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Robert De Niro feels he’s been extremely “fortunate to wind up with Marty” for all these years, and Martin Scorsese returned the compliment as the actor and director sat down after a screening of Mean Streets, the 1973 film that marked their first collaboration, and Scorsese’s breakout. They went on to make nine more features together.

The two grew up together in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, an Italian enclave populated with low level mafiosi. De Niro’s “Johnny Boy” Civello in Mean Streets, a reckless but charming small-time gambler deeply in debt to loan sharks, was based on people they both knew, the duo told a Q&a with rapper Nas after the packed screening at the Beacon Theater. The climatic final scene, a car chase, shooting and crash, was inspired by a trauma Scorsese said he barely escaped – getting out of a car only a few minutes before it smashed.

In Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, the late Robbie Robertson’s final original score, laced with Native American percussion and fierce electric guitar, captures the chilling tension that was building up in 1920s Oklahoma’s Osage Nation community.

The intense musical work, which Robertson composed while battling prostate cancer, was a labor of love for the five-time Grammy nominee given his own Mohawk tribal roots. He died in August at 80.

On today’s Crew Call, we speak with The Band co-founder’s longtime manager Jared Levine, who expounds on Robertson’s process with his longtime friend Scorsese in mounting the three-hour epic starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone.

Related: Martin Scorsese & Robbie Robertson To Receive Society of Composers and Lyricists Spirit of Collaboration Award

“Being able to do work in the Native American music world was important to him,” says Levine. “This was the...

“I just miss Robbie, period,” says Martin Scorsese, talking about a professional and personal relationship with Robbie Robertson that lasted 47 years. “The friendship, the work, the tales he told — all of it.”

Although the filmmaker has already declared his intentions to shoot a new project in 2024 — an adaptation of “A Life of Jesus” by the late Japanese author Shūsaku Endō — Scorsese still has his head very much in his darkly poetic “Killers of the Flower Moon” and the late, great musical collaborator and friend who composed its haunting score.

“It meant a lot to both of us that we did this project together,” Scorsese told Variety on Friday, noting that “’Killers of the Flower Moon’ was a kind of culmination” of their entire working relationship.

The director’s epic Western crime drama chronicling the true story of the reign of terror waged against the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma starring Leonardo DiCaprio,...

Jonathan Taplin has had more careers than most folks — Bob Dylan and The Band’s tour manager, film producer (the Last Waltz and Mean Streets) Wall Street entrepreneur, teacher at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. In an exclusive excerpt from his latest book, “The End of Reality: How 4 Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto,” Taplin lays out the dangers of becoming complacent in the face of the fantasy worlds offered by the leading technocrats.

Four very powerful billionaires— Elon Musk, Peter Thiel,...

“This film should be played loud!” It’s a cliché now, a concert-movie disclaimer that’s become the equivalent of that hippie-dippy tagline from those Freedom Rock compilation ads (“Well, turn it up, maaaaan.”) But in the late Seventies, when it first flashed onscreen in all white font against a stark black background before the credits of The Last Waltz, you knew it meant business. Keep moving that volume knob clockwise, folks. Let the needle swing into the red.

And then we begin at the end, with the weary members...

An amazing Blu-ray year is capped by a genuine favorite, rescued by its filmmaker and set aside for almost twenty years. Wim Wenders was forced to make a shortened version of what he hoped would be his greatest success, following Wings of Desire: but he cleverly saved his 4.5-hour uncut version, making its Blu-ray debut on December 10. Longform video is currently the rage, so perhaps the time has finally come for the uncut Bis ans Ende der Welt. The music soundtrack is nothing less than fantastic, not to be missed.

Until the End of the World

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 1007

1991 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 158, 181, 287 min. / Bis ans Ende der Welt / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date December 10, 2019 / 39.95

Starring: Solveig Dommartin, William Hurt, Sam Neill, Rüdiger Vogler, Jeanne Moreau, Max von Sydow, Chishu Ryu, Kuniko Miyake, Allen Garfield, David Gulpilil, Ernie Dingo, Lois Chiles, Adelle Lutz, Chick Ortega, Eddy Mitchell,...

Jean-Pierre Blais, Jane Wrightson and Jonathon Taplin at the Acma content conversation. (Photo: Acma)..

The Federal Government.s review into Australian and children.s content is now underway, with aims to create policies that will ensure a strong Aussie screen sector into the future.

However, our industry is not alone in grappling with how to sustainably produce local content in a digital era..

At the recent Acma content conversation conference, international regulators and funding agencies gave insight into how they had adapted to try to deal with changes in the global market.

Jane Wrightson, CEO of Nz On Air - the funding agency that supports public broadcast media in New Zealand - pointed out New Zealand differs to Australia in that it has virtually no media regulation. This includes no cross-ownership restrictions, quotas, licence fees or conditions. There's also no non-commercial mainstream broadcaster except Maori TV. Interventions in the...

The Trump administration will not try to break up Silicon Valley’s powerful monopolies — Google, Facebook and Amazon. “I have no hope whatsoever,” said USC dean emeritus Jonathan Taplin, author of the new book, “Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.” Taplin describes President Trump as “subservient to” the tech giants, but says President Obama was the same. “Politicians seem to be over-awed by real billionaires,” Taplin told TheWrap. “I don’t even know if Trump is a real billionaire. But I’m certain Peter Thiel, Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg are real billionaires.

Author and academic Jonathan Taplin has issued a warning over the dangers tech giants Google, Facebook and the like pose to U.S. democracy in an op-ed in The New York Times. In it he argues that it’s high time to break up such tech “monoliths” because — among other things — their successes have “stymied innovation on a broad scale.” Taplin argues that the world’s five largest companies by market capitalization have all changed over the last decade except for Microsoft. “Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Citigroup and Shell Oil are out and Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon.

It’s been a rough patch for the big tech companies that built their near-boundless riches on the content and conversations of billions of users. Now critics say they’ve accreted too much power at the expense of people, copyright, even democracy, and should be curbed, fined, even broken up. Those critics may be right.

Just since the election, we’ve had swirling controversies over the impact of fake news – fueled by Facebook and Google’s blackbox algorithms and ad revenues – that may have shifted the election results a few crucial points. The Trump Administration’s demonstrated tenuous relationship to actual facts since then has only intensified concerns.

Separate from all that, advertisers have been boycotting Google, and to a lesser extent Facebook. They’re unhappy that their brands keep ending up next to (and even paying for) extremists’ videos, posts and other objectionable material.

The European Union is reviewing...

"This film should be played loud!" It's a cliché now, a concert-movie disclaimer that's become the equivalent of that hippie-dippy tagline from those Freedom Rock compilation ads ("Well, turn it up, maaaaan.") But in the late Seventies, when it first flashed onscreen in all white font against a stark black background before the credits of The Last Waltz, you knew it meant business. Keep moving that volume knob clockwise, folks. Let the needle swing into the red.

And then we begin at the end, with the weary members of the...

I was very happy to read Laura Barton’s lovely piece on the dual 40th anniversaries of The Last Waltz and Jim Szalapski’s Heartworn Highways (G2, 16 September). However, when I came to the paragraphs devoted to my old friend and producer Jonathan Taplin, I could feel my eyebrows furrowing: slightly, but furrowing nonetheless. I owe Jonathan a great deal: if it weren’t for him, I would never have been able to make either Mean Streets or The Last Waltz. Yet, it seems our recollections of the shoot on the latter film differ on one important point.

Related: The Last Waltz and Heartworn Highways: two 40-year-old films at the birth of Americana

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David Bloom is a Deadline contributor. USC will launch a three-year research effort called the Edison Project to figure out key issues of the emerging entertainment economy surrounding new creators of content, new platforms and distributors of that content, new business models to finance their work and new metrics to measure success. USC Annenberg professor Jonathan Taplin, who heads that school’s Innovation Lab, announced the project’s general outlines during a keynote speech Friday at the Digital Marketing & Analytics Summit in Los Angeles. Taplin told a ballroom of entertainment and tech executives that sector after sector of the entertainment business is showing signs of trouble, from the long-staggering music industry to a movie business that launched numerous bombs this past summer, to an ad business that’s consolidating and automating. These problems are happening even as the world’s entertainment-consuming middle class is booming, and creation of digital media has jumped nine times.

About six months ago, Google began releasing data on takedown requests it received as part of a "Transparency Report." The goal was to showcase how content holders were attempting to delete links to infringing content. Now, USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab has taken the data and used it in a way that Google probably didn't anticipate. Annenberg has come out with a ranking of the top 10 online ad networks that place the most ads to pirate websites. And guess what? Google is No. 2. Jonathan Taplin, director of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, explained to us the methodology behind

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Last week, Fast Company hosted its Innovation Uncensored event in New York -- and also saw a major throwdown between Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and Jonathan Taplin, a producer ("Mean Streets," "To Die For"), tour manager for The Band, Sopa supporter and currently director of USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab. Bottom line, Ohanian believes the internet economy -- which includes a heavy dose of free content from sites like Pirate Bay -- can provide a fair deal to artists. Taplin thinks he's selfish, clueless and can shove it. Making the arguments even sharper the recent death of The Band drummer Levon Helm, who died of throat cancer the day after the debate. Taplin believes unprotected music rights helped drive Helm to ruin and forced him to contunie touring while mortally ill. We're presenting both arguments here, as well as the full videos of the debate. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Everett Bob Dylan circa 1970

“Outlaw Blues,” Jonathan Taplin’s absorbing new book, is part-memoir and part history lesson. Taplin, a former cohort of Bob Dylan, The Band, George Harrison and Martin Scorsese, cleverly traces the modern history of American popular culture, going back as far as Louis Armstrong making music that would influence players for decades and Benny Goodman leading an integrated group.

In addition, Taplin, now 64 years old, also draws on his rich history of working as a tour...

Jay Leno and David Letterman are rooting for the Republicans.

That's not a comment on their political beliefs, which late-night hosts play close to their vests. But if comic fodder is any factor, after-hours hosts will benefit from a John McCain administration: During a survey in September, the Center for Media and Public Affairs counted seven times as many jokes about the Republican ticket than the Democratic one.

The outcome of the battle for the White House will have consequences far beyond entertainment. But next week's election will also impact Hollywood, influencing culture and policy in crucial ways.

In redefining the pop cultural zeitgeist, it could indirectly affect which movies are made and how much media regulation conglomerates face as well as have an impact on digital development and cable-news ratings.

And it will vault some personalities to popularity and doom others to obscurity.

The principle: What's good for one...

WASHINGTON -- Intertainer, a pioneer in the video-on-demand business, filed civil subpoenas against MPAA president and CEO Jack Valenti and the MPAA's technology officer Thursday in their legal action against the industry-backed MovieLink online delivery service. Through the subpoenas, the company is seeking information on the involvement that Valenti and Jon Liebowitz had in the formation of MovieLink and contacts the pair of executives had with lawmakers, their aides and Justice Department officials. Intertainer CEO and producer Jonathan T. Taplin (Mean Streets) told The Hollywood Reporter the MPAA executives may have done nothing wrong, but the company wants to know how extensive the contacts were and if they were involved in the studios' decision to pull out of his company. "Clearly they were all together in the planning of MovieLink," he said. "I know it's (Valenti's) job to fix things for the industry, and it could be that he was just doing his job, but we don't know that."...