Martin Scorcese / Steven Prince – American Boy (1978)

“This is a fantastic and very rare documentary film by Martin Scorsese, and one of the greatest interviews ever recorded. The subject is his friend Steven Prince, best known for his role as “Easy Andy”, the traveling gun salesman in “Taxi Driver”. Prince is a manic raconteur, telling wild stories about his life as an ex-drug addict and a road manager for Neil Diamond. Scorsese intersperses home movies of Prince as a child as he talks about his family. When talking of his years as a heroin addict, Prince tells a story about injecting adrenaline into the heart of a woman who overdosed, with the help of a medical dictionary and a Magic Marker. This story was re-enacted by Quentin Tarantino in “Pulp Fiction” (which he then claimed as a completely original idea, as usual with him). Prince also tells a haunting story about working at a gas station in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, and being robbed by a large drug crazed man, who Prince ends up shooting several times (this story was re-created in Richard Linklater’s animated “Waking Life”, this time with Prince doing the re-creation). The Neil Young song “Time Fades Away” is featured during the film’s opening credits.“

This piece of celluloid folklore first caught my attention in my early days on the information superhighways back in the 90s, but it bugged me that I never got my hands on it, and then let the title of it slip from memory. Thanks to the efforts of sneakerhead / cult cinema scribe Gary Warnett and corporate streamsites, I am able to watch it, finally. Am about to do that right now, actually.