A 12.14 “Page Six” item says L.A. Times/ “Envelope” writer Paul Lieberman couldn’t get Martin Scorsese to talk to him for a Departed article, so he allegedly dug up nearly two-year-old quotes that Scorsese supplied for an Aviator interview and re-used them for a 12.13.06 “Envelope” piece, which ran yesterday.
Okay, not good at all…but at least the old Scorsese quotes that were used seem to actually apply to The Departed. Sample #1: “I did not want to do another gangster movie” but Scorsese read William Monahan‘s script to be polite, “as a matter of form.” Sample #2: But by the time he got to page 26 and thought, “What the hell’s going on here? [The characters] “are all duplicitous and all deceiving each other and ultimately all wind up in a kind of elegant, how shall I say it Gotterdammerung.”
So to be in the clear, all Lieberman had to do was say Scorsese wasn’t available but that he said the following back in ’04, etc. What would have been so hard about that?