Mardik Martin

Mardik Martin September 16 1934 September 11 2019 was an American screenwriter of such classics as Mean Streets New York New York and Raging Bull directed by his lifelong friend Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro Mardik Martin is among the revered screenwriters on the Writers Guild of Americas list of 101 Greatest Screenplays Martin Mardik was born into a family of Armenian genocide survivors that fled to Iran They later moved to Iraq Although his family in Iraq was wealthy he fled the country to avoid the draft and arrived in New York City in a penniless state In Easy Riders Raging Bulls Peter Biskinds 1998 book on the New Hollywood the author writes that Martin had to wash dishes to pay his way through NYU where he met fellow student Martin Scorsese in 1961 The two formed a close friendship and worked together on Scorseses early projects such as Its Not Just You Murray and the semiautobiographical Season of the Witch which ultimately became Mean Streets According to Biskind The two young men sat in Martins Plymouth Valiant and wrote In the winter in the cold and snow Martin also shared writing credits on the Scorsese films New York New York with Earl Mac Rauch and Raging Bull with Paul Schrader In 2014 Martin cowrote the screenplay of the German drama The Cut which won a special mention by the Young Jury Members of the Vittorio Veneto Film Festival for its director Fatih Akin at the 2014 Venice Film Festival Martin died of unknown causes on September 11 2019 He was found dead in his house five days short of his 85th birthday