Celebrity Biographies
mardik martin
He regularly collaborated with Martin Scorsese, in the 70s, although he later dedicated himself to teaching. Mardik Martin, who co-wrote “Raging Bull” for the filmmaker, passed away in Los Angeles at age 82 on September 11, 2019. “To say he was one of a kind is a wild understatement. No one will ever be able to to be in their shoes,” said Howard A. Rodman, former President of the Writers Guild, who broke the news.
Born on September 16, 1936 in Iran, in an Armenian family, he spent his childhood in Iraq. After working in the latter country, in Baghdad, during his adolescence, in a film distributor, he moved to the United States, where he graduated in Economics from New York University. There he ended up being recruited for various tasks by the film department, which gave him the opportunity to meet Martin Scorsese , then a very young aspiring filmmaker.
He wrote the 1964 short It’s Not Just You, Murray! , where he also served as his assistant, and actor. He also served as assistant director in ¿Quién llama a mi puerta? , the Italian-American’s first feature film. Subsequently, she co-wrote Mean Streets with him , considered “one of the films that gave rise to modern cinema” by critic Roger Ebert , and she worked as a screenwriter on New York, New York , and Raging Bull , alongside Paul Schrader , for the that both spent a year researching the protagonist, the boxer Jake LaMotta. He also took care of the treatment of The Last Waltz, Scorsese’s music documentary, and was responsible for the libretto for Valentino , by Ken Russell , where Rudolf Nureyev played the great silent film star.
Despite having a huge reputation in Hollywood at the beginning of the 1980s, Mardik Martin fell into drug hell. This prevented him, for example, from taking care of writing Trapped by his past , as planned, for Brian de Palma , a friend he had in common with Scorsese, who in fact was the one who introduced Robert De Niro to both of them . After coming out of the hole, he became a writing professor, again at the New York university. His last work as a screenwriter was The Father (The Cut) , where the director Fatih Akin reconstructed in 2014 the tragic massacre of the Armenian people that occurred in Turkey at the beginning of the 20th century. The life of Mardik Martin himselfit was brought to the screen in 2008 in the documentary Mardik: Baghdad to Hollywood .