Bringing Out the Dead

by Paul Schrader

The screenplay for Martin Scorsese's most recent film, starring Nicolas Cage, a work of stunning power aobut a burned-out New York paramedic who is hooked on the addictive thrill--and terror--of saving lives.

In this "surprisingly funny and very moving" (San Francisco Chronicle) film, based on Joe Connelly's acclaimed novel, Martin Scorsese once again explored the dark streets of New York and the desperate lives of its inhabitants that he and screenwriter Paul Schrader had first confronted in their classic film Taxi Driver. This time the focus of Schrader's blistering writing is a paramedic named Frank Pierce, a man who has seen so many people die that he is caught between his compulsion to save lives and his fear and terror of losing them. Haunted by the ghost of a young girl he inadvertently killed, Frank and one of his partners bring an old man back to life, even though they both know they should have let him die rather than prolong his agony. While Frank is forced to watch the comatose man slowly fail, he is drawn to the dying man's daughter, Mary, a sometime addict, who first sees Frank as a possible savior before, ultimately, seeing him as a kind of killer.

Hard-edged yet insightful, angry yet full of compassion for the fatally flawed, Bringing Out the Dead is another tour de force by Schrader, in which the harsh realities of urban life-and one man's struggle with it-are conveyed with an immediacy and force that are both riveting and deeply moving.

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Although his name is often linked to that of the 'movie brat' generation (Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, De Palma, etc.) Paul Schrader's background couldn't have been more different. Schrader's strict Calvinist parents refused to allow him to see a film until he was eighteen. Although he more than made up for lost time when studying at Calvin College, Columbia University and UCLA's graduate film program, his influences were far removed from those of his contemporaries - Bresson, Ozu and Dreyer (about whom he wrote a book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu Bresson Dreyer Da Capo Paperback) rather than Saturday morning serials. After a period as a film critic (and protégé of Pauline Kael), he began writing screenplays, hitting the jackpot when he and his brother, Leonard Schrader (a Japanese expert), were paid the then-record sum of $325,000, for The Yakuza, thus establishing his reputation as one of Hollywood's top screenwriters - which was consolidated when Martin Scorsese filmed Schrader's script [Book:Taxi Driver] (1976), written in the early 1970s during a bout of drinking and depression. The success of the film allowed Schrader to start directing his own films, which have been notable for their willingness to take stylistic and thematic risks while still working squarely within the Hollywood system. The most original of his films (which he and many others regard as his best) was the Japanese co-production Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985).


Biography Source: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001707/bio

Reviews

[G. Salter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining, darkly comic, and surprisingly readable for a screenplay, Schrader gives a fascinating look at redemption and reconciliation in the last place anyone would look for it.

[Samuel Loveridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best of one of the best.

[Vivian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a strange but compelling read. I didn't want to like it because the thought of EMT's and ER docs & nurses being burned out, numb to suffering & death, and stressed out to the point of not being able to sleep and using drugs/alcohol to cope is not how I like to picture "angels of mercy". But Schrader got me hooked and I had to keep reading. The humor that simmers beneath the surface helps this book along. I had to smile at the idea of the old, decrepit "bus" that just would not quit and the EMT who would yank the dispatcher's chain by making her call for him several times before finally answering (and she knew he was doing it). It takes a skillful hand to write about a field that is "dead serious" in a humorous way and not have it come off distasteful.