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But nothing tested the show like Sinead O’Connor’s musical appearance on Oct. 3, 1992, when she stunned viewers — and the producers — by tearing up a photograph of Pope John Paul II, declaring, “Fight the real enemy.” Two years earlier, O’Connor had drawn wide criticism for joining the cast member Nora Dunn in pulling […] More
The actor recently donated hundreds of boxes of scripts, props, notes and other objects from his work on “Raging Bull,” “Taxi Driver” and more. We dived in.AUSTIN, Texas — When Robert De Niro heard that Marlon Brando’s personal, annotated “Godfather” script was for sale on eBay, he was not too happy. How could such an important cultural artifact, created by an acting icon, a true artist, be as easy to bid on as an old pinball machine, or a Las Vegas coffee mug?This was around 2006, and De Niro had been looking for a place to donate the extensive collection of props, costumes, scripts, letters and mementos he had accumulated throughout his six-decade career. He did not want his “Taxi Driver” script notes to wind up deteriorating in a stranger’s closet in Des Moines, so he sought out a place where the archivists and staff would care for and preserve each piece, including the red boxing gloves and leopard-print robe he wore as Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull” and the pages of letters he and his “Last Tycoon” director Elia Kazan wrote each other. “I wanted to keep it for my kids and I wanted to keep it all together,” De Niro told me just after he viewed an exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin showcasing part of his archives. He was in town last month for the show, and for a gala celebrating the Ransom Center’s 65th anniversary. Leonard Maltin served as the master of ceremonies, and Meryl Streep hopped over to Texas to honor her longtime friend and colleague with a speech.“I don’t know, if you’re spelunking around in there, if you’re going to be able to find the secret of his power and what he does,” Streep said in her speech. “His strength comes from what he doesn’t say.”Texas might seem like an odd home for De Niro’s two Academy Awards and personal photos, but he wanted an institution that would provide easy access to students, researchers and cinephiles from around the world. As he said in his own speech that night: “I had accumulated an appalling amount of stuff. It was going to be either the Ransom Center or an episode of ‘Hoarders.’”The center houses the papers of the acting teacher Stella Adler, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Tom Stoppard, Tennessee Williams and Frida Kahlo, to name a few. In his speech, De Niro said he chose the center because of the company his archive would be in. “I imagine my papers talking to their papers, or trying to anyway, and their papers asking my papers, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’”The “Robert De Niro Papers” show runs through January and features a portion of the 537 boxes, 601 bound volumes and 147 folders of items De Niro donated. Here are a few treasures on display, with insights from De Niro and the curator of film, Steve Wilson.Early Headshot and Résumévia Harry Ransom Centervia Harry Ransom CenterThe black-and-white photo of a very clean-cut-looking young De Niro is accompanied by one of his early acting résumés, back when his film roles had names like Friend of Lead. De Niro said he remembered typing those résumés, and when I asked him if he maybe, possibly exaggerated anything, he said, “I think I may have. Maybe I said I was in a play or had a role in a play, and I’d just done a scene.” Wilson said the résumés helped the archivists date some of the items from early in his career, like his old makeup kit, which holds used brushes, tubes and cosmetic sticks that helped De Niro get into character during his early years as a student, before he went to work onstage and in dinner theater. “The existence of these résumés was really interesting to me,” Wilson said. “It does look like he was probably padding résumés. For example, he might say he was in a touring play, but we know he performed a scene at Stella Adler or something.”Fedora From ‘Mean Streets’via Harry Ransom CenterWarner Bros.The hat, and the role, marked the start of one of cinema’s most enduring and powerful collaborations, between De Niro and the director Martin Scorsese. When the actor wore this brown fedora to read for the role of Johnny Boy, the neighborhood punk, Scorsese knew De Niro was his guy, he told New York magazine a few years later. In Vincent Canby’s 1973 review of the film for The Times, he wrote, “The look, language and performances are so accurate, so unselfconscious, so directly evocative.” De Niro’s performance (opposite Harvey Keitel, above left, and David Proval) and that now iconic hat helped create the visceral realism that still manages to feel in-your-face and raw, almost five decades later. “I wore that hat as a kid,” De Niro told me when I asked where it came from. “I just liked it.” When it came time to audition for Johnny Boy, he said, he felt that it fit the character. “He had been keeping wardrobe items that he would use for auditions, like hats and glasses, for a long time,” Wilson said. “It was kind of an arsenal.”License From ‘Taxi Driver’via Harry Ransom CenterTo prepare for his 1976 role as Travis Bickle, a haunted, lonely Vietnam veteran turned New York cabby, De Niro spent a little over a week actually driving a taxi. This was just after he had won an Academy Award for “The Godfather Part II,” and one passenger recognized him and commented that things must be especially tough for actors if an Oscar winner was trying to earn money driving a cab. The license is another piece of the collection that illuminates his dedication to character and the lengths he goes to fully inhabit another life.The exhibition also includes one of De Niro’s annotated “Taxi Driver” scripts, opened to a page where Bickle stares into the mirror. The action simply reads: “His eyes are glazed with introspection. He sees nothing but himself.” Just below that, in blue ink, De Niro wrote, “Mirror thing here?” That “mirror thing,” of course, became “You talking to me?” It’s an improvised moment that has become a hallmark of his career. College-age kids still yell that line to De Niro sometimes when he’s out in public. As for the license, as soon as Wilson saw it for the first time, he “knew immediately that it was the image of the archive. It speaks to his process and says it all. It’s a great piece.”Military Dog Tags From ‘The Deer Hunter’via Harry Ransom Center“I can’t remember if I wore those through the whole production; it was a long time ago,” De Niro said of the ID his character, Mike, wore in Michael Cimino’s 1978 film about a group of friends from a Pennsylvania steel town whose lives are forever scarred by their experiences in Vietnam. Besides the dog tags, the archive displays De Niro’s prep work, including medical records from actual Vietnam veterans, articles about “returning vet syndrome” (now known as PTSD), and detailed notes he took on the dialect of the specific area of Pennsylvania his character hailed from. (Sample: “these ones” and “those ones” can be used interchangeably.)“I think this is where the archive really starts,” Wilson said. “There is a giant uptick in the amount of research material that we have for any particular film once we get to ‘Deer Hunter’ and beyond. Sometime around 1979 or 1980 is when he really got serious about keeping things.” When the dog tags arrived, Wilson noticed they were covered in plastic, as they would have been in real life to keep the metal from making noise and alerting the enemy. By the time the dog tags reached Austin, the plastic was yellowed and leaching liquid, so the archivists removed the decaying material and had them encased again, to stay true to the object’s original form.‘Raging Bull’ Annotated Scriptvia Harry Ransom CenterLike most of the screenplays in the collection, De Niro’s “Raging Bull” draft, dated “2-1-79” and revised by “M.S. and R.D.N.” (the director and actor), is covered in handwritten notes. The hefty version is enclosed in a brown leather folder. Wilson said several of the scripts “seemed to have a personality of their own,” and that there were notes in the pockets of the folder, including one to De Niro from Vikki LaMotta, the real-life wife of De Niro’s character.The script is displayed in a glass case next to the writer Paul Schrader’s handwritten scene outline, scribbled on a yellow legal pad. Several writers were credited in the film, but De Niro and Scorsese went away for a few days together to work on a final draft before production began. De Niro said they headed to the Caribbean because “it just seemed like a nice place to go. We worked on the script and on getting it to a good place. We worked on the character.”The notes across the script pages are tough to decipher. When De Niro stepped away for a moment, I overheard his young daughter telling Wilson that her father had horrible handwriting, so bad that she didn’t even think he used the same alphabet as everyone else. That hard-to-decipher handwriting will probably not stop film lovers and researchers from traveling to the Ransom Center in their quest to decode De Niro’s career, his technique and the mystery of his process, one script note, costume choice and scribbled-on napkin at a time. More
The dream is Vegas.“Don’t make fun of me,” said Kate Biberdorf, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, “but it would be a live show in Vegas where it’s a science show.”That is not a typical aspiration of someone who teaches chemistry to undergraduates. For Dr. Biberdorf — better known as Kate the Chemist — that dream is part of her goal to capture the fun of scientific exploration and to entice children, especially girls, to consider science as their life’s calling.“When I’m happiest is when I’m onstage sharing what I love,” she said.She’s thinking of a big spectacle, like the long-running magic shows of David Copperfield at MGM Grand or Penn & Teller at Rio Las Vegas. “If we can convince people to go to science shows when on vacation,” she added, not entirely convinced herself.For now, her efforts have focused on television and publishing, not Vegas. Over the last few years, she has written two books of science experiments to try at home, a science book for adults and, with Hillary Homzie, a children’s book author, a series of novels starring a younger, fictional version of herself.On television, she has already become something of a contemporary update of science popularizers like Bill Nye the Science Guy or Donald “Mr. Wizard” Herbert.Perhaps you’ve seen her.Dr. Biberdorf, 36, has appeared on NBC’s “Today,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and other programs with demonstrations of color-changing chemicals, magnetic slime and, very often, chemical reactions accompanied by bright, loud bangs.During a “Today” show segment in 2019, she, along with Craig Melvin, the show’s news anchor, and Dylan Dreyer, the meteorologist, forcefully dumped buckets of hot water into liquid nitrogen, instantly engulfing them in eruptions of billowing white vapor.The three, wearing lab coats, safety goggles and protective mitts, emerged a bit frost-blasted.“You didn’t tell me it was going to blow up in my face,” Mr. Melvin exclaimed.“This is a thundercloud,” Dr. Biberdorf explained.Dr. Biberdorf has appeared on NBC’s “Today,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and other programs with color-changing chemicals, magnetic slime and bright, loud bangs.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesThe TV appearances only last a few minutes — long enough to show off some chemistry “wow” but too brief to include more than passing mentions of the how and why of what is happening.For a deeper dive into science, Dr. Biberdorf is looking to star in a television show or two of her own.One of the ideas she and her collaborators are pitching is “Science Unfair.” Imagine a reality television competition along the lines of Food Network’s “Worst Cooks in America,” but with students who are bombing in their science classes.“It would be more like the kids who hate that and don’t want to do the science fair,” Dr. Biberdorf said. “We’re trying to get them together and make them do a little competition. At the end of each segment, hopefully they will now like science.”The other pitch, on the back burner for now, is “Blow My Stuff Up,” which would combine therapy and pyrotechnics to help people recovering from a failed relationship or other unhappy experiences.“There’s a therapist there as well, so they’re actually working on healing and moving forward in their lives.” Dr. Biberdorf said. Then, she would satisfyingly dispose of objects emblematic of the troubles that the people have put behind them.An episode might follow someone who had long suffered driving an unreliable, junker of a car. “They finally got a new car, they just want to blow up their old car,” Dr. Biberdorf said, “and we can do that with a bunch of pyrotechnics. So I am absolutely stoked about that.”Both of Dr. Biberdorf’s parents are psychologists, and her sister is a therapist. “It kind of brings the two worlds together,” she said.Sizzles — demo videos showing snippets of what the show might look like — have been shown to various networks.Growing up in Portage, Mich., just south of Kalamazoo, Dr. Biberdorf got hooked on chemistry because of an enthusiastic teacher in high school, Kelli Palsrok.“Honestly, ever since I was 15, I knew I wanted to be a chemist because of her,” Dr. Biberdorf said. “My dream, truthfully, is to be her for the next generation of kids.”Ms. Palsrok remembers the young Kate as “pretty much the same as she is now,” she said. “Always enthusiastic about chemistry and science. Very well-rounded student. Loved the hands-on stuff.”But the field of chemistry has not always been welcoming to Dr. Biberdorf. “You are judged on your appearance,” she said. “And I look a certain way, and I dress a certain way.”Which is to say, she wears heels, skirts and lipstick.“I lean into my feminine side,” she said. “But that’s just because I like it, and I feel like I’m at my best when I present that image.”She added, “It’s also very important for me that younger girls can see that side of a scientist.” She said women taking her college class have expressed appreciation for that.“You can look however you want and still be into science as much as possible,” Dr. Biberdorf said.But that does not fit the stereotype that many scientists have of women as scientists.“I don’t think people look at me and go, ‘Well, that’s a smart lady,’” Dr. Biberdorf said. “So I know when I’m in faculty meetings or conferences or anything like that, my first three sentences need to be articulate, accurate.”Dr. Biberdorf said she owed her passion for chemistry to her high school chemistry teacher. “My dream, truthfully, is to be her for the next generation of kids,” she said.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesAs a graduate student at the University of Texas, she studied catalysts for potentially speeding up Suzuki-Miyaura coupling, a reaction commonly used in the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals.There, she found that she did not like laboratory work. In addition, pure academia was a difficult place for her. “I didn’t want to be in that environment,” she said. “I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could.”Her current job at the university is as a professor of instruction — all teaching and no lab research. In 2014, when she started, she was teaching two undergraduate chemistry classes, and she went to her boss asking if she could do more.“We created an outreach program called ‘Fun with Chemistry,’” she said. “I was supposed to go to two elementary schools a semester. That was the deal.”The program turned into something much more popular, with many more schools asking her to visit. “I interacted with something like 16,000 students that first year,” she said. “It was nuts, in my opinion.”That in turn led to monthly appearances on “We Are Austin,” a morning show on the local CBS station.A few years later, a thousand miles away in Los Angeles, Glenn Schwartz, noticed. He had been Bill Nye’s publicist, but the two went their separate business ways about five years ago. Mr. Schwartz wondered: Is there another Bill Nye out there?He searched for about a year before coming across Dr. Biberdorf.“I found Kate’s website, and I looked at some video, and I simply contacted her,” Mr. Schwartz said. “Really, it was me looking around and looking for somebody like her. And then I was lucky enough to actually find her.”Mr. Schwartz, who is now Dr. Biberdorf’s manager, said she possessed a winning mix of credentials and personality. Although there are many people posting science videos on YouTube, “Kate was obviously different,” he said.He added, “The thing about being on TV is that you can’t teach somebody to be likable.”Bill Nye the Science Guy does not mind sharing the science television spotlight. “Kate is going to be Kate, and Bill is going to be Bill,” he said in an interview.Mr. Nye said their goals were the same: to intrigue children in science. “It’s the people who are watching us that we want to succeed and change the world,” he said.(Mr. Nye is still on television, too. His latest series, “The End Is Nye,” , premieres on the Peacock streaming service on Aug. 25.)Though she does not have her Vegas shows yet, Dr. Biberdorf is planning to take a road tour of chemistry demonstrations across the country next year.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesScience on television has required a sort of research very different from the Suzuki-Miyaura coupling experiments Dr. Biberdorf used to undertake. For example, she had to figure out how to blow up a cake on “The Wendy Williams Show” last year to celebrate the host’s birthday.For safety, fire, the usual sorts of explosives and toxic chemicals were not allowed in the studio.“So what did I do?” she said. “I took liquid nitrogen, put it in a soda bottle and put it in a thing, and it exploded that way. Which is a bomb. But they don’t know that. So we just didn’t use that terminology. I said it’s vapor pressure. But it’s a way to spin that, right? You have to figure out how to say things so you don’t scare people.”After a year and a half of remote teaching because of the pandemic, she returned to the lecture hall in the spring semester. “We’re able to talk a little bit about how Covid tests work,” she said. “There’s a lot of real-world applications.”She is planning a road tour of chemistry shows next year, conducting her experiments and science entertainment at performing arts centers across the country.“We’re just trying to figure out the logistics right now,” she said. For a demonstration like the exploding birthday cake, “How do I get that from place to place?” she wondered. “Am I rebuilding my exploding birthday cake every time, or what can I reuse?”If the whiz-bang of the shows can intrigue audiences, she hopes people might delve into her books, where she can provide more detailed explanations and still make chemistry interesting to people not yet familiar with the jargon.“I use as many analogies as I possibly can,” she said. “I talked about Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively’s marriage as a way to explain double replacement reactions. And so that’s something that works for my age group. Maybe there are people that don’t know what I’m talking about, but it’s a way to hook the millennials and then Gen Z hopefully, because we need more scientists.”She does not have her Vegas show yet, she said, but, “we have some connections with Penn & Teller.” (The magician duo, Penn Jillette and Teller, are also clients of Mr. Schwartz.)“Maybe,” Dr. Biberdorf mused, “I can kind of sneak in there somehow and do something fun with them.” More
