He didn\u2019t do it three days in a row. Ferrara snorted smack for 14 years straight. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Revelations like this are pretty much everything one could have hoped for from a memoir by the picaresque gutter poet, who has spent the past four decades playing Virgil to adventurous moviegoers, taking us on tours of grimy underworlds full of sleaze, desperation and spiritual torment. That he\u2019s somehow alive, sober, and still making films at the age of 73 is a shock to everyone, especially himself. Scene<\/em> is partially a chronicle, something of an amends and it reads like a late night rant. You didn\u2019t expect an Abel Ferrara autobiography to be linear, did you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n A lot of the time it feels like the book is shouting at you. If you\u2019ve ever heard an interview with Ferrara, bellowing abundant obscenities in his raspy Bronx roar, you know the voice. He writes like he\u2019s jabbing a finger in your chest while he\u2019s telling you a story. The book rambles and skips around in time, alternating anecdotes about his father — an alcoholic and compulsive gambler who killed himself in 1980 — with tales of shady characters like his Uncle Bobo, who used to bring underage girls to Jake LaMotta\u2019s nightclub, and the frightening Fun City moneymen who financed the fledgling filmmaker when he was making porno flicks fresh out of SUNY Purchase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ferrara\u2019s career trajectory \u2013 from pornography to grindhouse exploitation to arthouse darling \u2013 is fairly unprecedented. But then, there\u2019s really nobody else like Abel Ferrara, a natural born hustler with a carny barker\u2019s knack for titillation that\u2019s simultaneously suffused with an intense spiritual longing. His 1992 masterpiece Bad Lieutenant<\/em> is somehow both the most blasphemous and the most devoutly religious movie I\u2019ve ever seen \u2013 a sordid Stations of the Cross culminating with a full-on Last Supper in a crackhouse and Harvey Keitel taking the Gethsemane sequence to heights of anguish seldom seen in American cinema. Of his star, the filmmaker says, \u201cHarvey knew how to put the spurs to the demons we were all riding and exorcise them in front of the camera.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Making the movie spooked him. \u201cI walked out of the sunlight into that big dark church with \u2018Fuck\u2019 scrawled across the altar and I thought, we shouldn\u2019t be doing this.\u201d A recovering Catholic into Buddhism and meditation these days, Ferrara confesses to \u201cstill looking over my shoulder for a nun with her pointer stick.\u201d But the book is otherwise surprisingly cagey about matters of faith, given how many pictures he\u2019s made on the subject. His penchant for digression can be frustrating, with the memoir veering off in occasionally confusing flurries of dealers, lovers and unhappy endings. The chapter about his affair with Asia Argento is chaotic enough to be an Abel Ferrara film of its own, and it\u2019s impossible not to be moved by his remembrances of Chris Penn. But the conversational tone makes a reader wish you could every once in a while interrupt him for clarification: \u201cWait, did you just say you were dating Debbie Harry at the time?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are a lot more pages than you might have guessed devoted to Body Snatchers<\/em>, the 1993 sequel-slash-remake that represented Ferrara and his regular crew\u2019s lone attempt to work inside the Hollywood system with a major studio. There are also tantalizing details of another that almost happened. Obsessed with King of New York<\/em>, Al Pacino originally wanted Ferrara to direct Carlito\u2019s Way<\/em>, and the project looked for a bit like it might be moving forward with Keitel in the lawyer role eventually played by Sean Penn. It all blew up over a page-one rewrite by the studio\u2019s preferred screenwriter David Koepp (\u201ca fucking travesty,\u201d according to Ferrara) and an incident at Cannes when the director grabbed a bottle of white wine off the table of Universal Studios chief Tom Pollock to bring with him for the cab ride back to the hotel, tucking it into his suit jacket as he walked away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat is wrong with me? A self-destructive nature? An innate feeling of unworthiness? A mistrust of success? What\u2019s wrong with me is that I\u2019m an alcoholic,\u201d Ferrara concludes. In its rambling, roundabout way, the book builds to the filmmaker finally getting sober, finding a new life in Rome and a renewed passion for his art. But Scene<\/em> is not a drag in the way a lot of similar recovery stories are. He\u2019s not lecturing, and the rare times the author gives advice \u2013 like ripping out the page with the crack recipe and burning it \u2013 feel hard-earned and true. He sounds grateful to still be here. And a little amazed. Ferrara compares himself and other filmmakers to the ancient cave-painters \u201cscratching pictures into stone to confirm it, as proof we exist. Proof we care about sharing what we learned with another human being.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n “Scene” is on bookshelves now.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On page 89 of Abel Ferrara\u2019s new memoir Scene, the director provides an enthusiastically detailed description of how to make […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":633,"featured_media":27883,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381],"tags":[1433],"class_list":["post-27881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","tag-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/633"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27881"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27887,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27881\/revisions\/27887"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/abel-author-photo-credit-Mauro-Maglione-scaled-e1761331158936-1024x576.jpeg\")