Where to watch Raging Bull (1980)

Trivia & production notes

• Robert De Niro discovered Jake LaMotta's autobiography while filming The Godfather Part II and pitched it to Martin Scorsese, despite being disappointed by the book's writing style.
• Martin Scorsese initially rejected Raging Bull multiple times, saying he didn't understand boxing and found the sport boring, but agreed to direct after nearly dying from a drug overdose.
• Michael Powell advised that the film be shot in black and white after pointing out that boxers in LaMotta's era only wore maroon, oxblood, or black gloves, not the color in Scorsese's test footage.
• Joe Pesci had not appeared in a film for four years and was working at an Italian restaurant in New Jersey when De Niro called him to cast him as Joey LaMotta after seeing him in the low-budget TV film The Death Collector.
• Cathy Moriarty was discovered by Joe Pesci in a photograph at a New Jersey disco and cast as Vikki LaMotta at age 18, becoming an unknown actress at the time.
• De Niro trained so thoroughly as a boxer that he fought in actual matches in Brooklyn under the nickname 'young LaMotta' and won two of his three fights.
• Martin Scorsese spent six months on the sound mix alone, requiring meticulous work because each punch, camera flash, and gunshot needed individual attention to achieve the right effect.
• Scorsese threatened to remove his directing credit from the film if he wasn't allowed to edit out the audible mention of the Cutty Sark whisky brand in one scene.
• Raging Bull went through a test screening in July 1980 where United Artists executives praised Scorsese as a 'true artist,' but the studio later declined to distribute the film.
• The Motion Picture Editors Guild voted Raging Bull the best-edited film in history in 2012.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Raging Bull, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.