Mardik Martin

September 16, 1936 – September 11, 2019

Iran

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 America's 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 Biskind’s 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 Scorsese's early projects such as It's Not Just You, Murray! and the semi-autobiographical Season of the Witch, which ultimately became Mean Streets. According to Biskind, "The two young men sat in Martin's 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 co-wrote 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.