A writer I know describes searching the corners of a well-trodden film scene as being "like taking a walk along a familiar nature trail." Perhaps. I know repetition becomes fanatical ritual to movie-goers who know every purloined fuck and shit in "Reservoir Dogs," or god forbid, can match Ferris Bueller snark-for-snark. Yet while Scorsese, movie-mad as anyone in cinema's century, refers endlessly to other films, he manages to integrate it into other forms of heritage as well. Scorsese's eye is omnivorous, at once a fan's and yet the most developed critical instrument. He can discourse until dawn on the meaning, the sensation, the lineage and wealth of reference in any series of shots in his own movies as well as those of others. How does he sleep, quell the chatter of this hard-won pop mentality? One can imagine him taking ages to still that voice, to quiet the chatter of erudition in his fast-talking mind. (His heart must beat as fast as a songbird's.)

One of the great "Doh!" insights of adulthood is to recognize the reservoir of knowledge of those who came before you, both spiritual and secular. Power rests in that awareness, but its heavy weight can stifle the act of creation. It can also hold back the gutter-level strivers like Scorsese's 27-year-old Charlie, embodied by a kid-faced Harvey Keitel, inner voiceover courtesy of Scorsese. He thinks he's doing the work of Francis of Assisi, but as his lover Teresa tells him, "St. Francis didn't run numbers!"

Scorsese edited the movies of others and he made an impressive hodgepodge, variously titled and assembled, best known as "Who's that Knocking at My Door?" (one of Roger Ebert's first great public enthusiasms). Then he made a slick trash movie and was prepared to maybe make "Mean Streets" as an exploitation picture, maybe with a black cast. But he kept in mind the imprecation John Cassavetes leveled after seeing this "Boxcar Bertha" movie-Why are you making shit? Don't do it again.

The result? Look at the swim of "Mean Streets," autobiographical, steeped in Catholic conflict, routines between the guys absurd as vaudeville, dense with family lore and the geography of a few teeming blocks south of Houston, east of Broadway. I wonder what this movie looked like at the New York Film Festival in 1973-so many movies since made by filmmakers who greedily drank it up. (Twenty-five years on, "Mean Streets" is also a gem of urban archeology. New York doesn't look this way anymore. Even the dinginess of the Little Italy delis seems sanctified from this remove.)

So many times I've watched "Mean Streets" since that 16mm print arrived at the film society and we locked ourselves into the tiny screening room, watching the credit sequence a couple dozen times, laboriously threading back to witness the jumpcuts, the Ronettes singing "Hey There Be My Baby" again and again, and Scorsese's voice murmuring Charlie's inner monologue: "You make up for your sins in the streets-the rest is bullshit and you know it."

We were ready to take the challenge, to contemplate those scenes and more, in the dark at hundreds more movies, on the floor of film sets we would someday work upon. We recognized what movies might be-Scorsese's; the ones we wanted to see; the ones we would grow to hope to make. We did not see how personal the snatches of Godard were alongside the too-young Robert DeNiro saying, Beckett-flat loony-tunes, "I'm sad about my hat," alongside the late George Memmoli threatening, "Come back here and you'll find out what's gonna happen to you!" We did not see that the fever went beyond the dark of the screening room. We were not old enough to know, yes, he did mean "streets"-both the narrow passages we course in sifting our own histories to fiction, as well as the broad road of opportunity if only we would go that way, see the avenues of chance, the boulevards of our most idiosyncratic personal fears, fascinations, and dare we even venture, visions.