SXSW Review: American Prince

More than 30 years ago, Martin Scorsese decided to spend an evening -- more than a day, really -- filming his friend Steven Prince as he told all kinds of strange and fascinating stories about his life. The result was the short documentary American Boy, which had no official release in 1978 but floated around "unofficially" for decades. Tommy Pallotta saw one of these bootleg copies when he was in college, and never forgot it. He and Richard Linklater included one of Prince's stories from American Boy in Waking Life. And more than 30 years after American Boy, Pallotta and Linklater spent a similar evening hearing more of Prince's tales, which are the backbone of Pallotta's documentary American Prince. Both films screened back-to-back at SXSW.

Steven Prince in American Prince has mellowed a lot -- he sits comfortably in a chair sipping cognac and genially relating stories about his years in Hollywood. You might remember him as the gun salesman in Taxi Driver, and he had a few other minor roles in films, as well as working on some other Scorsese films. As a result, he has some very colorful stories to share with the guests in the room as well as the film's audience. The setting of the documentary might remind you of Steven Tobolowsky's Birthday Party, which played SXSW in 2005, but more tightly focused, and without a lot of interaction from the other guests.

Pallotta mimics the general structure of American Boy by separating his film into chapters, even using the same font for the headings. However, Pallotta has wisely interspersed Prince's stories with clips from the films he's talking about, or that are related to the people he's discussing, to give us context as well as a visual change. Because American Prince focuses on Prince's time in Hollywood, it has a more defined structure than American Boy.

American Prince also revisits some of Prince's stories in American Boy to see how they've changed or been adapted elsewhere, as with the story in Waking Life. One surprising sequence used footage not only from American Boy but from Pulp Fiction. It turns out that the overdose sequence with Uma Thurman and John Travolta is very closely based on a story in American Boy. But as Prince notes in the sequel, Quentin Tarantino added an extra over-the-top bit that wasn't in the original tale.

Steven Prince is no longer involved with Hollywood and tells us in the film that he's working as a general contractor these days. He also has a second job that interested the SXSW audience so much that it dominated the first part of the Q&A session. American Prince is about someone looking back fondly on a world he no longer occupies, whereas Prince in American Boy doesn't quite connect all of his stories. I realize that this is probably sacrilege, but I liked Pallotta's film better thanScorsese's -- probably because I preferred watching the older Prince over the younger one. The two films, seen together, make a wonderful double feature about one man's extremely wide range of experiences. I hope one of the filmmakers returns in another decade for even more stories.