Martin Scorsese accepted the Producers Guild’s David O. Selznick Achievement Award on the PGA Awards tonight and took the Hollywood & Highland Ovation Ballroom down reminiscence lane — to about 60 years in the past, when he accepted a PGA nod for his scholar movie, It’s Not Just You, Murray! on the ripe age of twenty-two.
Painting the scene, the Killers of the Flower Moon filmmaker mentioned: “On the stage, Alfred Hitchcock, James Stewart, Jack Benny, Samuel Goldwyn, Jack Warner and Norman Lear, Lew Wasserman, Julie SteinCary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, Janel Leigh, Dick Van Dyke, Elke Sommer and David O. Selznick. They had been the individuals on the dais on the thirteenth version of this occasion on March 8, 1965. That dinner was known as the Milestone Awards Dinner and offered on the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
“At the very end of the dais was me,” Scorsese continued. “I was all the way on the end. I was receiving the Jesse L. Laskey intercollegiate award for a film I made at NYU, 22 years old. I’m up here with all these people. Cary Grant was so gracious to me. Many of the others were gracious too. When Elke Summer gave me the award, I didn’t know what to do. I look over my right shoulder, and Cary Grant goes, ‘Kiss her!’ So I did. I gotta tell you, the Milestone Award that night was presented to Alfred Hitchcock, who got up to speak after a 34-minute clip. It was a shorter evening, but 34 minutes!”
The honoree added: “The word bygone — talk about a bygone era, as they used to say. It really was the 13th edition of this event. It was another world. Coming over the hill is Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, Wild Bunch, right around the corner. Then somehow, we were the ones who were making the movies. The history in that room — Warner, Goldwyn, Selznick, those incredible actors.”
Scorsese shared with the ballroom how Selznick and Hitchcock had been at all times at odds. “The thing about these guys, they cared. This is a keyword — obsessed — by the cinema. They both lived their obsessions. Selznick dictated those infamous memos. That’s what the memos were about, the obsession.”
The Raging Bull and The Departed director remembered when he first noticed the Selznick manufacturing Duel within the Sun when he was 4. “It was condemned by the Catholic church, and my mother wanted to see it,” he mentioned. “She said, ‘The kid likes westerns, I’m taking him.’” ,
He continued: “It’s the primary movie I can keep in mind seeing by title. So the very first influence of basic Hollywood cinema begins proper there for me. Slashes of coloration, motion, the landscapes, beautiful set items just like the dance within the cantina, the approaching horsemen lining up towards the railroad, the mysticism of the movie blended with the profane. It’s performed out on a larger-than-life display screen by larger-than-life actors.
“At one point, Lionel Barrymore says, ‘There’s a strange glow in the sky tonight.’ Those figures of him in the buggy are silhouetted against a red sky. That’s 1946, and I was sure that those figures wound up in my film Killers of the Flower Moon, the sequence with the prairie on fire at night. It stayed with me all those years.”
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Summed up Scorsese: “Tonight I feel like it’s really extraordinary, like I’m coming full circle. I was 22 when Cary Grant told me to kiss Ekle Sommer. Now I’m 81, and I’m glad I kissed her.”
The David O. Selznick award acknowledges producers for his or her excellent physique of labor in movement footage. Past recipients embrace producers comparable to Steven Spielberg, Barbara Broccoli, Mary Parent, Tom Cruise, Brian Grazer, Frank Marshall, Kathleen Kennedy and George Lucas.