Martin Scorsese's 'Taxi Driver' Celebrates 40 Years | By Noë Gold | Fandango_2-8-16

2/8/16, 3:29 PMMartin Scorsese's 'Taxi Driver' Celebrates 40 Years: Here's What You Should Know | Fandango
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MARTIN SCORSESE'S 'TAXI
DRIVER' CELEBRATES 40 YEARS:
HERE'S WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Martin Scorsese Facts
Age: 73
Born: Queens, New York
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FEBRUARY 8TH 2016, 10:00 AM
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Best Known For: Taxi Driver, New York New
York, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Mean
Streets, The Departed, Casino, Goodfellas,
Raging Bull, Gangs of New York, The Wolf of
Wall Street
Martin Scorsese is a living cinema legend,
known as much for his film preservation as for
the gritty gangsters of his action pictures. In
1980, he founded the Film Foundation, restoring
nearly 700 films to date. His latest project is this
year’s Silence, starring Adam Driver and Liam
Neeson as Catholic priests facing persecution in
17th-century Japan in an adaptation of the
Shusaku Endo novel. And his '70s-set, sex,
drugs and rock 'n' roll music-industry miniseries
Vinyl, featuring Bobby Canavale, Olivia Wilde,
Ray Romano – as a coke-snorting record
company exec – and Andrew Dice Clay, kicks
off its 10-episode HBO season on Februrary 14.
But the real gem in the Scorsese oeuvre this
month is a movie that is as relevant today as it
was on the day of its release 40 years ago on
February 8, 1976: Taxi Driver.
The film stars De Niro as its troubled Vietnam
veteran Travis Bickle, who drives a taxi by night
and hopes to save a young prostitute (Jodie
Foster) from the New York streets. It was
nominated for four Academy Awards, including
Best Picture; won the Palme d'Or at the 1976
Cannes Film Festival; was ranked 52 on its
AFI's “100 Years...100 Movies” (10th Edition) list;
and was selected for preservation in the
National Film Registry in 1994.
Scorsese and Schrader appeared with the cast
at the Paris opening of La Cinémathèque
Française’s “Martin Scorsese” exhibition last
year, describing the grueling shoot on the gritty,
mean streets of New York.
nd

Situated prominently in front of the Paris
exhibition was an actual Checker cab like the
one De Niro drove in Taxi Driver. Scorsese
revealed how he settled on the Checker for
practical reasons: The sound men would get in
the trunk and Scorsese and his
cinematographer, Michael Chapman, would
crouch on the backseat floor and use available
light to shoot.
Fun fact: If it weren't for some uncanny Oscars
serendipity, Travis Bickle would have been
played by Jeff Bridges.
Schrader explained: "Taxi Driver was as much a
product of luck and timing as everything else. It
was still a low-budget, long-shot movie, but
that's how it got made. At one point we could
have got the film financed with Jeff Bridges in

the lead, but we elected to hold out and wait
until we could finance it with [the newly Oscar-
endowed] De Niro."
Scorsese elaborated: "In 1974, De Niro was
about to win the Oscar for The Godfather Part II.
Ellen Burstyn won an award for my movie Alice
Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) and Paul had
sold The Yakuza to Warner Bros. Michael and
Julia Phillips, who owned the Taxi Driver script,
had won an Oscar for The Sting and figured
they had enough power to get the film made,
though in the end, we barely raised the very low
budget of $1.3 million. In fact for a while, we
even thought of doing it on black-and-white
video!"
Scorsese's Partnership with De Niro Hit Its
Zenith with Taxi Driver
Scorsese met De Niro through director Brian De
Palma, who had worked with the then-20-year-
old actor in 1963’s The Wedding Party (released
in 1969). Their first collaboration was on 1973’s
gangster film Mean Streets, which starred De
Niro and frequent Scorsese collaborator Harvey
Keitel as small-time New York crooks. It was
considered Scorsese’s breakthrough movie and
he would go on to make some of his greatest
films with De Niro, including Raging Bull,
Goodfellas and Cape Fear. (The two have so far
made nine films together.)

"You Talkin' to Me?"
Taxi Driver is a masterful nightmare vision of a
deranged vigilante's descent into insanity set in
a seedy world of New York lowlifes. So that he
didn’t have to dress the set, Scorsese filmed
during a sweltering summer heat wave and a
garbage strike – there was already trash
everywhere. A feeling of dread and alienation is
heightened by Bernard Herrmann's eerie final
score (finished the day he died), which blends a
romantic and somewhat sleazy surface with a
darker and potentially violent undercurrent.
Among other sources, screenwriter Schrader
referenced the diaries of would-be assassin
Arthur Bremer, who shot and paralyzed
governor George Wallace in 1972.
Trivia:
Taxi Driver was cited by the media as a key
influence on John Hinckley Jr.'s assassination
attempt on President Ronald Reagan March 30,
1981, saying that he was trying to impress Jodie
Foster with his action.
To get into the twisted psyche of Travis Bickle,
Robert De Niro obtained a cab driver's license,
and would drive around New York for a couple
of weeks before returning to Rome to resume
filming on Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900.

De Niro reportedly lost 35 pounds and listened
repeatedly to a taped reading of Arthur
Bremer’s diaries. He told an interviewer years
later, "There are underground things about
yourself that you don't want to discuss.
Somehow these things are better expressed on
paper or on film."
According to Schrader, the iconic "Are you
talking to me" speech was not scripted but
improvised by De Niro. At the Paris exhibit the
screenwriter commented: "In the script it just
says 'Travis speaks to himself in the mirror.'
Bobby asked me what he would say, and I said,
'Well, he's a little kid playing with guns and
acting tough.' So De Niro used this rap that an
underground New York comedian had been
using at the same time as the basis for his lines.
(Warning: This and other clips contain strong
language)

Taxi Driver (5/8) Mov…
And while the film has been labeled as an
exercise in violence, Scorsese said that that is
not the message he intended. "I was shocked
by the way the audiences took the violence. I
saw Taxi Driver once in a theater and everyone
was yelling and screaming at the final shootout.
When I made it, I didn't intend to have the
audience react with that feeling. Movies don't
kill people. People kill people. I do not regret
having made Taxi Driver. Nor do I believe it was
an irresponsible act – quite the reverse. Bob
and I are at one on this."
Trivia:
A longstanding rumor has it that when a
Columbia Pictures executive imposed cuts on
the film to get in an R rating instead of an X,

Scorsese stayed up all night with loaded gun
agonizing over a plan to kill the executive (or
himself, as variations on the legend go). He
decided instead to desaturate the color of the
blood in the final scene to merit the R.
Director Scorsese, screenwriter Schrader and leading
man De Niro on the set
Martin Scorsese exhibit coming to New York
The Paris exhibit will open in America later this
year (Dec. 2016, though exact dates are TBD) at
the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.
Photographs, posters, storyboards, costumes
and some of the director’s personal effects are
on display to offer visitors the chance to see his
inspirations and working methods.

Taxi Driver Storyboards
Taxi Driver Storyboar…
And finally, here's the director in his own
movie:

Taxi Driver (4/8) Mov…
Image sources: Everett, Cinematheque Francaise
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DoctorNoe • 7 minutes ago
Outstanding article. Noe Gold has also
written about the unlikely connection of
Jimi Hendrix & Leonard Nimoy
http://doctornoemedia.blogspot...
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