American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince

Steven Prince talks for an evening. He has been Neil Diamond's road manager, a heroin addict, a gun dealer, and he played Easy Andy the gun salesman in Taxi Driver. Martin Scorsese sets up the camera and listens; he is in the room too, laughing and asking questions. What comes out is not a portrait but a performance of storytelling. Prince's stories entered film history. The passage where he describes bringing back a woman who had overdosed by driving an adrenaline needle straight into her heart was later restaged in Pulp Fiction; another of his stories went into Waking Life. The fifty-five minute film was shot in 1978 across a couple of weekends. The telling rests entirely on one man, and Scorsese never questions whether any of it is true. Who it's for: Viewers who like Scorsese's documentary work, the 1970s American film scene, and films built on storytelling. Who it's not for: The accounts of drugs and violence are explicit. The film also rests on a single source and verifies none of its claims.