{"id":10968,"date":"2025-10-21T17:46:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T17:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/10968\/"},"modified":"2025-10-21T17:46:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T17:46:08","slug":"when-abel-ferrara-was-king-of-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/10968\/","title":{"rendered":"When Abel Ferrara Was King of New York"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I descended further into my own hell, my career was taking off. It was the early \u201990s, and independent auteur NYC filmmaking was having its moment in the sun. Spike, Jarmusch<\/a>, the Coen brothers<\/a>, the Angelika Film Center, Bob Shaye with New Line Cinema, and the Weinstein brothers with Miramax. But like my four-year-old once had me write on a cookie box, \u201cGood things never last.\u201d Hollywood called and like fools we all listened. Buying a crack pipe at two in the morning on Sunset Blvd wasn\u2019t as easy as on the Lower East Side, but I found a way.<\/p>\n

Walken was originally the Bad Lieutenant. We spent the week together in LA at the Marmont<\/a>, working at fine-tuning the script. On the Sunday morning before I had to go back to New York and finish the prep, we had a meeting in my room, the producer Ed Pressman, Walken, and myself. Chris, in his usual direct way, said, \u201cEd, I know what Abel wants now, and I can\u2019t give it to him.\u201d Then he stood up, shook Ed\u2019s hand, and walked out. It took a moment for it to register with Ed. \u201cShould I go after him?\u201d I couldn\u2019t even muster an answer. Ed went racing off down the hall. I sat there thinking, damn, I already spent my director\u2019s fee.<\/p>\n

Maybe I should have expected it. During that week Chris had said to me, \u201cWhat\u2019s this fascination with religion? Come on\u2014Christ? He\u2019s an overused literary device.\u201d Again Jay Julien came to the rescue. He gave the script to Harvey Keitel.<\/p>\n

The teaching has to come from the teacher. It\u2019s handed down physically to the student. Like the begat part of the Bible when you get all those names, it\u2019s the same in the Buddhist texts. Proof of lineage. You can watch Mean Streets and Raging Bull all you want, but you\u2019re not going to get it just by watching. It\u2019s got to come direct from the source, hand-to-hand, face-to-face. The first thing Harvey said to me was, \u201cThere is a lot you guys can teach me, but there are things I can teach you.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As I descended further into my own hell, my career was taking off. It was the early \u201990s,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10969,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8858,17,157,158,9,11,10,989,990],"class_list":["post-10968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-christopher-walken","tag-culture","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-textbelowcentergridwidth","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10968\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}