The recipient of an honorary Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Robert De Niro has a long history with the Croisette. In 1983, the legendary actor joined director Martin Scorsese and co-star Jerry Lewis in bringing The King of Comedy to the fest. The black comedy marked De Niro’s fifth film with Scorsese, coming on the heels of his best actor Oscar win for their 1980 collaboration, Raging Bull.
King of Comedy stars De Niro as Rupert Pupkin, an aspiring comedian with mental health issues who becomes obsessed with appearing on the late-night show hosted by his idol, Jerry Langford (Lewis). Paul D. Zimmerman, a former Newsweek film critic, had penned the script more than a decade before it got made; director Michael Cimino was initially attached but got held up with Heaven’s Gate. When Scorsese joined, he hoped to cast Johnny Carson as Langford and has said that the real-life late-night host spurned him by quipping, “You know one take’s enough for me.”
Scorsese was in poor health throughout the shoot. He had recently been hospitalized for exhaustion and pneumonia after filming several movies in rapid succession, but first-time producer Arnon Milchan pushed him to start filming King of Comedy a month ahead of schedule due to a looming directors’ strike. In the 2004 book Scorsese on Scorsese, the director recalled that the “strange movie” included a tough scene where Pupkin shows up at Langford’s home: “It took two weeks, and it was just so painful because the scene itself was so excruciating.”
20th Century Fox had released the film in theaters on Feb. 13, 1983, and critics were impressed, with THR’s review deeming it “a major achievement for all concerned.” But the dark film fizzled at the box office, collecting just $2.5 million ($8.4 million today). “People in America were confused by The King of Comedy and saw Bob as some kind of mannequin,” Scorsese said about De Niro, who would go on to lead the Cannes jury in 2011. “But I felt it was De Niro’s best performance ever.”
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