Scene: A Memoir

In this raw debut account, filmmaker Ferrara takes stock of his directing career and his struggles with addiction. The book opens in 1974, when a 23-year-old Ferrara stopped driving garbage trucks and secured financing for his first movie with a loan from New York City mob boss Matty “the Horse” Ianniello. That same scrappy energy suffuses the rest of the narrative, especially sections detailing the production of Ferrara’s biggest successes, including 1990’s King of New York and 1992’s Bad Lieutenant. Flashes of humor appear in these sections, too: Ferrara memorably recalls Harvey Keitel dumping the script of Bad Lieutenant in the garbage after reading five pages before he eventually agreed to play the lead. Such anecdotes lighten an otherwise grim chronicle, which spends significant time on Ferrara’s “drinking and drugging”—including a “serious crack habit” in the early ’90s, followed by years of heroin abuse before he got clean in the late aughts—which he acknowledges “ruined” his second daughter’s childhood. Frank and unflinching without curdling into cynicism (“The life force you come into the world with can be flipped from the bad back to the good, refocused and nurtured”), this offers a fascinating window into a storied career. Admirers of Ferrara’s films will be rapt. (Oct.)