While their length, form and quality may vary, Martin Scorsese’s documentaries fulfill a useful function in his filmography, acting as direct branch-offs to the current embodiments of his most active and frequent fixations. Their content generally comprises a mixture of three key topics: music, movies and storytellers. The subject of American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince, like fellow raconteur Fran Leibowitz (now subject of two Marty tributes), occupies the latter slot, indicating a prevailing fixation on dynamic talkers with thick NY accents and big personalities.
Yet Prince, who circulated in Scorsese’s orbit for a brief period in the late ‘70s, appearing briefly in Taxi Driver while also fulfilling a variety of vague, possibly dubious unofficial functions, is also Liebowitz’s opposite in some sense. Unlike the famously writer’s-blocked humorist, whose snarky wit catalogs violations of social niceties and various other gripes, Prince is more of a mysterious, potentially dangerous figure, hovering around the the fringes of the entertainment industry. Yet rather than the air of desperation such a status might indicate, he comes off as a Mephistophelean figure, loquacious and magnetic with a hint of latent menace. In keeping with this quality, not much context is provided for his position as a documentary subject, beyond bits of ironically positioned home movie footage and the man’s own collection of surprising stories.
Those stories provided the occasion for a bull session conducted at the house of Mean Streets actor and fellow Scorsese running buddy George Memmoli. Likely aided by a healthy quantity of illicit substances, this quick lark of a project used up film stock left over from shooting The Last Waltz, and served to let off steam from the stress of that famously complex undertaking. The setup seems to promise something unbearable, considering the generally poor translatability of stoned ramblings and inside jokes, yet Scorsese not only avoids such an outcome, but manages to spin the slim 50-minute doc into a deeper inquisition on the nature of cinematic storytelling itself.
Part of this is due to the content of Prince’s stories, which due either to his own skill for pacing and elision or Scorsese’s cutting (or more likely, a combination of both), are issued rapid-fire, in the style of stand-up sketches, packed with surprising whiplash moments that jerk unexpectedly from the funny to the extremely disturbing. It’s a mixed bag of practiced material: light reminiscences about family history and trained gorillas, a gas station robbery that mutates into a bloody murder, tales of electrocutions, drug addiction and teenage bagel scams. From these spawn both Pulp Fiction’s famous adrenaline injection scene, which Tarantino has admitted was lifted directly from one of Prince’s sordid anecdotes, and the potential origin point of Boogie Nights’ coked-out drug-dealer robbery gone wrong. The latter is more of a stylistic pull from the manic, unhinged vibe of the evening, and also the fact that Prince himself narrowly avoided becoming a victim of the so-called Wonderland Murders, the aftermath of a similar bungled heist involving porn star John Holmes.
In that case, Prince moved out of an LA drug house shortly before its inhabitants, some of whom had recently robbed club owner Eddie Nash, were bludgeoned to death by unknown assailants in a grisly home invasion. The details of his involvement, summed up in a fascinating New Yorker profile of Prince from 2020, highlights the real-life stake of these stories, and also the huge amount of luck it’s taken to keep him alive into his mid 70s. Luck is a running theme here, as is levity, and the ability to wriggle out of one scrape after another while holding onto a haggard sort of charm helps confirm him as another classic Scorsese trope: the indefatigable dreamer who navigates an unsavory milieu with swaggering aplomb, convinced he’ll come out on top.
Yet the most interesting angle here is not just the construction of a composite portrait of Prince through his own wild, possibly exaggerated yarns, but the shift in perspective upon those accounts that occurs as the film progresses. At first it appears that Prince is the one pulling the strings, spinning narratives that have his audience in the palm of his hand, commanding a spot in the director’s entourage off the brute force of his charisma. Then, in the final segment, Scorsese shifts from sympathetic audience analogue to a more active observer, prodding his subject for multiple takes on an emotional story about his dying father, demanding he strike the right balance of wryness and emotion, despite the clear toll recounting the episode is taking on the teller. Going back through earlier scenes, it’s easy to then reinterpret previous instances of eager audience participation, in which Scorsese teases out certain details and intonations, less as the inquiry of a delighted observer than a practiced director firmly guiding one of his actors.
This changes the focus on who’s being exploited, while also highlighting the inherently exploitative nature of the filmmaking process, and the subtle way in which stories can entrance audiences into the sway of their illusions. That spell is then tactfully broken, in a rupture that further signals its significance by serving as the closing scene. Just as with the finale of The Wolf of Wall Street, which aligns Jordan Belfort’s hucksterism with the director’s in a climactic sales pitch, the fabulism identified here applies both to Prince and Scorsese himself. In addition to predicting and underscoring themes that appear elsewhere in different variations, the movie allows for a window into a solidifying narrative perspective, which would come into clearer focus as the ‘70s drew to a close. As with many other classic Scorsese protagonists, American Boy ultimately isn’t about Prince, but the impulses and attitudes he manifests, perennial qualities for which he is merely the willing vessel.
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