entertainment empire on the shoulders of “Bandstand,” producing other music shows like “Where the Action Is” and “It’s Happening.” He eventually expanded into game shows, awards shows, comedy specials and series, talk shows, children’s programming, reality programming, and movies. His umbrella company, Dick Clark Productions, has produced thousands of hours of television; it also has a licensing arm and has owned or operated restaurants and theaters like the Dick Clark American Bandstand Theater in Branson, Mo.

But none of it would have been possible without “American Bandstand,” a show that earned immediate popularity, had remarkable longevity and became a cultural touchstone for the baby-boomer generation. It helped give rise to the Top 40 radio format and helped make rock ’n’ roll a palatable product for visual media — not just television but also the movies. It was influential enough that ABC broadcast a 40th-anniversary special in 1992, three years after the show went off the air, and a 50th-anniversary special 10 years later. Mr. Clark, who had long since been popularly known as “the world’s oldest teenager,” was the host of both, of course.

Philadelphia Roots

“American Bandstand” was broadcast nationally, originally from Philadelphia, from 1957 to 1989, and the list of well-known performers who were seen on it, many of them lip-syncing their recently recorded hits, spanned generations: from Ritchie Valens to Luther Vandross; from the Monkees to Madonna; from Little Anthony and the Imperials to Los Lobos; from Dusty Springfield to Buffalo Springfield to Rick Springfield. Mr. Clark was around for it all.

“It meant everything to do Dick’s show,” Paul Anka said in telephone interview on Wednesday. “This was a time when there was no youth culture — he created it. And the impact of the show on people was enormous. You knew that once you went down to Philadelphia to see Dick and you went on the show, your song went from nowhere to the Top 10.”

“American Bandstand’s” influence waned somewhat after it changed from a weekday to a weekly format, appearing on Saturday afternoons, in 1963 and moved its base of operations to Los Angeles the next year. And as the psychedelic era took hold in the late 1960s and rock ’n’ roll fragmented into subgenres, the show could no longer command a central role on the pop music scene.

Indeed, the show was criticized for sanitizing rock ’n’ roll, taking the edge off a sexualized and rebellious music. But it was also, in important ways, on the leading edge of the culture. Mr. Clark and his producer, Tony Mammarella, began integrating the dance floor on “American Bandstand” early on; much of the music, after all, was being made by black performers.

“I can remember, a vivid recollection, the first time ever in my life I talked to a black teenager on national television; it was in what we called the rate-a-record portion of ‘Bandstand,’ ” Mr. Clark recalled. “It was the first time in a hundred years I got sweaty palms.”

He was fearful, he said, of a backlash from Southern television affiliates, but that didn’t happen. From that day on, he said, more blacks began appearing on the show. And as time went on, the show’s willingness to bridge a racial divide that went almost entirely unacknowledged by network programming was starkly apparent, “providing American television broadcasting with the most visible ongoing image of ethnic diversity until the 1970s,” according to an essay about the program on the Web site of the Chicago-based Museum of Broadcast Communications.

“We didn’t do it because we were do-gooders, or liberals,” Mr. Clark said. “It was just a thing we thought we ought to do. It was naïve.”

The right man at the right time, Mr. Clark was a radio personality in Philadelphia in 1956 when he stepped into the role of host of what was then a local television show called “Bandstand” after the regular host was fired. By the following October, the show was being broadcast on ABC nationwide with a new name, “American Bandstand,” and for the next several years it was seen every weekday afternoon by as many as 20 million viewers, most of them not yet out of high school, eager to watch a few dozen of their peers dance chastely to the latest recordings of pop hits, showing off new steps like the twist, the pony and the Watusi, and rating the new records in brief interviews.

“It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it” became a national catchphrase.

Handsome and glib, Dick Clark was their music-savvy older brother, and from that position of authority he presided over a grass-roots revolution in American culture in the late 1950s and early ’60s. “American Bandstand” was the first show to make use of the new technology, television, to spread the gospel of rock ’n’ roll. In its early years it introduced a national audience to teen idols like Fabian and Connie Francis, first-generation rockers like Bill Haley and Jerry Lee Lewis, and singing groups like the Everly Brothers. Even more, it helped persuade broadcasters and advertisers of the power of teenagers to steer popular taste.

“At that moment in time, the world realized that kids might rule the world,” Mr. Clark said. “They had their own music, their own fashion, their own money.”

By early 1958, “American Bandstand” was so big a hit that network executives installed a new show in a concert format in its Saturday night lineup, calling it “The Dick Clark Show.” In June, ABC sent it on the road to broadcast from a number of cities. In October, when “The Dick Clark Show” originated from Atlanta, both black and white teenagers were in the audience — amounting to one of the first racially integrated rock concerts — and with National Guard troops present, it weathered threats from the Ku Klux Klan. The nighttime show lasted only until 1960.

Opportunities Abound

In spite of his success, Mr. Clark, who never hid his desire for wealth, had not been getting rich as a network employee. But he had been investing, shrewdly and voluminously, in the businesses that “American Bandstand” supported — talent management, music publishing, record distribution and merchandising, among others — and his bank account ballooned.

His finances were dealt a blow, and his clean-cut image was tarnished, however, when Congress convened hearings into payola, the record company practice of bribing disc jockeys to play their records on the air. In late 1959, with the hearings pending, ABC insisted that Mr. Clark divest himself of all his record-related businesses, which he did. He was called to testify before the House Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight in April 1960, and though he denied ever taking money to play records, he acknowledged a number of actions that exposed what many in Congress considered a too-cozy relationship between the music industry and D.J.s, Mr. Clark in particular.

For an investment of $125 in one record company, for example, Mr. Clark received $31,700 in salary and stock profits over two years. He admitted that some songs and records may have been given to his publishing and distribution companies because of his affiliation with “American Bandstand.” He also acknowledged accepting a ring and a fur stole from a record manufacturer.

Mr. Clark, who was never charged with a crime, said that having to comply with the network’s divestiture request cost him millions.

“I never took any money to play records,” Mr. Clark said in his 1999 Archive of American Television interview. “I made money other ways. Horizontally, vertically, every which way you can think of, I made money from that show.”

Over half a century, Mr. Clark made millions as a producer or executive producer, shepherding projects onto the airwaves that even he acknowledged were more diverting than ennobling: awards shows like the Golden Globes, the Academy of Country Music Awards and the American Music Awards; omnibus shows like “TV’s Bloopers & Practical Jokes,” featuring collections of clips; and television-movie biographies and dramas that targeted devotees of camp, kitsch or B-list celebrities.

He excelled in signing up top acts for his shows, and had to be especially creative on his New Year’s Eve show. Top acts often had lucrative bookings that night, so Mr. Clark worked around that by taping the dance party portion of the show at a Los Angeles studio in August.

“You would go out there and see all these people in their New Year’s Eve outfits getting a smoke outside in 100-degree heat,” said Ted Harbert, then an ABC program executive and now chairman of NBC Broadcasting. “That’s how he got the stars to turn up on a New Year’s Eve show. He taped them in August. It was genius.”

Mr. Clark wasn’t high-minded about his work. “I’ve always dealt with light, frivolous things that didn’t really count; I’m not ashamed of that,” he said during a 1999 interview for the Archive of American Television. “There’s no redeeming cultural value whatsoever to ‘Bloopers,’ but it’s been on for 20 years.” He added: “It’s a piece of fluff. I’ve been a fluffmeister for a long time.”

Richard Wagstaff Clark was born on Nov. 30, 1929, in Bronxville, N.Y., and grew up nearby in Mount Vernon, the second son of Richard A. and Julia Clark. His father was a salesman who commuted to New York City until he was hired to manage a radio station in Utica, N.Y. The older brother, Bradley, was killed in World War II, and young Dick, who had greatly admired “Brad,” a high school athlete, was devastated and depressed afterward, his father once said in an interview.

An Early Love of Radio

As a boy Dick listened often to the radio, and at 13 he went to see a live radio broadcast starring Jimmy Durante and Garry Moore. From then on, he wanted to be in broadcasting. His first job, at 17, was in the mailroom of his father’s station. He often said he learned the most important lesson of his career from listening to Arthur Godfrey.

“I emulated him,” Mr. Clark said. “I loved him, I adored him, because he had the ability to communicate to one person who was listening or watching. Most people would say, in a stentorian voice, ‘Good evening, everyone.’ Everyone? Godfrey knew there was only one person listening at a time.”

Mr. Clark studied business administration at Syracuse University, where he was a disc jockey on the student radio station. After graduating he worked briefly as an announcer for his father’s station before getting a job in television, at WKTV in Utica, as a news announcer.

In 1952 WFIL in Philadelphia gave him his own radio show, “Dick Clark’s Caravan of Music,” an easy-listening afternoon program. A few months later, the station’s television affiliate began an afternoon show called “Bandstand,” with Bob Horn and Lee Stewart. At first it showed films of musical performances for studio audiences, Mr. Clark recalled, but it evolved into a dance show when teenagers, bored with the films, started dancing to the music. As the show grew in popularity, the station changed the name of Mr. Clark’s radio show to “Bandstand” as well, even though his playlist remained uncontroversial fare for a relatively small middle-aged afternoon audience.

It was in the summer of 1956 that Mr. Horn, by then the show’s sole host, was fired and the station turned to young Dick Clark.

“I was 26 years old, looked the part, knew the music, was very comfortable on television,” Mr. Clark recalled. “ ‘They said, ‘Do you want it?’ And I said, ‘Oh, man, do I want it!’ ”

Mr. Clark’s first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Kari Wigton; three children, Richard, Duane and Cindy; and two grandchildren.

He won five Emmy Awards, including a Daytime Emmy lifetime achievement award in 1994, and in 1993 was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He owed his success, he said, to knowing the mind of the broad audience.

“My greatest asset in life,” he said, “was I never lost touch with hot dogs, hamburgers, going to the fair and hanging out at the mall.”

Written by Courtney Carver on April 17, 2012 

I like Twitter. It’s my favorite form of social media and connecting. If you’ve never been on Twitter, it can be hard to understand the concept. Actually, the first 30 days of using Twitter are a little confusing. It isn’t that there is a lot to learn, but grasping that it is as simple as it is can be mind-boggling. It’s easier if you think about it as more social and less media.

I know some of you are thinking, “Courtney, Twitter has been around for years. Everyone already knows all about it.” I used to think the same thing, but when I spoke to 60 really smart business women last Fall, less than 5% of attendees had a Twitter account. A handful had heard of Twitter and the rest looked at me like I was crazy taking about twits and tweets.

What is Twitter?

According to Wikipedia, Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”.

Why should you consider Twitter?

Like any social media platform, Twitter is not for everyone, but you’ll never know unless you try. Here are a few reasons to consider …

• Twitter is simple. You don’t have to read a book or hire a social media expert to use Twitter. I think it’s much more user-friendly than Facebook or Google +.
• Twitter isn’t time-consuming. Like anything else, you could spend mindless hours on Twitter, but if you follow the rules of engagement, use Twitter for good, and then get back to work, it can add value instead of steal time. I typically spend less than 20 minutes a day during the week on Twitter.
• You can meet people on Twitter. If you like celebrities, you can see what they are thinking and ask them questions. Ok, bad example. You can connect with politicians. Uh, scratch that. What about authors, teachers, and specialists in fields that you care about? See who is talking about traveling, cooking or learning to knit.  I love meeting new bloggers, simple living advocates and writers. They are all 140 characters away.
• People are nice on Twitter. Just like the grocery store, the people you meet on Twitter are usually nice. They can also be smart and helpful. When you encounter the opposite, a simple “unfollow” will suffice.
• Twitter can help your business. This simple sharing format lets your clients/readers/people share the good (and bad) about you and your business. It’s word of mouth on fire.
• Twitter replaces headline news. I hear about breaking news on Twitter before anywhere else. At that point, I can go deeper for details or move on.
• Consuming information is manageable. If you follow 5000 people, you will experience information overwhelm. If you follow 50, you can manage what your tweeps have to offer. I suggest starting small. You can see who I follow here.
• It’s easy to search on Twitter. Don’t know what to cook for dinner. Search for #dinnerideas. Need a little inspiration, search #inspirationalquotes.
• It’s easy to share on Twitter. You don’t have to attach pictures, accept friends, create albums or anything but type up to 140 letters about what you would like to share.

You don’t have to be a social media expert to learn twitter, or know much at all, but here are a few common terms that will help.

I love Twitter for many reasons, but mostly because it’s simple and accessible and forces you to consider what you say. You can’t be wordy. If you are new to Twitter, say hi to me @bemorewithless, or ask a question. If you are a regular on Twitter, I want to hear from you too. If you don’t comment here, this blog can become a one way conversation. Twitter can change that.

Like most anything in life, you can make Twitter as simple or complicated as you like. Keep it simple and get started! If you have a Twitter account, please comment below with your Twitter profile url and description and what you think about Twitter so readers can connect with you too!

Photo by Art Streiber

BY RICK TETZELI

AT 69, AN AGE WHEN MOST HOLLYWOOD DIRECTORS have been packed off after a hollow cavalcade of plaudits, roasts, and nostalgic fetes, Martin Scorsese is once again panicked about hitting a deadline. His new movie is Hugo, a 3-D children's movie being released by Paramount Pictures this Thanksgiving weekend, and Scorsese has never before directed in 3-D, nor, God knows, made anything resembling a kid flick. But this is what life is like for Marty, as everyone calls him. The director has achieved the trifecta of a fulfilling, creative life: enough money to do only what truly interests him, enough freedom to attack those projects in a way that is satisfying, and enough appreciation from his peers to tame--just slightly, just ever so slightly--the neurotic beast of self-doubt. After 22 movies, five commercials, 13 documentaries, a handful of music videos, three children, five wives, and 25 studios; after insolvency and misery, after box-office failures and years of going unappreciated; after the one Oscar and all the others he should have won, Marty Scorsese has earned the right that every creative person dreams of: the right never to be bored. And what all this adds up to in his case, what this really means to this particular man, is that he has earned the right to continue to fret every little detail in the world well into the next decade and for as long as he cares to make movies.

So as he sits down for the filmed part of a fastcompany.com interview in his office screening room, a comfortable unostentatious cave surrounded outside by posters of classic films likeThe Third Man, Citizen Kane, and Ladri di Biciclette (The Bicycle Thief), Hollywood's eminence grise starts off by wanting to get something straight: "Let me ask you: Do I look like Quasimodo? Am I sitting too far down in the chair? The shoulders on this jacket, against these chairs, they can scrunch up so I look like Quasimodo. Okay, is this good?" Yes, Mr. Scorsese. And how are you feeling today?

"I'm good. I'm tired. I'm tired, but in a good way. There's just so much to do. What I'm worried about is, is there confusion in the film? Because there's so many things going on, especially in a movie like this, in 3-D. There's the color timing; Bob Richardson has done the film but he's in Budapest right now shooting another film, and he's got to get the timing right, but he's doing it through Greg Fisher who's living here now, but originally Greg did it with Bob in England, so there's that problem. Rob Legato is living here now for the special effects--he doesn't live here, but he's here in New York till the picture's finished. These special effects are hard! Some take 89 days to render--89 days to render! And what if you don't like it when it comes back? I tell them at a certain point, you've gotta tell me, you've got to say: This is the point of no return, Marty; you've got to make up your mind right now about this facet of the shot! So, you know, that's when you've got to make up your mind."

Scorsese, to pick a side in an endless argument, is America's greatest living director. And yet he still can't make up his damn mind, still gets obsessed, still gets crazed by the same kinds of things that make any creative type nuts. Is he going to get the resources he needs? Will his bosses like what he's doing? Will they give him another chance on another project? How much of his creative vision will get into this project? How much will the powers that be screw with his vision? When does he say "no" to them? When does he say "yes"? Whom does he trust? And how in the world is he going to get away with doing the work he loves for his whole life?

In an era when careers are measured in months rather than decades, Scorsese has reliably delivered for 45 years--but it still isn't easy. "There's always been pressure," he says. "People say you should do it this way, someone else suggests that, yes, there's financing, but maybe you should use this actor. And there are the threats, at the end--if you don't do it this way, you'll lose your box office; if you don't do it that way, you'll never get financed again. . . . 35, 40 years of this, you get beat up." Hollywood has always been a battlefield, as rough as any more-traditional corporate setting.

And yet unlike so many creative geniuses, Scorsese hasn't burned out, he hasn't alienated the people he's worked with, and he's generally not considered a creep. Despite the fact that he's never had a massive box-office hit (Shutter Island is his biggest grosser to date, with $300 million earned worldwide), Paramount decided to give him a reported $85 million to make a 3-D children's movie about a broody child named Hugo Cabret. And while Hugo's success is uncertain (for God's sake, screams conventional wisdom, it's two hours long, it's dark, it takes place in France, and aren't people over live-action 3-D?), Scorsese is well on his way toward funding his next project, Silence--an adaptation of a book about 17th-century missionaries. In Japan! (Which is yet another foreign country, people!)

Of course the spectacles audiences will wear to see Hugo will be a cross between Scorsese's own and the flimsy 3-D glasses of yore. | Photo by Art Streiber

Any man who can get this stuff financed--never mind make great art from the material--has clearly learned a trick or two. Scorsese has sweated the details of his career as thoroughly as the details of his movies. As he explains here, in his own rat-a-tat style, the man knows a few things about constructing a life of meaningful work--things that apply to anyone in the business of trying to craft a creative life.

RESPECT THE PAST

Nobody talks about the movies the way Marty Scorsese can talk about the movies. His conversation bounds from John Cassavetes (a mentor) to Steven Spielberg (a friend) to Akira Kurosawa (an acquired taste) to George Melies, the silent-film director and innovator whose story forms the basis of Hugo. "When we begin a film," says Dante Ferretti, the Oscar-winning production designer of Kundun, Gangs of New York, The Age of Innocence, and now Hugo, "I read the script and then Marty shows me films. Many, many films, with many different references he wants me to think of for the look of our movie. He carries all these films in his head. He shows me whole films for just one shot, telling me, 'Remember this image, that's the feel I want.'"

Scorsese revels in such details. He likes to speak of directors on three levels: their films, their careers, and their lives within and without Hollywood. He is fascinated by how these men (and the occasional woman) made it--or didn't make it--through the gauntlet. In 1995, he narrated and codirected a documentary about their careers called A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. It's a career how-to video disguised as the greatest lesson in U.S. film history. Going back to D.W. Griffith, through Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder, and up to modern-day filmmakers, he looks at how these "smugglers, iconoclasts, and illusionists" managed to get some version of their creative visions on-screen. "I was mainly interested in the ones who circumvented the system to get their movies done," he explains in the video. "To survive, to master the creative process, each had to develop his own strategy."

For someone whose own innovations are numerous--the introduction of a certain New York street vernacular in Mean Streets and Who's That Knocking at My Door, the intimacy of the boxing scenes in Raging Bull, the rush and flow of Goodfellas, and now, with Hugo, a reinterpretation or rediscovery of how 3-D can bolster a film's beauty without intruding on the story--Scorsese understands himself as a product of, and a battler against, the Hollywood system. He draws clear lines from classics past to his own work: Nicolas Cage's EMT inBringing Out the Dead is "a modern-day saint, like what Rossellini did in Europa '51"; the fight sequences in Raging Bull draw from, yes, the ballet in The Red Shoes. His comfort with the past is so deep that he romanticizes the old-Hollywood-studio system, where directors worked for one studio churning out at least a movie a year, if not three or four. "There was always a part of me that wanted to be an old-time director," he says, laughing. "But I couldn't do that. I'm not a pro."

A Man For All Genres

Think Scorsese is just a director of gangster flicks? Think again.

A Man For All Genres 

TRUST YOUR CONFIDANTS...

Ferretti is one of Scorsese's trusted advisers at this point, along with director of photography Bob Richardson, costume designer Sandy Powell, casting director Ellen Lewis, and, above all, editor Thelma Schoonmaker. As much as possible, he enjoys working with the same crew. He enjoys working with the same actors, as well. First came Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, and Joe Pesci; more recently it's been Ben Kingsley and, of course, Leonardo DiCaprio; in Silence, he'll turn once again to Daniel Day-Lewis.

"Any great artist needs a lot of support," says Schoonmaker. "We're a group that is totally committed to his high standards, and we understand what he's after." The creative process of a director, unlike that of an actor, is essentially collaborative. And some of Scorsese's greatest creative moments have come about because of suggestions by those closest to him. Watching some early takes on Raging Bull, British director Michael Powell remarked to Scorsese that "there's something wrong about the color of those red gloves." That, says Scorsese, was when he knew the film had to be shot in black and white. When Scorsese was scouting a location for his great Five Points battle in Gangs of New York, Ferretti pushed him toward the CineCitta production facilities in Rome. "We were in Venice talking about this," says Ferretti." We had considered New York, but there's nothing in the city that looks the way it did back in the 1860s. We thought about Canada, but it's too cold. So we decided to go to Rome to check out CineCitta . I loved this idea, since I live here [in Italy]. Before we went, I called up a restaurant, a good one just outside CineCitta, and I said, 'Listen, I'm bringing Mr. Martin Scorsese, and it's important that we eat well. Do you understand me? It's very important that we eat well!' So we went to CineCitta--Marty, Thelma, all of us--and after, we went to the restaurant. And that is why we shot Gangs at CineCitta! I mean, of course there were other reasons . . . "

...BUT NOT TOO MUCH

"There are two kinds of power you have to fight," Scorsese says. "The first is the money, and that's just our system. The other is the people close around you, knowing when to accept their criticism, knowing when to say no." All directors face pressure to make their films shorter, and Scorsese simply cannot deliver a short film. He hasn't made a sub-two-hour movie in 25 years, since the 119-minute-long The Color of Money. For children's movies, the industry standard is to keep it under 90 minutes. Hugo is a two-hour visual feast, with stretches that even some adults at its New York Film Festival premiere screening found taxing. "Some may suggest--how can I put this?--that there's an indulgence on my part," says Scorsese. "But sometimes something needs time to work on a viewer. People talk about length, but it's not just length. It's pacing and rhythm. I've done some of the fastest pictures--the sequences in Goodfellas, and particularly those in Casino, which is a three-hour film that moves very fast."

It's not just a question of ignoring what may seem like completely sensible suggestions. You've also got to know when a collaboration has run its course. "Over the years, people change and they want other things. You've got to understand when a collaborator isn't satisfied anymore," says Scorsese. "Michael Ballhaus--he was a lifesaver for me, an extraordinary cameraman who helped me relearn how to make a motion picture on After Hours. The last picture he did with me was The Departed. It was a very tough picture to make. We had lots of problems with actors' schedules, and I was constantly reworking the script. For The Aviator, the dialogue was very straightforward. But in The Departed, it was not, and with those actors! I mean, that's why you want them, but that doesn't make it easy. So Michael decided he wanted to do other things. That was very sad."

PLAY THE CORPORATE GAME

Sometimes you just have to give in to the system. Scorsese comfortably admits that he made at least two movies for calculated business reasons: The Color of Money, in 1986, and Cape Fear in 1991. The early '80s were difficult for Scorsese. "For a long time," says Schoonmaker, "our films were not recognized and did not make money--which was a serious problem." As much as critics now admire Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and even The King of Comedy, none of those movies ignited the box office. The Last Temptation of Christ had been ginned up in 1983, but six weeks before production was to begin, the studio pulled the plug. Scorsese's follow-up to The King of Comedy was After Hours, a quirky comedy starring Griffin Dunne. The film was shot on budget and on time over 40 nights in SoHo and did fairly well as a low-budget film. But none of that mattered. "They saw me as outside Hollywood," Scorsese remembers. "'You're gone, you're in independent cinema now, on the outside from now on.'"

Enter The Color of Money. Paul Newman was interested in doing a sequel to The Hustler, the 1961 movie he had starred in with Jackie Gleason. Scorsese abhorred the idea of doing a sequel to anything but says he was intrigued by the character of Eddie Felson: "Again, it was a guy who took too many risks, overstepped the line, didn't understand his own self-destruction, and didn't catch on until it was too late." So he took the job, as a way of proving to Hollywood that he could make a box-office winner. "It was a calculated business move. I needed the new studio heads to think they could give me another chance, finance me again."

Color hit at the box office, and Paul Newman took home the Oscar for best actor. As a result, at least the way Scorsese tells the story, he won the right to finally make his passion project, The Last Temptation. But the tortured production drained Scorsese financially. "I was never interested in the accumulation of money, you know. And I never had a mind for business," he explains. "There have been serious issues with money over the years. I have a nice house now, in New York. But there have been major, major issues. In the mid-'80s it was pathetic, I mean, my father would help me out. I couldn't go out, I couldn't buy anything. But it's all my own doing."

Three confidants pushed him into Cape Fear: his agent, then-CAA chief Michael Ovitz, the best career counselor Scorsese ever had; De Niro, enthralled by the role of Max Cady, the psychotic criminal bent on revenge; and Spielberg. "We were down in Tribeca at dinner," Scorsese remembers, "and I said, 'Steven, I can't do this, I hate the script.' He said, 'Marty, if you did the picture, would the family live at the end?' I nodded yes. So he said, "If that's the case, do whatever you want up until that! And, oh, by the way, this guy over here? He's the scriptwriter. Wesley [Strick], meet Marty.'" He took the movie, with Strick as a willing participant. "We tried to push the genre as far as we could," Scorsese remembers. "We pushed it as good as we could. And I'll never forget the call I got from Ovitz after we'd done it. I pick up the phone and he says, 'Congratulations, Marty, you're solvent! Now don't go screw it up again.'"

DEFY THEM WHEN YOU MUST

In the editing room, in the waning weeks of a production, everything is on the line. The studio pushes harder than ever for the film to satisfy its box-office needs. Actors, through their agents, plead for more screen time. Colleagues have their own ideas, and then there's the despair of the director realizing all the mistakes he made during those precious, long-gone days of shooting. "This is when you see I ain't got certain scenes and I wish I had them," says Scorsese. "Maybe we didn't have the money. Maybe I didn't have time, but if I had chosen to shoot other things other ways, I would have had the time. Whatever--now it's too late. Let's say you make 25 or 30 decisions on a particular scene. If one or two big ones were off, they can ruin everything about that scene. And you only discover this in the editing room."

Photo by Art Streiber

At this point, he says, everything is focused on one thing: "What does the film need, what does the scene need?" In every movie, whether a commercial play like The Color of Money or a passion project like The Age of Innocence, "there is an essence to the project that you must protect. You cannot make concessions on that, the story cannot be tampered with past that point; you have to fight off every power or force around you."

This is when Scorsese retreats to a long dialogue with his one constant collaborator, Schoonmaker, who has edited every film of his since Raging Bull. Unlike his other collaborators, Schoonmaker is not a child of the movies. Whereas Ferretti and Scorsese can go on and on about films they watched during their isolated childhoods, Schoonmaker grew up intending to be a diplomat and fell into editing after being chided in the early 1960s by State Department interviewers for her anti-apartheid views. Starting with their time together at New York University, she learned everything she knows about films from Scorsese, who also introduced her to her husband (Powell, the British director). "Thelma stays loyal to me, and to what I'm trying to do with the story, through everything. We'll say anything to each other in the editing room--anything," he says, smiling as he raises those famous eyebrows. "What can be done? What shouldn't be done? If the studio is saying this, maybe what they really mean is this. There are so many issues, it can get very tricky, very political. She'll see me getting tired and giving in, let's say, to someone who has my ear and is very influential, to someone who uses threats. There are a lot of those more and more now, and she will say, 'Be careful, because this is going to harm the whole thing, the whole project.' She gets me back on track if I'm going off."

"Marty knows Hollywood very well," says Schoonmaker, "and he handles them brilliantly. I could never do it. I've heard them say things in meetings--once someone said, 'Why don't you take Gone With the Wind and apply it to this movie?' I swear to God! I would walk out, but he just takes it in stride. His neighborhood prepared him for dealing with Hollywood. And he will fight to the death for a film not to be ruined."

"Thelma and I," says Scorsese, "we think alike in terms of culture and politics. The resistance is always there, that '60s thing we grew up with. Not hippies or anything! I'm not a hippie, not that I had anything against them. We have a way, we can tell when something smells too much of being a part of the process, and we don't want to get too close to that. Sometimes you wake up and you've gone there. But then you move on, watch that the next time you're more careful."

FIND ANOTHER OUTLET--OR EIGHT

Here's a little list of the side jobs that Martin Scorsese, who turned 69 this November 17, has been involved in over the past two years.

1) A Letter to Elia, a doc he directed about film director Elia Kazan.
2) Public Speaking, a doc he directed about writer Fran Lebowitz.
3) Boardwalk Empire, HBO's epic gangster series set in Atlantic City. He directed the first episode and now executive-produces.
4) Living in the Material World, the George Harrison doc he directed.
5) Surviving Progress, a doc he produced, based on the book A Short History of Progress.
6) La Tercera Orilla, a 2012 film directed by Argentine director Celina Murga, who was paired with Scorsese in the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative. He will executive-produce her movie.
7) A new Terence Winter project for HBO about a drug-fueled movie exec in 1970s New York; Scorsese will direct the first episode and executive-produce the series (with Mick Jagger).
8) The Film Foundation, which has restored more than 550 old movies and basically salvaged the silent-film era. Scorsese is the founder and chairman--and is personally involved in the restoration of 10 films this fall, including four silents directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

There are two reasonable responses to this kind of list:

1) You should be doing more with whatever creative gift you have.
2) As Tim Van Patten, an executive producer and director of Boardwalk Empire, says: "I don't know how he does it. He's always juggling. I have enough trouble doing this one job and having a life."

This work on the side, especially the music documentaries, has become increasingly vital for Scorsese. "There was a point with The Departed where I was ready to throw in the towel. I wanted to make the movie I thought the script was about, and I thought the studio wanted something else. I figured, Jeez, at this point in my career, I just want to make films where, granted I'll stay within budget, but I just wanna make the movie I wanna make. You're gonna come to me, especially on a project like this, my home turf sort of, and then you're asking for these actors and this kind of movie? I thought this might be the end, just let me out of here and I'm going to shoot the Rolling Stones on stage, that's it."

He did wind up making The Departed, as you may have heard. But since then, besides shooting the Rolling Stones in their most visceral stage performance in decades (Shine a Light), he also directed a great Bob Dylan doc (No Direction Home) and the George Harrison feature. These films are made on a much smaller budget than, say, Shutter Islandor Hugo. But with less money comes more freedom. "When I get frustrated with the commercial playing field of feature films, I go to these movies. I have had the need, more and more, to explore the spiritual or religious. Elements of that find their way into my music films. Music is for me the purest art form. There's a transcendent power to it, to all kinds, to rock 'n' roll. It takes you to another world, you feel it in your body, you feel a change come over you and a desire to live," he says, laughing at his enthusiasm. "That's transcendence." And a far cry from the mundane battles with Hollywood. "The Stones," he says, "working the stage like that at their age, strong and visceral, pure movement and sound and images. That's strong and powerful and defiant."

GIVE BACK AND LEARN

For a filmmaker so conscious of the history of his art, it's hardly surprising that Scorsese is a generous mentor. As Van Patten and Winter were setting up Boardwalk Empire, Scorsese regularly invited them to his offices for screenings. "He's this legend and all that," says Van Patten, "but you get past that instantly because Marty's such a regular guy. Whenever you're with him it's an education. He started us out by meeting once a week, for a double feature or a single movie. He never puts down a film. He'll find something positive about everything. We were watching this one movie called Pete Kelly's Blues [directed by Jack Webb, star of the '60s cop series Dragnet]. After, Marty says, 'Well, this is not Jack Webb's best work,' and I'm thinking, Jack Webb? Really? Does Jack Webb even have best work?' But that's the way he is."

"At this point," says Scorsese, "I find that the excitement of a young student or filmmaker can get me excited again. I like showing them things and seeing how their minds open up, seeing the way their response then gets expressed in their own work." Hugo itself is something of a lesson in film history for kids, with its plot centered around Melies, whose work, which Scorsese has helped restore, is featured in the movie in a run of strange and wild clips.

His biggest teaching project these days is his 12-year-old daughter, Francesca. He's trying to give her a cultural foundation that seems less readily available these days. "I'm concerned about a culture where everything is immediate and then discarded," he says. "I'm exposing her to stuff like musicals and Ray Harryhausen spectaculars, Frank Capra films. I just read her a children's version of The Iliad. I wanted her to know where it all comes from. Every story, I told her, every story is in here, The Iliad."

"Three months ago," he remembers, gesturing to the room around us, "I had a screening here for the family. Francesca had responded to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, so I decided to try It Happened One Night. I had kind of dismissed the film, which some critics love, of course, but then I realized I had only seen it on a small screen, on television. So I got a 35-millimeter print in here, and we screened it. And I discovered it was a masterpiece. The way Colbert and Gable move, their body language. It's really quite remarkable!"