Swapping De Niro
How Robert De Niro’s fame led to the making of two movies from the same footage.
Today Robert De Niro is regarded as one of the greatest actors of his generation. With a filmography that spans five decades and includes such classics as Mean Streets, The Godfather Part 2, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, Raging Bull just to name a few, it is hard to argue with this sentiment. Known for his character immersion acting method, De Niro was noticed early on in his career and a talented actor who was destined for big things and lived up to expectations by having a great and illustrious career highlighted by numerous awards and nominations.
However, before he became a big star, De Niro was just a struggling actor looking for work, One of the first films that he appeared in was a movie directed by Jordan Leondopoules called Sam’s Song (1969). In Sam’s Song, De Niro plays Sam Nicoletti, a young ambitious film maker who spends a weekend hob nobbing with the social elite at a posh estate in hopes to get financial backing to make a movie. He ultimately ends up becoming tangled up in a web of mind and sex games of the corrupt would be film financiers and losing his idealism and ambition to be a film maker along the way.
The movie is reminiscent of other experimental “hippy era” films from around the same time such as Dennis Hopper’s Last Movie (1971). Like many of these other hard to follow experimental films Sam’s Song was deemed by the studio as “unreleasable” and subsequently shelved. The shelving of such films happens all the time in Hollywood, especially before the advent of straight to video releases. With only so many theaters to go around, movies that were poorly accepted by test audiences or by film reviewers were tucked away in a studios basement vault where they were left to collect dust. Sometimes these movies would be used for stock footage, other times, if one of the principals in the film happened to make the big time, the film would then be dusted off and then rereleased in order to capitalize off of the new found fame of the actor, actress or director. In the case of Sam’s Song, both of these things eventually happened.
Ten years after Sam’s Song disappearance into the bowels of Cannon studios Robert De Niro had become rather well known for his gripping and award winning performances in movies like Bang Drum Slowly (1973), Mean Streets (1973), The Godfather 2 (1974), Taxi Driver (1976) and The Deer Hunter (1978). A decade of hard work had gotten the Italian Irish (although mostly known for his Italian side) American actor from the Bronx well known. It was after his performance in the Academy Award winning movie The Deer Hunter, that somebody over at Cannon Studios suddenly remembered the previously unreleased flop that was sitting in the basement. In order to capitalize off of Bob’s success, Sam’s Song was the released onto the public once again.
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Sometimes these rereleased films, turn out to be gems that time is kind to, and what a decade ago had been virtually unwatchable, turns out to be merely ahead of its time. This was the case with Last Movie, which is now has a sort of cult following after decades of being considered a debacle. Sam’s Song, unfortunately, was not one of those movies. While some critics managed to dig up a few kind words about the idealism and De Niro’s acting, the film still proved to be too counter culture and idealistic to find an audience. However, the bean counters over at the studio refused to give up on the snippets of some of De Niro’s earliest work and decided to bring in another director to take the pieces of De Niro and put them into another movie that could hopefully find an audience. John Broderick was called in and a year later, “The Swap” starring a young Robert De Niro and a relatively unknown cast of new actors soon hit the video shelves hoping to cash in on the rising popularity of VCRs.
While it would be easy to say that "The Swap" is just a piece of rubbish thrown together by a studio in order to cash in on the fame of a Hollywood legend (De Niro reportedly saw it this way), you have to give a few credos to Broderick for taking old film footage and finding a sensible way of tying it into a completely new movie. Throwing out the entire idea of the original arthouse movie dealing with the greed and corruption of the social elite, this new movie instead was a crime thriller centered around the murder of Sam Nicoletti.
The swap begins with the murder of Sam Nicoletti as he is busy editing what can only be a porno film. This very first sequence is taken entirely from the original movie and shows some early brilliant acting on De Niro’s part. After Sammy is bludgeoned to death, the movie then moves forward ten years. Sammy’s brother Vito (played by Anthony Charbota) is getting out of prison after ten years and is determined to find out what really happened to his little brother. As Vito goes on his quest to uncover the truth, he comes across a number of porn films that his brother made that were financed by some wealthy elite. Sammy apparently had tried to blackmail these rich and powerful people and then wound up paying the ultimate price.
Because of the value of his well known name, De Niro, has top billing in this pieced together crime thriller, but in reality, his character is only featured in the beginning and in a number of flashback scenes. Still, while this movie does not rank anywhere near such classics as The Deer Hunter or GoodFellas, for serious De Niro buffs, it does offer a glimpse into this great actors early years when he was just another struggling actor willing to take on any role that came his way.
Franck Benedittini
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