“It was disastrous”: Paul Schrader’s early exposure to the highs and lows of Hollywood

Posted On September 22, 2024September 22, 2024

Hollywood can be a place where actors and filmmakers experience success right from the start, or it can be a cold and unforgiving town where it takes years to break through. Paul Schrader got to experience them both in the same production, which doubled as his cinema debut.

Starting off his career as a film critic, Schrader eventually realised that he wanted to pursue his creative side at the expense of his analytical one. In a development that didn’t happen to first-timers too often during the embers of ‘New Hollywood’, he earned a hefty sum for his very first screenplay.

Co-written alongside his brother Leonard, their script for The Yakuza became the subject of a heated bidding war. Two big screen novices suddenly found themselves in the middle of a studio tug-of-war, which was won by Warner Bros when the company stumped up $300,000 for the rights to turn it into a movie.

The whiplash didn’t stop there, either, with the project drafting in plenty of big-name talent on either side of the camera. The Schrader siblings’ script was polished by Chinatown scribe Robert Towne, with Academy Award-nominated director Sydney Pollack calling the shots, and the ensemble cast was headlined by the legendary Robert Mitchum.

A noir-inspired crime story that finds Brian Keith’s George Tanner placed in a sorry predicament when a Japanese organised crime figure kidnaps his daughter, Mitchum’s Harry Kilmer heads off to Japan to investigate the case before finding himself in the crosshairs of the Yakuza with a price on his head.

All of the ingredients were there for success, and if The Yakuza lived up to its billing, Schrader would be a made man. It might have been his first script, but it was overflowing with A-listers, only for the debutant to end up caught in the backdraft when it tanked at the box office.

Accurately referring to it as “a film which completely flopped” in an interview with Film Comment, Schrader wasn’t in the mood for sugarcoating it when asked to sum up his feelings on The Yakuza‘s commercial performance as a whole; “It was disastrous.”

Things didn’t go according to plan, but Schrader nonetheless had his foot in the door. He’d already gained attention as a promising writer because his maiden screenplay had caught the eye of almost every major outfit in Tinseltown, so there was a genuine sense of anticipation over what he would come up with next.

Funnily enough, what came next was Taxi Driver, an instant classic that partnered him up with Martin Scorsese for the first time. After that came Brian De Palma’s Obsession and cult favourite Rolling Thunder, ensuring that Schrader didn’t take very long to recover from the disappointment of his first published work going up in flames among the ticket-buying public.

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