Book Beat welcomes Mark Binelli for an in-store author signing and conversation about his new book, Martin Scorsese’s Life In Film: Just a Shot Away by Mark Binelli.
He’ll be at Book Beat on Thursday, November 11 from 6:30-8pm and at the Redford Theatre on Friday, November 12 accompanying an 8pm showing of Scorsese’s 2006 film The Departed.
“A true biography rather than a greatest-hits compendium or a superficial survey of his films. . . . Think of this portrait as capturing the Martin Scorsese who lives behind the man we think we already know.”
—Booklist
“A first-rate bio of America’s foremost filmmaker.”
—Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
“Epic, frenetic, thoughtful, darkly comic, and deeply researched like Scorsese’s best films, Just a Shot Away zips by in an adrenaline rush, reframing the director’s work within the context of his life, giving novel perspective to every scene. Mark Binelli’s voice, too, is singular: a commanding grasp of his subject’s genius, moderated by a sober skepticism, fearlessness, and turns of phrase that had me hollering. The book, crucially, is not just about Marty, but also Bobby and Mardik and Robbie and Thelma and Barbara and Isabella—a community of creatives who kept Scorsese artistically nourished and, at times, alive. This is the biography that Scorsese earned and deserves.”
—Dan Charnas, author of the PEN Award-winning Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm
The first major biography of Martin Scorsese, America’s greatest modern filmmaker, a book as stylish and audacious as the director’s movies, drawing on previously unseen sources, original research, and new interviews to reveal the origins, genius, and influence of his life and work.
Just a Shot Away chronicles the brilliant and tumultuous life and career of Martin Scorsese, one of the world’s foremost living filmmakers, from his childhood on the violent streets of mid-century Little Italy, recreated in unprecedented detail, to his tectonic contributions to the cinema of the New Hollywood and beyond. The making of such masterpieces as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Waltz are explored here in revelatory depth, along with undersung favorites like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and After Hours.
Through deep archival research, interviews with dozens of friends and collaborators, and access to a trove of previously undiscovered material, including firsthand accounts from Scorsese, his parents, Robbie Robertson, Robert De Niro, and ex-wife Isabella Rossellini, Just a Shot Away dynamically recasts the life of the master filmmaker with brio and the headlong, form-shattering dynamism of one of its subject’s own indelible pictures.
Mark Binelli is the author of Detroit City Is the Place to Be and the novels Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ All-Time Greatest Hits. A features writer at Rolling Stone for twenty years, he is now a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn.