Martin Scorsese and Griffin Dunne on the set of After Hours in 1984 (Courtesy of the Criterion Collection)įor Martin Scorsese, the story of his 1985 yuppie horror-comedy After Hours begins on Thanksgiving Day 1983. What follows is my original introduction to the oral history and some choice outtakes, as well as behind-the-scenes Polaroids from the Oscar-winning makeup artist Valli O’Reilly, which are published here for the first time. As the story got leaner, the narrative gained a more propulsive pace, not unlike what Scorsese said about cutting After Hours with his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker: “We found that the faster we moved, the funnier it got.” Along the way, some illuminating and entertaining anecdotes were excised, and I didn’t want to leave them on the cutting room floor forever.

Then my editor-the unwaveringly patient and kind George Pendle-chopped it in half out of necessity. I machete’d it down to about 14,000 words. My initial rough draft was the size of a small book. Scorsese archivist Marianne Bower and After Hours production designer Jeffrey Townsend generously provided reams of invaluable documents: storyboards, memoranda, location-scouting reports, call sheets, script and production notes, and so on. Without the redemptive power of After Hours, the ensuing four decades of the director’s career-studded with such gems as Goodfellas, Casino, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, as well as the forthcoming Killers of the Flower Moon -may not have been possible.įor the better part of three months, I interviewed a couple dozen people who lived by night to make the film-among them Scorsese, Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, and Catherine O’Hara.

(Chong and his longtime partner, Cheech Marin, play burglars in the film.) The piece tells the story of how Scorsese, with his career as a major Hollywood filmmaker on the ropes in the mid-1980s, managed to claw his way back to viability with a low-budget surreal black comedy anchored in New York’s gritty downtown scene. My interview with Chong was conducted as part of the research I was doing for an oral history of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, which Graydon Carter’s Air Mail newsletter published on August 12.

Cheech and chong EAGLE MOUNTAIN CASINO