March 30, 1981. John Hinckley Jr. waits outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington DC, with a gun.
He had done something similar the year before with President Carter, staying three blocks from the White House with two revolvers and keeping an eye on Carter's itinerary. One time he made a "test run" where Hinckley got close to Carter in a crowd, but eventually was unable to "psyche himself up" to doing the assassination he originally planned.
He also, in February of 1981, made an attempt at Senator Edward Kennedy (the last Kennedy brother) and visited his office, but he was unable to find him and broke off.
He changed target again to one he previously considered: President Reagan. This time, on March 30, 1981 at 2:27 PM, he followed through with the attempted assassination. In addition to hitting Reagan (who survived due to surgery, but it was a near death), three others were injured, including the press secretary James Brady (who suffered severe brain damage and died many years later due to it).
Before the attempt, he had sent a letter to the actress Jodie Foster.
I will admit to you that the reason I'm going ahead with this attempt now is because I just cannot wait any longer to impress you. I've got to do something now to make you understand, in no uncertain terms, that I am doing all of this for your sake! By sacrificing my freedom and possibly my life, I hope to change your mind about me. This letter is being written only an hour before I leave for the Hilton Hotel. Jodie, I'm asking you to please look into your heart and at least give me the chance, with this historical deed, to gain your respect and love.
I love you forever,
John Hinckley
Yes, his entire motivation for considering assasinating Carter, then Kennedy, and then finally shooting Reagan: he wanted to impress Jodie Foster. He had watched her in Taxi Driver and had become obsessed (and did some stalking with repeated phone calls and poems under her door).
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Taxi Driver was hard to get made. The producers, Michael Phillips and Julia Phillips, had had success with The Sting, but the extreme violence (and the pornography, and the child prostitute) made investors skittish, and Columbia eventually helped get to a budget of 1.3 million, only possible via the leads being accepting of low salaries, especially De Niro (fresh off an Oscar win of Godfather II).
Columbia made constant suggestions on saving money, enough to the point Scorsese threatened to quit the project. It did end up going a bit over budget, to 1.9 million.
The level of violence led to the film being booed at Cannes, and it nearly got an X rating (Scorsese edited the color of the blood to be less red in order to make the ratings board happy).
It ended up a success, with both acclaim from critics and a healthy $28 million gross at the box office.
This led to Scorsese being able to make the musical New York, New York (a film technically started before Taxi Driver) which became the opposite -- a critical and commercial failure. The production was famously cocaine-fueled and the filming ballooned in both cost and length; Scorsese famously kept trying to search for personal scenes with improvisation and scenes kept getting added in ways the sets didn't support.
In the usual way one might consider a "blacklist", one might nominate New York, New York as trouble, but despite its crash, it didn't have notable long-term effect. It sure had immediate effect: Scorsese considered moving to Italy and making exclusively documentaries, and eventually his health -- and excessive drug problems -- landed him in a hospital, and his career was essentially "rescued" by DeNiro who had been keen on a movie (Raging Bull) based on the autobiography of the boxer Jake La Motta.
Round number thirteen, the hard luck number, there’s the buzzer, and I think you know both the boys.
It includes some of the most intense boxing scenes put to film, and a moment where De Niro and Pesci are sparring and De Niro breaks one of Pesci's ribs; this actually happened and was what made it to camera.
Raging Bull put Scorsese back in the spotlight, and was a giant success, with 8 Oscar nominations.
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So let's recap Scorsese's big movies in this span:
Taxi Driver: smash hit, associated with violence
New York, New York: considered a failure
Raging Bull: smash hit, associated with violence
Scorsese essentially -- inadvertently -- typecast himself as a director. He was now world famous, but for Raging Bull, and he could be recognized on sight.
Deranged reactions didn't help. Hinkley's was one (Scorsese briefly considered quitting filmmaking altogether after the event happened). Raging Bull provoked another incident, as the actress Teresa Saldana (who played Lenore La Motta) was attacked by a fan. The fan thought she was an angel who needed to be killed in order to go back to heaven.
So: a wildly successful director, but where unsavory associations wore on him. It perhaps didn't help he followed with The King of Comedy (1982) about an obsessive stand-up comedian and stalker who comes up with a kidnapping plot.
Where the problems really came to roost was The Last Temptation of Christ.
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Production on The Last Temptation of Christ started in 1983 and the movie was only released in 1988, which should give you an idea of how much a problem it was. Paramount agreed to funding (original budget: $11 to $12 million).
Scorsese was insistent on location shooting in Israel. This ended up causing logistical trouble (they lost their producer who couldn't come) and by November 1983 while pre-production was still being developed Scorsese became known as "anti-Christian". A letter writing campaign was arranged by The Evangelical Sisterhood, and letters started to roll in to Gulf + Western (parent company of Paramount). 500 a day. Paramount held a religious summit. Theologians raised direct concerns, and pressure reached the point that while the production had sets, costumes, and a cast, there was nobody willing to fund it and nobody willing to distribute it.
The movies After Hours and The Color of Money ended up happening first, while Scorsese's agent kept working to make The Last Temptation happen; finally, with some wrangling at a filming location and lower budget point, Universal and Cineplex Odeon became interested. Shooting started in Tunisia and Morocco on October 12, 1987.
It ended up being, in Scorsese's words, the "most physically arduous" movie he had ever made.
It was of course still controversial on its 1988 release, the end scene where Jesus dreams of being married to Mary Magdalene in particular. Scorsese received death threats. A Catholic group set fire to a cinema in Paris while the film was being shown. While the subject matter was undoubtedly part of the issue, it still hung overhead that Scorsese was known as the violence-and-mafia-movie guy, a reputation he perhaps never quite shook, since the 1990 movie Goodfellas ("As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster") was considered his "return to form".
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LoBrutto, V. (2007). Martin Scorsese: A Biography. ABC-CLIO.
Priggé, S., Prigge, S. (2004). Movie Moguls Speak: Interviews with Top Film Producers. United Kingdom: McFarland.
Raymond, M. (2013). Hollywood's New Yorker: The Making of Martin Scorsese. SUNY Press.
Schickel, R. (2011). Conversations with Scorsese. Knopf.