Just a Shot Away: Mark Binelli on Martin Scorsese’s Life in Film

“You don’t accidentally end up with five wives.” — Mark Binelli on Martin Scorsese

We are filming in New York today, which is appropriate for a show about Martin Scorsese. Mark Binelli’s Just a Shot Away is out today, the first substantial biography of the great New York City film director. Binelli got no cooperation from Scorsese with the book, which isn’t really surprising given the author’s interest in the Scorsese family’s connection with organized crime. Binelli himself is more generous about the refusal. A big book about his life that he wouldn’t have had control over, he says, offered Scorsese no obvious upside. Control, of course, being the key word. Binelli directs Just a Shot Away, not Marty.

The surprising thing is how close the mob actually was to a working-class Sicilian-American family like the Scorseses. Not as a recreation of Goodfellas or even Mean Streets, but more as the mechanism by which an Italian family in Little Italy got a job in the garment district or settled a dispute with a neighbor. Binelli suggests that Scorsese’s father was not a gangster. But his uncle worked for one, a bootlegger and hitman who let the young Scorsese film part of his first feature on his roof.

Then the two obsessions. Films, which Scorsese could recall with a memory his friends called freakish, in an era before Google, YouTube or Wikipedia. And the church, which came relatively late in his adolescence — his parents were barely observant, and he only found Catholicism when the family moved back to Elizabeth Street. For Scorsese, of course, the cinema became the church and both his life and work are always a shot away from God.

What all this cost is the other half of the Scorsese story. Five wives, two daughters he was barely a father to, and a rock ’n’ roll style decade of drugs. It’s an astonishing history of one of America’s greatest 20th-century artists. And Binelli tells it all with the loving grace of both a wide-eyed fan and a sophisticated cultural historian. “You talkin’ to me?” De Niro’s Travis Bickle asks in Taxi Driver. Binelli suggests that Martin Scorsese has been talking to all of us for the last sixty years.

FURTHER READING

•   Just a Shot Away: Martin Scorsese’s Life in Film (Metropolitan Books, 3 November 2026, 544pp). Binelli writes for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Detroit City Is the Place to Be.

•   The two documentaries Binelli wishes Scorsese had made more of: Italian American (1974), on his parents, and American Boy (1978), on his friend Steven Prince — drug procurer, bodyguard, roommate.

•   Jonathan Taplin produced both Mean Streets and The Last Waltz, and has been on this show several times.

•   Scorsese on Scorsese, from the other side: Italianamerican aside, the key primary sources Binelli drew on are archive recordings — including Scorsese and De Niro brainstorming the earliest version of Raging Bull.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Mark Binelli is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of Detroit City Is the Place to Be and the novel Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!. He grew up in a Catholic family outside Detroit and lived for years in Scorsese’s old neighborhood, on the corner of Spring and Mulberry.

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