transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:20] Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone one that young men will understand is perhaps a critique of certain aspects of masculinity and not something to aspire to. We'll get into it. As always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined by my co-host, my intrepid explorer of the manosphere, so to speak. As one of our listeners said, Chris hangs out with the Muppets while Lizzie has to research neo-Nazis, and I said, Lizzie chooses to research neo-Nazis, and she chooses to research Travis Bickle's. Lizzie, what do we have today?

Speaker 2:
[01:01] We have Taxi Driver, Chris. It's the 50th anniversary of Taxi Driver this year, and I think that's pretty remarkable because it really feels like a movie that could have come out yesterday.

Speaker 1:
[01:13] Well, it would be called Uber Driver, but yes.

Speaker 2:
[01:15] Yeah, yeah, yeah, but just as scary. We have a lot to talk about. I'm very excited. Before we get into it, if you have not listened to Friday's Out of Frame episode, it does cover the entire story of Jodie Foster and the stalker that she acquired kind of because of Taxi Driver, John Hinckley Jr. and then his attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, and it features red handed. So go back and listen to it. You don't need to listen to it before this, but it is a nice companion piece to this episode. So with that being said, Chris, had you seen Taxi Driver before as a young man, a young man, and what did you make of it watching it this time?

Speaker 1:
[01:54] Had seen it as a young man and now watched it as an old man. I rewatched Mean Streets and then I rewatched Taxi Driver, and then you actually asked me to watch another movie which I did, which will come up later that we'll talk about, and then also watched the Louis Thoreau Manifest for documentary in anticipation, which I know you did as well.

Speaker 2:
[02:13] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[02:13] Taxi Driver is an incredible movie. I feel like in Mean Streets, you can see everything that Scorsese wants to do, and sometimes does it incredibly well. I love Mean Streets. It's great Harvey Keitel performance, amazing Robert De Niro performance. You see the roots of Travis Bickle very much in that movie with his character, and it feels like he really finds himself as a director in Taxi Driver.

Speaker 2:
[02:34] 100 percent.

Speaker 1:
[02:35] But I think a large part of that is Paul Schrader's incredibly focused, incredibly incisive screenplay that is layered and nuanced and funny and extremely dark and disturbing, and there is such commitment to exposing the many layers and facets of various forms of, I would say, male pickling or the toxicity of men left in isolation in some of these instances. The real gross underbelly of a lot of the feelings that we as men, speak as a man, can have, especially if we feel spurned in some way. I don't think I've had any Travis Bickle-like thoughts, but I have had the thought of, I'll show them, I'll do something to prove that idea, that fantasy. Then they'll see, right? Then wanting a sort of taken-esque fantasy to sweep us off our feet. Of course, as you mentioned, Lizzie, this movie, not only is it visually incredible, and I love the way that Scorsese uses the zoom lens, for example, to emphasize the distance between Bickle and the people around him, it really feels like you thematically could make it today because we continue to deal with the problems of a directionless young man using violence to express himself, and Bickle's a little more complicated than other examples that are more black and white, I think, in recent memory. But that continues to be an issue that we struggle to address. In Sighting, I would argue it's gotten worse in large part because of the systems we have created that continue to push young men down gnarly dark alleys. But anyway, I loved it and I really didn't understand it when I saw it when I was little. I didn't know what an anti-hero was. I was very confused by the movie. It made me very uncomfortable. That's all very much intentional. Again, it's not a movie I really love watching. It's a hard watch, but I think it's an amazing movie. I'll kick it to you.

Speaker 2:
[04:29] That's what I remembered. I saw this when I was a teenager probably, and I don't even know if I saw the whole thing. It was one of those things where it's like, oh, you're supposed to have seen Taxi Driver. I had seen at least parts of it, but I'd never gone back and revisited it. I was expecting like, oh God, this is going to be so grim. It's going to be a tough watch. It's going to be unpleasant. That was not my experience at all. I was glued to my seat watching this movie. It is so good. I think it is entertaining on top of everything else. You're right, Travis is more complicated, and we will get into that. I think that that was very intentional, particularly on Scorsese's part. Obviously, Schrader wrote the screenplay, but as we will discuss, Scorsese put a lot of effort into, he thought, making it very clear that Travis was a Vietnam veteran and what that had done to him. Now, not everybody got that, but it's definitely there. It's so interesting to me because this movie has actually come up several times over the last couple of months as people talking about, I was going to become like Travis Bickle, saying, I understood that what I had to do was become a machine.

Speaker 1:
[05:43] Right. Tony Kay in American History Access may be specifically you're referencing.

Speaker 2:
[05:48] Tony Kay, obviously John Hinckley Jr., which we discussed in the episode on Friday. But watching this movie, that is a wild takeaway to have from Taxi Driver. That is not the point. I can't believe that anyone watched this and thought, oh, Travis Bickle is cool and he's a loser, and he's supposed to be, and the fact that anyone had that takeaway is so interesting and also disturbing.

Speaker 1:
[06:20] I can understand it though, in the sense that when you're very young, you come into a movie with the expectation that the protagonist is the hero, and therefore it is your job to identify with them, etc. Which I do think is the tricky thing with, this isn't exactly satire, but with a movie that's ultimately attempting to very subtly undermine its hero, and Scorsese does it in very funny ways, editorially and with music. I think a lot of people saw this and took maybe the wrong message from it, not dissimilar from Fight Club.

Speaker 2:
[06:48] I was just going to say, yeah, I mean, Fight Club verges farther in the direction of making it cool than this does. I actually think Scorsese does an incredible job of, to me at least, making it very clear.

Speaker 1:
[06:59] I felt the same way, rewatching it.

Speaker 2:
[07:01] Yeah, which was a shock to me because so many people have this obsession with Travis Bickle. You mentioned the Manosphere documentary, and Chris, we talked yesterday and you were like, I think you should watch this, and so I did. I'm curious what your take is on the connection between that documentary, which for the record, I have some problems with.

Speaker 1:
[07:24] I don't think it's a great documentary. I think it's very surface, but it does at least somewhat explore the phenomena of the Manosphere, which we're dealing with right now. I guess the biggest thing that I felt was, there continue to be a lot of young men who are looking for somebody to look up to, and who are looking for somebody to give them some purpose, which is what Bickle is ultimately trying to do in the movie. He gives himself purpose. It's a very misdirected purpose, ultimately, and I do think that's where the Vietnam thing ties in. He's a soldier without a mission. He's been dumped on the streets and he's very aimless. The thing that I felt with the Manosphere is, somehow, I really felt all of these Manosphere men are not their followers to be clear, but the main guys are worse than Bickle by a trillion miles because they're just grifters.

Speaker 2:
[08:10] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[08:10] They are all snake oil salesmen.

Speaker 2:
[08:13] They know it.

Speaker 1:
[08:14] They know it and they are just awful. It's a priest preaching an ideology, tithing the congregation and then turning around and saying, look at these fucking idiots. You guys are gross. Honestly, my big thought was by comparison, Travis Bickle is a hero compared to some of these guys.

Speaker 2:
[08:35] There was one moment in the documentary that I actually, and to be clear, my issue with the documentary was, yes, it was very service level and also Louis Theroux is very feigning interest and compassion. Then it's like, he's 100 percent just trying to get these guys in a gotcha moment and one of the guys even says that, and then it's like, yeah, bingo, sir, that's what this is. But there is a moment where he is talking to one of the fans of one of the guys that he's met.

Speaker 1:
[09:01] Yes. I had a lot of compassion actually for the fans.

Speaker 2:
[09:04] Me too, because it was this guy and he'd said he'd been living in his car. He had been homeless and then he's like, but you know what they've taught me is like, that's my fault and I'm the only one who's in control of me. And so like, I can turn my life around and I just have to use these cheat codes and I have to understand how to get better. And for me, he was the Travis Bickle in that movie.

Speaker 1:
[09:24] Yes. And his brother had died by suicide.

Speaker 2:
[09:28] Oh God, it was so sad.

Speaker 1:
[09:30] Well, and there was just such a failure of any sort of system to catch him as he fell, right? So he falls all the way to the bottom and then he sees these guys on Instagram. I completely agree. And I actually thought the documentary did a pretty good job of humanizing those two young men in Miami.

Speaker 2:
[09:48] Yeah. Well, with that in mind, Chris, I would like to actually open with this. So Martin Scorsese was interviewed by Roger Ebert right before the release of Taxi Driver. And he mentioned that he was working on New York, New York, which of course would come out after Taxi Driver. And Ebert asked if that will be a feminist film. And he referenced that many thought that Alice doesn't live here anymore was a pointedly feminist film. And Scorsese doesn't agree. Here is what he said instead. Actually not Alice, but Taxi Driver. This is my feminist film. Who says a feminist movie has to be about women? Alice was never intended as a feminist tract. At the end, she's making the same mistakes. The first shot of her in Chris Christopherson's house shows her washing the dishes. A big close up. Ebert says, and Taxi Driver, where the hero can't relate to women at all is? And Scorsese says, feminist, because it takes Macho to its logical conclusion. The better man is the man who can kill you. This one shows that kind of thinking, shows the kinds of problems some men have, bouncing back and forth between the goddesses and whores. The whole movie is based visually on one shot, where the guy is being turned down on the telephone by the girl, and the camera actually pans away from him. It's too painful to see that rejection. He gets it. Martin Scorsese is... He's been on R slash Red Pill. He understands.

Speaker 1:
[11:09] I feel like this movie is intentionally or not such a response to Dirty Harry, for example, with the 44 Magnum, which is funny because my understanding is Dirty Harry is actually based on one of the detectives who was on the Zodiac case, who was played by Mark Ruffalo in Zodiac. I don't know if he likes the character or not, but the irony of course being, one of the reasons that they never caught the Zodiac, was that the systems, meaning the various sheriff's departments and police departments didn't do a good enough job communicating with one another. It was a systemic breakdown. Not one person can actually do what these movies assume they can. And also, I think of something like Death Wish, for example, which I think had come out a couple years prior. But this idea of the Lone Ranger, the man with the gun, the gunslinger, this is just the ultimate deconstruction of that.

Speaker 2:
[11:51] It is, and I just love the way that he explains this. I love that he's like, just because there are women in the movie, it does not mean it's a feminist movie, which is 100 percent correct. I also, in looking at this, I definitely saw some people being like, oh, Martin Scorsese, he doesn't really care about women, he hasn't made that many great women characters. I don't agree at all. I think he has. I think he's very interested in women, and in the way that certain types of men interact with them. Anyway, I love him.

Speaker 1:
[12:20] I think there's an argument he is the most influential filmmaker of the last 50 years.

Speaker 2:
[12:24] I'm not going to argue with that.

Speaker 1:
[12:26] He's got bangers in every decade from 1970 through today.

Speaker 2:
[12:29] He does. All right. The details as always. Taxi Driver was directed by Martin Scorsese. It was written by Paul Schrader. It was produced by super producer, husband and wife duo, Michael and Julia Phillips, who have come up before. It starred Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Sybil Shepherd, Harvey Keitel, Peter Boyle, Albert Brooks, and many more. As always, the IMDb Logline is a mentally unstable veteran, works as a nighttime taxi driver in New York City, where the perceived decadence and sleaze fuel his urge for violent action. Main sources for today are Columbia Pictures, Portrait of a Studio by Bernard Dick, and a really wonderful oral history of Taxi Driver by The Hollywood Reporter that I definitely recommend you all read and many, many more. Let's get into it. First of all, I know we both loved First Reformed. Listeners, if you have not seen First Reformed, please go watch it. Paul Schrader is such a freak and he's the absolute best. It's so good. I would like to start by talking about Paul Schrader because he's really where Taxi Driver starts. He was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1946. Speaking of First Reformed, he was born into a Calvinist family. Calvinism is a form of Protestantism based on John Calvin's teachings. As far as I can tell, it is pretty hardcore.

Speaker 1:
[13:47] It is.

Speaker 2:
[13:48] Do you know what the basic tenet of it is?

Speaker 1:
[13:51] Okay. Tell me if I'm right because I'm just guessing here, but is it both predestination and transcendentalism? Are those the two big aspects of it?

Speaker 2:
[14:00] God, I hate when you use big words. Basically, the deal with Calvinism is everybody's a sinner, everybody's real bad and humanity is inherently corrupt and only a select few are able to be atoned. They are chosen by God. You cannot escape your fate if you are one of the chosen few, and I don't believe you can really change your fate if you're not.

Speaker 1:
[14:22] So that's the predestination, but transcendentalism, very different. I think I was getting confused with Schrader's writing on transcendental cinema and something like First Reformed.

Speaker 2:
[14:33] Yes. So basically, nothing is in your control. God comes first in every element of life and he has complete sovereignty and also you're bad, bad, bad, bad.

Speaker 1:
[14:42] You can feel that in Schrader's work for sure.

Speaker 2:
[14:45] Yes, yes. In 1928, the Calvinist Church had actually forbidden movies labeling them worldly amusement, and that category also included all things fun like drinking, smoking, dancing, playing cards. Basically, just you can't go to Las Vegas. When he was seven years old, Schrader begged his mother to let him see Disney's living desert in theaters and she said, she couldn't do it. She said, it doesn't matter if the movie itself is innocuous because the money that I would be spending on this movie is going towards an evil industry and I can't support it. So Paul Schrader didn't see a single movie until he was 17 years old. He actually attended Calvin College, which was a Christian seminary school in Michigan because his father was desperate for both him and his brother Leonard to become ministers. Spoiler alert, they both became screenwriters. But one summer in college, Schrader studied at Columbia University and he took every film class he could get his hands on. And one night he was hanging out at the West End Bar in New York City, not very Calvinist of you, Paul. And he started talking to a stranger about this book that he'd read called I Lost It at the Movies. It was a collection of movie reviews written by legendary critic Pauline Kael. It turns out the guy he was talking to was the son of another legendary film critic, and he actually knew Pauline Kael. So he was like, do you want to go see her? And the next day he did indeed take Schrader to meet Pauline, and they got along so well that he stayed with her all day and night and even slept on her couch. And in the morning when he was leaving, she said, you don't really want to be a minister. You want to be a movie critic. And if you ever want to get into UCLA graduate school, let me know. I will get you in. So in 1968, he graduated from seminary school and realized she was correct. He did not want to be a minister. So he called up Pauline and she did exactly what she said she would. She got him into UCLA film school. And it was pretty clear to everybody that Schrader had something special. He was part of the first group of fellows selected by AFI for its Center for Advanced Film Study. He got a job at the LA Free Press writing film criticism, published in the LA Times, also a published film criticism author. He wrote a really wonderful essay on film noir that I highly recommend reading. But he realized all this time and film criticism would be wasted if he didn't try writing a screenplay himself. So he wrote his first one. It's called The Pipeliner. It's about a dying man who goes home to Michigan and then promptly destroys the lives of everyone around him. Now there was a little bit of initial interest in this, but as soon as it started getting momentum, they couldn't secure financing and it fell apart. And so did Schrader's personal life. He had had an affair that caused his marriage to wife Janine Appewall to crash and burn and the affair also ended. I believe he also lost a job during this time and the whole thing happened over the course of only about four or five months. And this sent Schrader into a pretty manic spiral. He told film comment, quote, I got to wandering around at night. I couldn't sleep because I was so depressed. I'd stay in bed till four or five PM. Then I'd say, well, I can get a drink now. I'd get up and get a drink and take the bottle with me and start wandering the streets in my car at night. After the bar is closed, I'd go to pornography, the Pussycat Theater in LA. I do this all night till morning and I did it for about three or four weeks. A very destructive syndrome until I was saved from it by an ulcer. I had not been eating, just drinking. So, he actually ended up getting hospitalized thanks to a bleeding stomach ulcer. And he realized he had not spoken to a single person in that entire month until he got to the hospital. And as he was leaving the hospital, he said, quote, that was when the metaphor hit me for Taxi Driver. And I realized that was the metaphor I had been looking for. The man who will take anybody, any place for money, the man who moves through the city like a rat through the sewer, the man who is constantly surrounded by people yet has no friends, the absolute symbol of urban loneliness. That's the thing I'd been living. That was my symbol, my metaphor. The film is about a car as the symbol of urban loneliness, a metal coffin. He pulled inspiration for Travis Bickle from a few other sources as well, including the diaries of Arthur Bremer, who shot presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972, which would be right around this time.

Speaker 1:
[18:51] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[18:51] Harry Chapin's song Taxi, Sarah Jane Moore's attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford, which by the way, I didn't know about her. She is wild.

Speaker 1:
[19:01] Yeah, an unusual female shooter situation or would-be assassin.

Speaker 2:
[19:07] Yeah. And she was just like a suburban mom who happened to be like extremely radical. Anyway, Schrader wrote the first two drafts of Taxi Driver in less than two weeks, and then he sent it around. And there was pretty much zero interest. But in the fall of that year, 1972, Schrader met Brian DiPalma, who in turn introduced him to an up-and-coming director named Martin Scorsese.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[20:44] Scorsese was editing Mean Streets at the time, so it had not come out yet, but the two got along really well. Then in November of 1972, Schrader got a letter from his brother detailing an idea for a movie. They met up in LA, they wrote the script in about a month, and in February of 1973, the Yakuza screenplay sold for $300,000. Chris, you watched this. What can you tell us about it?

Speaker 1:
[21:08] It's so Schradery, but it also, well, you'll get into the making of because there's another writer credited on it that I feel like you can also feel the influence of Robert Towne. You can feel Towne, it feels like an uneasy marriage. The point is, Robert Mitchum plays a man who was, it's hinted, stationed in Japan. He may have fought in World War II in the Pacific Theater, but was certainly in Japan during the occupation after World War II, which we did talk about during Seven Samurai, and he had two friends. He had a friend named Oliver and a friend named George. In event, he fell in love with a woman named Echo. She had a daughter. It's very convoluted. Her brother returned from the Philippines five years later. The gist of the movie is that it is built around an idea of this, I believe, accurate Japanese idea of giri, which can mean burden or debt. Tanaka Ken, who is Echo's brother, feels that he has an unpayable debt to Robert Mitchum's character, who feels a debt to his American friend, George Tanner, who is in a tough spot with the Yakuza. Because of these cascading debts, we end up in a situation where Robert Mitchum and Tanaka Ken are going up against the Yakuza and it builds to a Tarantino-esque, crazy-88s-style fight scene.

Speaker 2:
[22:19] I think he definitely pulled from this movie.

Speaker 1:
[22:22] You can feel where John Wick pulls from this movie. You can feel where Tarantino pulls from this movie. I ultimately think you can see everything that Schrader is interested in. The ideas of honor, a man's obligation to his fellow man, to himself, ideas of sacrifice, and what is bravery, and what is cowardice. But there are things that undermine the movie, in my opinion. I think Robert Mitchum is ultimately somewhat miscast, and there's a lot of like gumshoe detective style dialogue that I feel like slows the narrative down. But it's a really interesting movie, and I highly recommend people watch it.

Speaker 2:
[22:56] Yeah, go check it out for sure. Also, I love Robert Mitchum in basically everything, but I agree, he's not the best in this. But the most important thing to know about this movie is that Chris is saying it has some of these elements that don't quite fit Schrader's style. That's due very much, I think, to the fact that this was written to be a commercial script. It was written to sell, and it did for so much money. Now, one day while playing chess with Brian De Palma, Schrader brought up Taxi Driver and shared it with him. De Palma passed, saying, this is not my taste, but he did hand the script over to his neighbor, who happened to be future super producer Michael Phillips. Michael, in turn, passed it along to his wife and producing partner, the very spicy Julia Phillips who we've visited before, and also Tony Bill, their other producing partner. Now, Tony and Michael loved it, but Julia, being a SaaS queen, wrote in her book, You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again, quote, I had found nothing really attractive about Taxi Driver when I first read it except for its sociology. Travis was a nutcase, a valid nutcase, but a nutcase. I thought Schrader was too. But Julia got outvoted, and the group agreed they would try to option the screenplay for $1,000, and they did. Meanwhile, Brian De Palma had also passed the screenplay along to Martin Scorsese, who was at a bit of a crossroads in his career at this point. Now, he had directed Boxcar Bertha in 1972 for Roger Corman, of course, everybody comes out of Roger Corman. Then he done a pretty small indie movie called Who's That Knocking at My Door? Harvey Keitel is in that one as well. And I believe Mean Streets, as we said, was in either production or post-production at this point, but it had not come out yet. According to Bernard Dick and Columbia Pictures' Portrait of a Studio, Scorsese frequently lamented the choice confronting him. The question of commercialism is a source of worry. Must one make a choice? Must it be a matter of either setting your sights on winning an Academy Award and becoming a millionaire or making only the movies you want to make and starving to death? But it didn't really matter what Scorsese thought because the Phillipses didn't know who the hell he was and they didn't think he was a big enough name to attach to Taxi Driver. But he kept coming back to them because he really loved the script. And Julia Phillips kept swatting him away. According to Marty, quote, She'd just tell me, come around again when you've done something more than boxcar Bertha.

Speaker 1:
[25:08] Well, which, yeah, and I think who's that knocking at my door, which I saw a long time ago, that feels like more like what Scorsese will eventually do. It deals with Catholicism and a young and Harvey Keitel very much torn between the worlds of what his desires and beliefs are. Boxcar Bertha feels like such a weird aberrant entry into his filmography.

Speaker 2:
[25:27] Well, the producers also had someone else in mind. They were considering a version of Taxi Driver directed by Robert Mulligan and starring Jeff Bridges. It doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 1:
[25:39] Hey, man. Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[25:42] He's a little too chill.

Speaker 1:
[25:44] I don't know. Look, Jeff Bridges is a great actor. It's impossible to imagine without De Niro now because it's such an iconic performance that I think it feels unfair.

Speaker 2:
[25:52] Yeah. Well, Schrader was pushing back pretty hard on this. He knew it wasn't right and he even said that he thought the Phillips is new, it wasn't spot on, but everyone just wanted to see the movie get made and felt like that was their best bet at that point.

Speaker 1:
[26:04] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[26:05] But then Paul Schrader saw a rough cut of Mean Streets and he's like, Julia, Michael, pals, you need to sit down and watch this. They did. Halfway through, they realized they were a couple of dumb dum dummies and they must have both Scorsese and Robert De Niro for Taxi Driver. Important to remember, he had not done The Godfather Part 2 at this point.

Speaker 1:
[26:26] Right.

Speaker 2:
[26:26] So they started shopping this around as a package deal, Scorsese, De Niro, Schrader, and everyone's like, who?

Speaker 1:
[26:35] A combined height of 15 feet between those three men. I'm just teasing.

Speaker 2:
[26:40] They are all relatively small. And also, all handsome.

Speaker 1:
[26:45] Very, all very handsome, especially at that time, very dapper. You mentioned Godfather Part 2. What's interesting is I think the performance in that movie would have not have lent itself as well to Taxi Driver as Mean Streets, right? Mean Streets, his performance in Mean Streets as Johnny Boy is so much closer to a Taxi Driver archetype.

Speaker 2:
[27:03] Totally. So everybody's like, we don't know who the fuck these people are. Like, this is not a priority for us. Honestly, the biggest name at this point might have been Schrader because of how much the Yakuza sold for.

Speaker 1:
[27:13] Sure.

Speaker 2:
[27:14] That is until the mid-70s rolled around. And this package deal started to look pretty great because Scorsese released Mean Streets in 1973, which of course starred Robert De Niro. Then De Niro went and starred in The Godfather Part II in 1974. Meanwhile, the Phillips had produced The Sting in 1973, which had won seven Oscars, including Best Picture. Julia Phillips is actually the first woman producer to win Best Picture. Wow. So basically, this is now an enormously incentivized package deal because of what they did over the span of like a year and a half or two years. So Columbia Pictures with David Begelman at its head, greenlit Taxi Driver, but Begelman was pretty nervous about it. I think understandably so. The only reason it got made was that every single major player took a massive pay cut to make it happen. De Niro got $35,000 for this, Scorsese got $65,000, the producers got $45,000 and Paul Schrader got $30,000. And remember, he had just sold the Yakuza for $300,000. Now Chris, any guesses in particular what might be making the studio a little nervous about this point? And to be clear, this would be right around the end of 1974, early 1975. What's going on in the world?

Speaker 1:
[28:33] We're just getting out of Vietnam, right?

Speaker 2:
[28:35] We are not out of Vietnam yet. The war is still very much going on. I believe it ended in 1975.

Speaker 1:
[28:43] Okay, got it. I mean, we've had a string of lone shooters.

Speaker 2:
[28:48] Yeah, there's been a lot of assassination attempts. The Vietnam War is still going on. Taxi Driver is clearly not a fan of the Vietnam War. And most movies involving a hint of war up to this point had only dealt with wars like World War II or Korea. They didn't really want to deal with something that's happening while the movie is being made, basically.

Speaker 1:
[29:07] Right, we're still well before The Deer Hunter. We're well before a lot of films critical of the Vietnam War.

Speaker 2:
[29:13] Which by the way, those all came out after it had ended. That was not the case with this. So Julia Phillips, for her part, also said that Begelman really hated the script. And the only way she got him on board was to promise that they would fire Scorsese and bring in Steven Spielberg to save it if they needed to.

Speaker 1:
[29:32] I love Spielberg. He is so wrong for this.

Speaker 2:
[29:36] I agree. She does say that he agreed to do this. That he agreed to step in and take it over if Scorsese really blew it. Which is interesting because he was friends with Scorsese. So I do wonder if he just turned around and told him. But who knows.

Speaker 1:
[29:50] Had he done Jaws yet? Because Jaws is 75, the summer of 75.

Speaker 2:
[29:55] He was probably in production on Jaws, would be my guess.

Speaker 1:
[29:59] Which is interesting because that's the one notoriously was a very troubled production. And there were a lot of questions as to whether or not, which direction it was going to go and which direction Spielberg was going to go as a result.

Speaker 2:
[30:11] Well, maybe that's why he was like, yes, sure, any job, I will have it to give it to me. They got a budget of only $1.3 million and they set off into casting. So Scorsese had apparently originally thought of another one of his frequent collaborators to play Travis Bickle, Harvey Keitel. But the Phillips was like, no, no, no, De Niro is our lead. So Scorsese offered Keitel the role of a campaign worker. And I do wonder if this is the Albert Brooks part. I don't know that for sure.

Speaker 1:
[30:37] Yeah, he's too good looking. He's too dashing.

Speaker 2:
[30:40] Except his hair in this movie is insane.

Speaker 1:
[30:43] I know, I know. But I feel like you need Albert Brooks doing the forerunner to what he'll do in broadcast news. You know what I mean? So well. And then Albert Brooks, by the way, who would go on to be his own, not only great director, but a great romantic leading man as well.

Speaker 2:
[30:55] Yeah, I love Albert Brooks.

Speaker 1:
[30:56] He's amazing.

Speaker 2:
[30:57] And he can be very sinister too. So Keitel came back though after reading the script and was like, no, no, no, I would like to play the pimp please. And they were like, oh, Harvey, the pimp is a black person in the script. And he was like, I don't care. It's like it should be me. And Scorsese and Schrader were really not totally sure about it. The studio, however, was like, yes, fantastic. Please change the race of the pimp character in this. They were very concerned about all the violence at the end of the movie being enacted exclusively against black people.

Speaker 1:
[31:31] Sure.

Speaker 2:
[31:31] Yeah, a valid point. And if that were the direction the movie had gone, they were not super on board for that. It's not for a particularly honorable reason. They were very concerned about potential rioting in the theaters and didn't want any legal liability affiliated with that. Quentin Tarantino famously derided this decision to change sports race because Travis murdering a bunch of black people, Tarantino thought was kind of the point. Like, oh, he's racist. That's what this is.

Speaker 1:
[31:56] That is true. I mean, it is. That's consistent with the character Schrader's crafted.

Speaker 2:
[32:00] It is. I mean, and that is how it was written. I believe that was Schrader's intention. But the way Tarantino said this was like, they shouldn't have given in to the studio. Schrader says it's not that black and white. He told a rabbit's foot, quote, I was involved in that decision. It wasn't in the script. It was just taken for granted that pimps in New York are all black. And Melnick, who ran it at Columbia, said, quote, we're going to have an incident in the theater if you do this. If at the end, Travis just goes and starts killing all the black people and only black people, something's going to happen. It only takes one incident in a theater to kill a film. So it sounds like he agreed that this was not worth any potential risk at the time and didn't feel like it was a huge character issue to change it. So Keitel got the part. Now Albert Brooks who had come up as a stand-up comedian and had just wrapped directing a few short films for the first season of SNL was cast as Tom. This is his first big feature role. He's so good. According to Brooks, there was quite a lot of improvisation during rehearsal, but not on the set. He basically said they would rehearse and improvise for hours, and then Scorsese and Schrader would be there watching it. Then he would write it into the script so that when the cameras rolled, they knew what they were working with. And that does seem to be the case across basically everyone in this movie, which I think is pretty cool.

Speaker 1:
[33:08] And it makes perfect sense because they have a low budget, so they don't want to burn film.

Speaker 2:
[33:12] Right.

Speaker 1:
[33:13] So just do the rehearsals. You have your actors for cheap. It's a good way of going about it.

Speaker 2:
[33:17] It's smart. So Cybill Shepherd was cast as Betsy, and she was coming off pretty hot of The Last Picture Show and The Heartbreak Kid. She's actually one of the biggest stars in this movie at the time, but she took some convincing. When she first read the script, she threw it across the room because she was pissed that her character had basically no lines. She eventually came around to it, but it sounds like this was not a particularly pleasant experience for her. According to Julia Phillips, Marty's misogyny was apparent from his casting of Cybill Shepherd as Betsy. We had interviewed just about every blonde on both coasts, and still he kept looking, looking, looking. I liked Farrah Fawcett, her fine bones, her aqualine profile, her big teeth, her thin body. Marty picked Cybill for her big ass, a retro Italian gesture I always felt. In the end, he had to give her line readings, and De Niro hated her. To which I say, fuck you, Julia. If Cybill Shepherd has a big ass, come on. And also, like, I think that's a totally unfair representation of Martin Scorsese and why he would cast her.

Speaker 1:
[34:18] I just don't think they shoot her that way.

Speaker 2:
[34:19] They don't.

Speaker 1:
[34:21] Look, Cybill Shepherd's very beautiful. I don't mean to take away from that, but I think she does have a girl next door quality to her that I think is so important.

Speaker 2:
[34:30] She looks accessible in a way that Farrah Fawcett does not.

Speaker 1:
[34:34] No. Bickle's not going to walk in there with Farrah Fawcett, I think, in the same way. Neither is Albert Brooks going to flirt with her at the office.

Speaker 2:
[34:41] No. Cybill Shepherd's gorgeous, but she totally looks like the most beautiful woman in the real world. Hey, maybe I have a shot.

Speaker 1:
[34:50] By the way, you don't, but maybe.

Speaker 2:
[34:52] You definitely don't. She did have a pretty bad time by all accounts. It does seem like Martin Scorsese had a hard time with her.

Speaker 1:
[34:59] Yeah, it may not have been the right fit on set. I'm just saying, I totally understand. I do think she's a great choice visually and otherwise.

Speaker 2:
[35:05] I do too. But it seems like out of everyone, she just didn't really get this process and they were very openly frustrated with her, which sucks. Like De Niro, I think was really frustrated with her. Martin Scorsese just gave a lot of line readings. So not a particularly pleasant experience for her, but I do just want to call out that gorgeous Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dress that she wears was her own dress that she brought to set. So justice for Sibyl. Then finally, there was Iris. Now, I had always thought they must have auditioned tons of kids for this role. That does not seem to be the case at all. Jodie Foster had already worked with Martin Scorsese on Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and it sounds like he just called up her mom directly and was like, hey, I'm making another one. Do you want to come back? In fact, Jodie Foster herself points out at the time that the cast was being put together, she had made more movies than basically anyone else there, and this is true. Again, go back and listen to our Out of Frame episode for a little bit more background on Jodie Foster, but she was a very established child actor at this point, especially thanks to some live-action Disney films. So they knew they wanted her. Her mom was on board. She trusted Martin Scorsese. They had all met together about it and they all agreed this is a good fit. Let's do it. But the Board of Education was not. They refused to sign a work permit for the then 12-year-old Jodie Foster to portray a sex worker in the film. Now, Jodie went on Conan's podcast this year and pointed out that compared to what we see nowadays, the sex scenes aren't even really that suggestive, which I guess is true, but she's 12 and the context is so upsetting. So I do understand what they were concerned about with this. Absolutely. She said that at the time, quote, the Board of Education started having issues with the idea of young kids doing more adult roles. They were concerned that somehow playing these characters that we would be confused about ourselves and who we were.

Speaker 1:
[36:57] I think it's a valid concern.

Speaker 2:
[36:59] I do too. I have very mixed feelings about the casting of her in this movie. I think she is incredible in it. I think what Scorsese is doing is he is forcing you to look at an actual 12-year-old next to grown men. There is something to be said for that because so often in movies, when you are dealing with someone who is underage, having a sexual relationship with an older person, they will often cast someone who is not actually underage or who looks quite a bit older than they are, which almost makes it feel acceptable on some level. I think he is very explicitly saying, no, I'm casting a 12-year-old because I want you to see what that actually looks like. There is a movie, I believe it was made for HBO, it's called The Tale, it stars Laura Dern. If you haven't seen this, it is worth watching. It shows the memories of this woman who's realizing that she was groomed by this person who she thought was her boyfriend, but she was 13, 14 years old. In most of the flashbacks, they show an actress who, like I'm saying, looks a bit more developed, looks older, doesn't seem as strange. Then what happens is she sees a picture of herself at that age, and she looks like a little girl. You start to see the flashbacks again with a different actress who looks much younger. It is very effective. That's all I'll say about that. I agree that this is concerning material for a 12-year-old, but I do understand what he's trying to do. In order to secure that work permit, Jodie Foster had to undergo a four-hour-long interview with a psychiatrist. At the end of the interview, the doctor ruled that she was mentally equipped to handle the part and what was being asked of her. Also, it should be noted, they agreed right away that anything verging too much on a sexual encounter in the movie would not be Jodie Foster. It would be her older sister Connie, who was 18 at the time and basically the same size. You can tell, but they do it very well. I don't know if you caught a couple of moments, Chris, where they do swap in Connie.

Speaker 1:
[38:50] I didn't notice.

Speaker 2:
[38:51] It's very subtle. There's a couple, when you see her try and drop her shirt and you see the back of her shoulders, that is Connie, that's not Jodie Foster. Also, I believe when she's dancing with Harvey Keitel, it's Jodie Foster for the first two-thirds of that. Then there's one moment where he turns away from the camera and you can't see her for literally one second, I think they swap her there, because then she turns around and he kisses her, and he's not kissing Jodie Foster. So even though the content was disturbing, it sounds like Foster was decently well-protected on the set. She told the New York Times in 1976, there was a welfare worker on the set every day. She saw the daily rushes of all my scenes and made sure I wasn't on the set when Robert De Niro said a dirty word. That's so funny that that's what you're worried about. Actually, I think the only thing that could have had a bad effect on me was the blood in the shooting scene. It was really neat though. It was red sugary stuff, and they used styrofoam for bones and a pump to make the blood gush out of the man's arm after he shot it off. So she was fine. But when it came to preparing for her role as Iris, Jodie Foster had a pretty good teacher, Robert De Niro. He took her under his wing during this production and would take her out to coffee shops to run lines and improvise with her. And she's 12 years old, so she doesn't really get it. She said she thought he was pretty weird, which I can't imagine being a 12-year-old and going out to lunch with Robert De Niro. There would be nothing weirder.

Speaker 1:
[40:12] Yeah, but he's not even really Robert De Niro at that point. You know what I mean? What, he's 30 years old or, you know, it's just, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[40:19] So that was until they got on set and she started to understand the character that he had helped her build during all of these rehearsals and pre-production. She said he really made me understand what it was to create a character, something I didn't know at 12 years old, and it changed. It definitely changed my life. And it's a good thing that De Niro had kind of already stepped into this role because Martin Scorsese, once they got into production, did have some issues directing the very young Jodie Foster in some of those adult scenes. She told Graham Norton, quote, They were very uncomfortable about my character. Nobody knew how to direct me. Scorsese would say something like, Unzip his fly and just start laughing and not know what to do. So he would hand it over to Robert De Niro and then Robert would tell me what to do. And he was even more Robert De Niro than even quieter and more strange. Now, while he was helping prep and direct Jodie Foster, De Niro was working an absolutely punishing schedule. He was actually filming Bertolucci's 1900 in Italy during prep for Taxi Driver. And I believe he would finish shooting in Rome on a Friday, get on a plane to New York, drive an actual cab around the city for the weekend, before flying back to Rome on Monday. And he did get a real cab license and was functioning as a taxi driver. I don't want you driving me around if you've just gotten off a plane from Italy.

Speaker 1:
[41:44] Crazy.

Speaker 2:
[41:45] And so this was terrifying for several reasons, not least of which being how the fuck was he awake on this schedule, but also New York City in 1975 was pretty much just as Travis diagnoses it, a shit show or rather an open sewer full of filth and scum. And he was technically correct about that open sewer part because in 1975, Chris, New York City saw a sanitation worker strike. In early July, in 90-degree heat, sanitation workers staged an unofficial strike. It lasted for three days, trash piled up at the rate of 28,000 tons a day. So it smelled like hot trash all over the city. And in June of 1975, New York City had also reached the absolute zenith of a credit issue. It had cut off access to the money market. It was unable to borrow any money. It needed to pay back its bills. It was basically on the brink of bankruptcy. They couldn't pay teachers. They couldn't pay police officers. There were issues paying sanitation workers. The city didn't have the money for anything. It was literally on the brink of collapse. So it was a pretty rough time to be in New York City. Meanwhile, Scorsese and Schrader were busy finding real people to serve as inspiration for the film. Scorsese took Peter Boyle and the rest of the Cabbies to the Belmore Cafeteria, which was a legendary cab driver hangout cafe. They would just sit around and listen to the real Cabbies, and then bring that dialogue back to Schrader and Scorsese who again would then go write it into the script.

Speaker 1:
[43:17] Yeah. A lot of the like, and then she's pissing panties off, driving across the room. It feels like the jocular work room, break room talk that you might hear from cab drivers at the time.

Speaker 2:
[43:32] A hundred percent. But while Scorsese was focused on the Cabbies, Paul Schrader was focused on the sex workers, specifically sport. Because of course, they've changed the race of this character. So he went out looking for, these are his words, not mine, the great white pimp, who he never found, by the way. But he would go around asking everyone being like, hi, is there a white pimp nearby perhaps that you could direct me to? And everyone was like, I don't know, maybe over there? What are you doing?

Speaker 1:
[44:05] Paul Schrader is such. One day we'll cover the Canyons when he stripped down naked to shoot the final nude scene to convince Lindsay Lohan to do her nudity. He is an unusual fella. One of the most incredible presences in film history and one of the most unusual with incredible highs and incredible lows in his career.

Speaker 2:
[44:25] Yeah. Well, after a long search, he ended up at a bar that a lot of sex workers hung out in, and that's where he found a 15-year-old girl named Garth Avery. He couldn't believe how close Garth was to the character of Iris that he'd written on the page. So he figured, I have to talk to this girl more. I have to have Marty talk to this girl. But he was like, I'm never going to find her again if she leaves right now. So he said, listen, I'll give you 200 bucks. If you will come back to my suite at the St. Regis, you sleep in the bed, I'm going to sleep in the couch. I just want you to meet someone in the morning. She said yes. That night, he slipped a note under Martin Scorsese's door that read, Marty, I've met Iris. We're going to have breakfast at eight o'clock in the morning. You should come down and meet her. According to Schrader, the next morning at breakfast, he said, quote, so it's the next morning, I'm having breakfast with Garth and Marty comes down and meets her. Virtually all the stuff Jodie does in the movie, we saw at that breakfast. She had a bag full of different colored sunglasses, and during the conversation, she'd just take one out, put it down, take another one out, put it down. She'd roll up a piece of bread, put butter on it, cover it with sugar, sugar, sugar, roll it up and eat it like this. All kinds of junkie mannerisms. As soon as Scorsese saw that, he knew what to say to Jodie. It was all there. I think this is something that this movie does incredibly well. There is almost like a documentary style quality to elements of it, and it really does seem like that's because they went out there and they spoke to these people and they just transcribed what they said. Like Iris, Garth had grown up in an upper middle-class family. She had gone to a good school, she got a great education, she had family who cared about her, siblings who frequently tried to bring her home and get her clean. But sadly, they never succeeded. Now, Jodie Foster did eventually meet Garth. It seems Scorsese and Schrader thought this would be some sort of like besties bonding meet cute. But the reality is they were introducing a 12-year-old to a sex worker and unfortunately also a drug addict. And they basically just said hi to each other and that was it. It was really awkward. But the inspiration for Foster's costume was heavily pulled from Garth and Foster was really not happy about that. She was a self-described tomboy, she hated the platform heels, the short shorts, the shirt, everything. By the way, Garth does appear in the movie. She is actually the girl who's walking next to Jodie Foster when Travis is trying to get her to get in the car. They tried to give her a bigger part with more scenes, but unfortunately she just couldn't show up. She was an alcoholic who struggled with drug addiction as well, and they had to just let that be it. Very sadly, she would die less than 20 years later in 1994 because of complications from HIV. Now, cameras ruled in June of 1975, and apartments for Travis and Iris were actually built inside a real building that was scheduled to be torn down. According to Scorsese, quote, it was a horrible, horrible place. It was really miserable. Had a lot of character, but it was a miserable place. Even the night shooting there was very disturbing. And according to Michael Phillips, there was another problem. He said, quote, it was very arduous. It was a tight schedule. We were over from the beginning, and there was a lot of pressure from the studio, which I think is interesting because this was so cheap. Like, I don't really know why they were breathing down their necks the way that they were.

Speaker 1:
[47:44] Yeah, I don't know. Maybe there's pressure on other projects. You know what I'm saying? And it's trickling downhill.

Speaker 2:
[47:50] Well, Phillips was the one who ended up kind of handling most of that pressure. According to Scorsese, quote, Michael Phillips absorbed a great deal of that. For example, I shot De Niro in this porno theater on Eighth Avenue, and there's a reverse in which you see the pornography on the screen. I was going to put a drop of oil on the negative to obscure the image, but in order to do that, I had to get the image first. They saw the film at the studio before I could obscure it, and up comes the pornography. They were furious. They yelled at Michael, no matter what I did, it irritated everyone.

Speaker 1:
[48:18] It is obscured in the version I saw.

Speaker 2:
[48:21] No, he does it. He does exactly what he said he was going to do. It's just that they saw it before he had done that. So it's these things of like, I don't know, I think maybe it's the material and that they were just extremely worried, and so anything was kind of setting them off. I'm not sure. And again, New York in the summer of 1975 was about as unpleasant as it gets. According to Steve Clifford, who I believe was a New York resident, everybody thought New York City was going to hell. Nothing seemed to work. The subways were, you know, 120 degrees in the summer. There was crime, there was dirt. There was just dirt everywhere. And Scorsese had brought on Michael Chapman to handle cinematography. He was East Coast based and pretty cheap, and those are basically his qualifications. I think he does an incredible job in this movie.

Speaker 1:
[49:03] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[49:04] But according to Chapman, much of the way the movie looks was dictated by the fact that we didn't have a lot of time and didn't have a lot of money and therefore couldn't do traditional things. Now, this includes things like they couldn't light the streets with big lights. They didn't have the money for it, so they had to just work with the lights that were already there. And they really did not have a lot of money. Here is how he explained they captured the scenes in the car with De Niro. Quote, we were in a real cab in real New York. We weren't even towing the cab behind any sort of generator truck. It was just Bobby driving the cab through the streets. Marty and I would squat in the back with the camera operator shooting over Bobby's shoulder. We had a little 110 battery pack in the trunk. We stuck the sound man in there, poor guy, and we'd just drive off into the streets.

Speaker 1:
[49:47] True guerrilla style filmmaking.

Speaker 2:
[49:48] And it looks great. And meanwhile, the studio was always lurking. The second week of filming was plagued with constant rainstorms. Naturally, the studio execs were like, hey, why don't you move some of these urban scenes inside and drop this whole New York City backdrop type thing? And what do you think Martin Scorsese had to say about that?

Speaker 1:
[50:08] Go fuck yourself.

Speaker 2:
[50:09] Yeah, basically, basically. He was really upset. He reportedly exploded and shut down the entire production at lunch. And later that night, he's like, I will walk off, I will walk off the set and I will never come back if they keep meddling. And so Columbia was like, fine, do whatever you want, just stay under budget. We don't care. By late August or early September, it was the end of a relatively short shoot, even though they were five or six days over the 40 day shoot and they had gone a bit over budget at that point. But there was a problem. Chris, what's the most iconic line in this movie?

Speaker 1:
[50:40] You talking to me?

Speaker 2:
[50:41] You talking to me?

Speaker 1:
[50:42] You talking to me?

Speaker 2:
[50:43] That's right. That's the one. Well, they didn't have it. And not like they didn't have the right take or the right performance. It was not written. The script just said Travis pulls his gun out and talks to himself. So, yeah, in order to squeeze this scene in, Scorsese locked himself and De Niro in the room with no camera operator, no AD, and he sort of like tucked himself like a little garden gnome in at Robert De Niro's feet and was directing him from down there how to improvise into the mirror. This went on for over an hour and a half, and his AD was literally banging down the door, being like, you have to move on. And I love this. Martin Scorsese cracked the door and goes, this is good, this is good. Give me five, give me two more minutes. One more tick, one more tick.

Speaker 1:
[51:23] I mean, it works really well, and that whole montage is, yeah, it's one of the moments where he does use editing to undercut Bickle in some very interesting ways, right? You have, like Bickle's, I love how Bickle resets his own monologue a couple of times. It's very funny.

Speaker 2:
[51:38] Yes. Now, allegedly, this line may have come from Bruce Springsteen.

Speaker 1:
[51:44] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[51:45] I had a hard time completely confirming this, but some sources say that either De Niro or Scorsese attended a Bruce Springsteen concert at the bottom line in New York City. At one point, the crowd was calling out Bruce's name, Bruce. He turned around and said, are you talking to me? Are you talking to me? Apparently, that stuck with them. His manager does say he did say that at this concert and that he's pretty sure that they were there. So who knows? Some really cool production and costume design details, I want to mention as it pertains to Travis's past in Vietnam. Scorsese was very meticulous about this. He hired a former Special Forces officer with a background in psychology to consult with him on how Travis would move, how he would talk, how he would avoid eye contact. They are very specific about this. The mohawk he has by the end was suggested by a friend of Scorsese's and an actor who had served in Vietnam. He told Scorsese, quote, In Saigon, if you saw a guy with his head shaved like a little mohawk, that usually meant those people were ready to go into a certain Special Forces situation. You didn't even go near them. They were ready to kill. According to Bernard Dick's Columbia Pictures Portrait of a Studio, both Scorsese and Schrader worked really hard to make sure the audience understood that Travis' past was traumatic, that he did not snap out of nowhere. Couple of key details. There's a super large scar on Travis' back. He complains of insomnia. He worries about cancer in his stomach. Those are very common worries, particularly of veterans of Vietnam.

Speaker 1:
[53:12] Yeah, with Agent Orange.

Speaker 2:
[53:13] Right.

Speaker 1:
[53:14] He's popping amphetamines throughout the movie.

Speaker 2:
[53:17] He battles fatigue, often expressing as sleeplessness. He's popping amphetamines. He's smoking unfiltered camel cigarettes, which I guess could be easily carried into combat zones because they didn't have any filter residue. Also the shoe polish, the knife that he straps to his leg. Apparently, that's something that only special forces use in Vietnam. There are so many context clues as to what the deal is. But I would like to end our production section by talking about my favorite scene and performance in the whole movie. It's not Robert De Niro, it's not Jodie Foster. Who do you think it is, Chris?

Speaker 1:
[53:50] Well, you kind of teased it for me before the episode, so I can't claim credit, but I'm going to say it's Martin Scorsese playing really maybe the most vile character in the whole movie.

Speaker 2:
[54:00] It is.

Speaker 1:
[54:01] It's a horrifying scene. Yeah, it's really dark.

Speaker 2:
[54:04] It is. I love this scene. I love it. It's a horror movie and he's so scary. He's so good.

Speaker 1:
[54:13] So the scene is Scorsese is playing a character who's a passenger in De Niro's cab, and he just tells him to keep the meter running and to wait outside of a window. He points and there's the silhouette of a woman. Again, it's set up in a way where you think, is this De Niro's fantasy of what he's seeing in the window? Because it's the silhouette profile of a woman.

Speaker 2:
[54:34] It's very Austin Powers, yes.

Speaker 1:
[54:35] Right. Her breast is revealed in some way and Scorsese reveals to De Niro very casually. This is his wife and she's having an affair, and she's having an affair with a black man. He does not use that word. He's going to kill her and he's going to shoot her in the face with a.44 Magnum. You should see what a.44 Magnum can do to a woman's face. Then he goes on to say, you should see what can do to her vagina. The casualness with which he expresses this makes it feel like a foregone conclusion that it's going to happen, which is so terrifying. It's actually more terrifying than the Bickle posturing in his apartment.

Speaker 2:
[55:13] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[55:14] Because it doesn't feel like Scorsese's character is posturing at all.

Speaker 2:
[55:18] No, it feels like he's gonna do it. Yeah, it's terrible.

Speaker 1:
[55:21] Well, this is happening, buddy. It's happening tomorrow.

Speaker 2:
[55:23] Yeah. I love the scene even more knowing that the role was not supposed to be played by Martin Scorsese. He was a last minute swap for actor George Memoli, who very unfortunately got pretty severely injured in another movie set. I'm pretty sure it was a back injury. And they didn't have time to replace him, so Scorsese decided to step in. And everyone, including Scorsese, was pretty nervous about it. Also, Paul Schrader was nervous because he was worried that if Scorsese didn't turn in a good performance and he didn't like it, that he would end up cutting it, which was, in fact, Scorsese's plan if he had sucked. But Schrader was concerned because that would remove a pivotal scene from the film. Also, I don't know if you just Googled a picture of George Memoli, but...

Speaker 1:
[56:03] I just did.

Speaker 2:
[56:04] OK, so he's huge.

Speaker 1:
[56:06] He's a big man, and I think it works less, it works better because he has a Joe Pesci, Goodfellas energy where you're just like, holy shit, this guy could just go off on anyone at any point in time.

Speaker 2:
[56:16] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[56:16] And there's no indicator as opposed to this larger bully type, right? Which is also what makes Scorsese's cameo in Mean Streets so effective as Shorty. And OK, skip 15, 30 seconds if you haven't seen Mean Streets, but at the end, he's the one who shoots Keitel and Amy Robinson's character and De Niro in the neck. De Niro keeps getting shot in the neck and it's so unexpected. And he's again so casual about it. He's so casual about the violence.

Speaker 2:
[56:43] I'll say this for Martin Scorsese, he is a small man and anytime he has appeared on screen, he doesn't hide that. Like it's very much used to his advantage. And I think that him being this kind of small, squirrely guy in the back of the cab, it ends up working so much better, like you said. And I think it also kind of plays into the male fantasy world that this movie is living in. And he is like one of the most manosphere characters in the whole thing.

Speaker 1:
[57:15] Yeah, in a terrible way. And I think Scorsese is very aware of this, but you could lean into this idea that there's a whole character backstory that becomes apparent with this idea of, oh, maybe he feels like he's been overlooked in some way because of his height. This is even more emasculating, right? Because he's a smaller man. So it allows for us to project a really terrifying history onto this character in a scene that lasts 90 seconds.

Speaker 2:
[57:39] It lasts longer than that. It's a pretty impressively long monologue, but yes.

Speaker 1:
[57:43] But my point being we never see him before or after.

Speaker 2:
[57:45] Well, fortunately, the film's resident acting coach was there for Scorsese, and that is Robert De Niro. And he, I think, could tell that Scorsese was nervous and he just said, listen, I'm not going to turn my meter off until you make me turn my meter off. And that really clicked for Martin Scorsese, and it ends up being a wonderful scene. And by the way, I should say, the end of Taxi Driver is obviously very much open to interpretation. We're not going to discuss it much here because we actually did discuss it in depth with Hannah and Saruti from Red Handed on Friday's episode that went into the case of Jodie Foster and John Hinckley Jr. So if you want to hear what we think about the end of Taxi Driver, go back and listen to that episode. One day after they wrapped production, President Gerald Ford denied a federal bailout to the city of New York prompting a very famous New York Daily News headline that read, quote, Ford to city, drop dead. Quite a time to be in New York City. All right. Let's talk about post-production. Taxi Driver was edited by Tom Rolfe, Melvin Shapiro, Scorsese himself, and who, Chris?

Speaker 1:
[58:59] Marsha Lucas.

Speaker 2:
[59:00] Marsha Lucas, yes. I couldn't confirm this 100 percent. I believe she may have been supervising the edit because there were several other editors working on it. But she had cut Scorsese's first studio feature, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and they would continue working together after this as well.

Speaker 1:
[59:15] She was, in a way, more integrated into this group of directors than Lucas himself was in some senses at this point in time.

Speaker 2:
[59:24] Yeah. My understanding about that is that someone basically said to her, like, you need to cut somebody else's movie that's not your husband because if you don't do that, everyone's just going to think that you're getting these jobs because George Lucas is your husband, and to George Lucas' credit, he apparently was like, that's probably true. Like, you should go work for someone else, and she did. But since this was Bernard Herrmann's final film, I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the score, which I think is incredible. The score to me is maybe the most important part of making this a fantasy.

Speaker 1:
[59:56] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[59:56] Because it doesn't quite, I think it intentionally doesn't quite match the tone of the movie in a way that makes it all just feel a little wrong.

Speaker 1:
[60:04] Yeah. It really sells the idea that Travis Bickle thinks of himself as the lead in a film noir, like a Philip Marlowe or a Dashiell Hammett story, like The Long Goodbye or something like that.

Speaker 2:
[60:16] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[60:17] That's smooth, jazzy.

Speaker 2:
[60:19] Raymond Chandler, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[60:20] Yeah, Raymond Chandler. I knew the dame was troubled the minute she walked in and it's like, sure, you just barged into her office and so it's so good.

Speaker 2:
[60:30] She is not interested in going to a porn theater with you.

Speaker 1:
[60:33] Well, no, yes. She's initially a little interested, which I think is smart because he's very handsome. Again, it's just very smartly constructed. But yes, I think the score is jarring in all the best ways. I think it's very smart.

Speaker 2:
[60:47] It is. Scorsese approached Herman personally, and Herman was like, No, thank you. I don't know anything about taxis. I don't do movies about cabs.

Speaker 1:
[60:57] That's the extent of it. Never been in a taxi. I don't even know what this cab is.

Speaker 2:
[61:02] Never been in a cab. I don't get it. And then Scorsese was like, just just five minutes, five minutes. One more take. One more take. I got it. This is good. This is good. But he read the script and that did change his mind completely. Little bit very briefly about Bernard Herman, if you're not familiar. He was not from a musical family at all, and somehow he managed to win a songwriting competition at 12 years old and then went off to study at Juilliard. Following that up with a gig as the composer and conductor for CBS Radio by the time he was 22 years old. This is, of course, where he met Orson Welles. The two collaborated on the War of the Worlds broadcast and then he made his feature debut with Citizen Kane. It's just crazy. Then he ends up teaming up with Hitchcock on many films, including North by Northwest and Psycho. He had just worked with Brian De Palma on Obsession, and it was De Palma who suggested Herman to Scorsese. Taxi Driver owes quite a bit of favors to Brian De Palma. But on December 23rd, 1975, Herman completed the score for Taxi Driver and turned it in. One day later, at 64 years old, Bernard Herman died of congestive heart failure in his sleep.

Speaker 1:
[62:04] Wow, I did not know that. That's-

Speaker 2:
[62:07] One day.

Speaker 1:
[62:08] I mean, it's terribly sad because 64 is still very young. But I am glad we got one more Bernard Herman score. Also, sorry to backtrack, wasn't Obsession also written by Schrader?

Speaker 2:
[62:19] Yes, Obsession was written by Paul Schrader. Now, with a final score and cut in hand, Taxi Driver was screened for a small group of friends who, I think, loved it. Then they screened it for the execs at Columbia Pictures, and they did not love it. They had one pretty major concern right away. Chris, any guesses as to which quadrant of the audience they thought might not like this movie that much?

Speaker 1:
[62:41] Well, my guess is it's a full half of the audience, two quadrants, right? It's women in any age bracket.

Speaker 2:
[62:48] Women. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. The ladies are not going to love it, which I think is an interesting take. I don't think this is a movie that is unappealing to women at all. I think Martin Scorsese is totally right. The fear that the Cybill Shepherd character experiences is something I think women are very, very familiar with, and I think he does a good job of demonstrating that in this movie.

Speaker 1:
[63:10] Yeah. I mean, as we talked about on the Out of Frame, if you listen to the phone calls where Jodie Foster is trying to very politely turn down John Hinckley Jr., it is carbon copy of Cybill Shepherd repeatedly turning down Travis Bickle.

Speaker 2:
[63:25] Yep. Then he had another problem that was compounding that. The film went to the MPAA and came back with an X rating.

Speaker 1:
[63:34] That's what I thought. I didn't know that, but that's what I assumed the studio's concern might be.

Speaker 2:
[63:38] It's one of them, yeah. So they had a little sit down with the studio. According to Julia Phillips, the gist of the studio's message was change the picture to an R or we'll change it for you. She said, I knew they were never going to do that, but Martin Scorsese did not. So Michael Phillips starts going back and forth with the MPAA. He's making tiny little edits, he's doing little trims and cuts here and there to try and get them to bring the rating down, but it just doesn't work. They were specifically concerned about the violence at the end. They really wanted Scorsese to just cut that. Maybe you don't have to blow that man's hand off. Have you ever thought about that? What if we don't show that? Less blowing off hands, more romance, you know?

Speaker 1:
[64:13] More romance?

Speaker 2:
[64:15] For the ladies, I'm guessing.

Speaker 1:
[64:18] More dates with Sibyl Shepherd, we're a skinny taker.

Speaker 2:
[64:22] Yes, that's right. Less hands blown off, more romance.

Speaker 1:
[64:25] Didn't Midnight Cowboy win the Oscar for, it was the first X-rated film, I think, to win best picture in like 69 or 70?

Speaker 2:
[64:34] I think that's 60s, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[64:36] Yeah, I think it's within a few years of that. It is interesting that there's still such hesitation right around that. I understand, but it is just interesting.

Speaker 2:
[64:44] Also, the fact that Midnight Cowboy is an X-rating, it's bizarre having watched it again. It's like, hmm.

Speaker 1:
[64:48] I think the X-rating system has changed drastically over the years. You can't compare them apples to apples anymore.

Speaker 2:
[64:54] True. So, Scorsese called up old buddy, old pal, Steven Spielberg. I wonder if Steven was like, yes, yes, how can I help? But according to Spielberg and Scorsese themselves, Scorsese was like, Steven, I'm going to buy a gun. I'm going to buy a gun. I'm going to threaten the studio. And Spielberg was like, don't do that. Maybe don't. Just don't. Don't do that. It's not a good idea. Marty's like, well, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it because they're going to ruin the movie.

Speaker 1:
[65:20] You ever seen what happens to a studio when you shoot it in the face with a.44 Magnum?

Speaker 2:
[65:24] I'm going to do it. And Spielberg really had to talk him down off that ledge. But apparently what he really wanted to do was break into the area where they were keeping the rough cut and steal it back so that he could have it and destroy it himself. Scorsese really walked so Tony K could run. But fortunately, they got him to calm down, at which point Scorsese came up with the solve, which was to desaturate the color in that final sequence so it looks more like a tabloid than anything else, make it grainy, make it dark, more brown, and make the blood look less like blood. That was apparently the technique pioneered by cinematographer Oswald Morris on 1956's Moby Dick, and miraculously, it worked. The MPAA was like, it's not so red like blood, find R rating. They weren't concerned about the discussion of rape and murder, but the blood. Anyway, on February 8th, 1976, Taxi Driver premiered in New York City, and everyone was on the edge of their seat because no one knew how this movie was going to do. And it kind of sounds like on the studio side, they were like, this is a stanker. But much to everyone's surprise, it did absolutely gangbusters. There were lines around the block to see this. But it seems like people either really loved it or really hated it. According to Joseph Gelmes, a journalist with Newsday, quote, it is polarizing moviegoers into frenzied rage or raves. Taxi Driver broke the house record on the first day. The reviews were strong to mixed, but there was vociferous outrage, too, like the comment from one furious moviegoer who said, for the first time, I felt that freedom of speech had gone too far, which I love that review. Next, it was invited to screen at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was loudly booed. In fact, once Martin Scorsese heard that Tennessee Williams, then the head of the jury, hated Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese was like, fuck this, and he flew back to the US to finish New York, New York. But old Tennessee must not have hated it that much because it ended up winning the Palm Door and was booed again. In the end, Taxi Driver was nominated for four Oscars, Best Actor and Supporting Actress for De Niro and Foster, Best Original Score for Bernard Herman, and Best Picture, which it lost to...

Speaker 1:
[67:37] It's not Rocky, is it? Oh, it is Rocky.

Speaker 2:
[67:41] Yes, it lost to Rocky.

Speaker 1:
[67:42] Rocky won screenplay as well, is that right?

Speaker 2:
[67:45] Rocky was nominated but did not win. It was Rocky, Network, The Front, Cousin, Cousine, and Seven Beauties.

Speaker 1:
[67:53] Man, that's a good year. Seven Beauties, that was the first woman ever nominated for Best Director, I believe. Network's an amazing movie.

Speaker 2:
[68:01] Network's amazing. I get it. Although I would maybe give it to Taxi Driver, but I wasn't even nominated. In 2026, Jodie Foster told NPR that she believed her role in Taxi Driver may have helped protect her from sexual predators in the film industry. She said, quote, What I came to believe is that I had a certain amount of power by the time I was like 12. By the time I had my first Oscar nomination, I was part of a different category of people that had power and I was too dangerous to touch. I could have ruined people's careers or I could have called uncle so I wasn't on the block. I understand some people read that quote and they weren't really thrilled by it. I understand what she's saying. I think she's saying she had a bit of a blind spot to it perhaps because she, at such an early age, had enough weight to throw around that it just didn't come her way. She's not negating it at all.

Speaker 1:
[68:48] No, I think it's the opposite. She's saying this very much happens and it's awful and Hollywood can be a heinous place for children and Hollywood has a history of abusing children which is terrible.

Speaker 2:
[69:00] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[69:00] I think her point is I was insulated from that because I was so successful that I was not in a position to necessarily be taken advantage of in the same way unfortunately, producers felt like they could of other children. Again, so I don't view her as negating it. I think she's actually saying, this is horrible and I just got lucky in this one way.

Speaker 2:
[69:22] Yeah. Now, reviews were mixed. People were particularly disturbed by the graphic violence and some thought glorification of violence although I do not agree. But Paul Schrader's old friend Pauline Kael had this to say, the film doesn't operate on the level of moral judgment of what Travis does. Rather, by drawing us into his vortex, it makes us understand the psychic discharge of the quiet boys who go berserk. She is such a good writer. I highly, highly recommend reading her film criticism. It's amazing. Scorsese's biggest frustration was that people did seem to think Travis had snapped out of nowhere. He was very frustrated by this because he had been an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam for years at this point. He had participated in short films, he had produced movies, he had helped other people produce movies that were extremely critical of it. At a time when I think we take this for granted because we think, oh, everybody was protesting the war in Vietnam. No, they weren't, nor were they making content about it, and he really was. In a 1976 interview with Greg Kilday, Scorsese explained, quote, We knew all the background, the scars on his back, the way he lights the shoe polish to get rid of impurities, special forces in Vietnam, it's all there. Some people can't get it completely, some people do. You can't make a movie for everybody and spell it out for everybody. Yeah. Well, Marty, you made a movie for me. I loved it.

Speaker 1:
[70:42] I mean, the subtlety cuts both ways is just the unfortunate truth.

Speaker 2:
[70:45] Yeah. Well, Chris, that ends our coverage of Taxi Driver. A fun little romp through 1975 New York City. What went right?

Speaker 1:
[70:55] I will give mine to Paul Schrader because Scorsese is, again, I was going through his filmography and I was trying to think of who's the most influential filmmaker of the last 50 years, let's say. Let's go back to 66. You could make the argument for Kubrick, you can make the argument for Spielberg, and I'm just going to stick with American directors for right now. But I was going through Scorsese's filmography, and I feel like the difference is that Scorsese seems to have this consistent focus on the duality of men caught between two worlds in so many ways, right? Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Departed, Wolf of Wall Street, Killers of the Flower Moon. But what I love is that this Schrader is so focused on the tormented man, I think, in many ways, and you look at First Reform, The Card Counter, Last Sentation, and I think it's such a wonderful marriage between the two of them, because I think Schrader has such a distinctively angry but targeted voice, and when it can be further sharpened by a great director, it's such a powerful combination. I actually think Schrader can be a great director. First Reform is an incredibly directed movie, but I think that he and Scorsese are a particularly potent duo, and I just think this screenplay is remarkable. So I'll give mine to Schrader.

Speaker 2:
[72:26] I can't argue with that. I spent a lot of this episode praising Martin Scorsese, which is, I think, very deserved. What he does on this movie is absolutely incredible. But I would like to give my What Went Right to Robert De Niro. Because the dedication that he had to this role, it sounds like the dedication that he had to other actors, Cybill Shepherd excluded. But the way that he treated Jodie Foster, I very much appreciate what I've heard her say about that. Because it just seems like he really respected her, and he didn't treat her like a kid. He treated her like an equal, and he tried as best he could to make her comfortable, and to also prepare her to be a really great actor. Their scenes together in this are excellent because of that. I also just think that it would be so easy to come in and play this character and just overplay it massively. That would be the big temptation with this, and he doesn't do it.

Speaker 1:
[73:28] I agree.

Speaker 2:
[73:28] He's so understated. He's like a shark. Like the stillness he has in this is so scary because it's unpredictable.

Speaker 1:
[73:37] And he never reveals to the audience, like, hey, I get it.

Speaker 2:
[73:41] He doesn't tell you anything.

Speaker 1:
[73:43] A less secure actor would almost want to signal, like, I know this guy's weird too, right? You know what I'm saying? And De Niro, he never gives an inch.

Speaker 2:
[73:52] No, there's nothing self-conscious about this performance, and I just don't think anybody else could have done this. It is so good.

Speaker 1:
[74:00] I agree.

Speaker 2:
[74:00] Harvey Keitel is also so good.

Speaker 1:
[74:02] He's really good.

Speaker 2:
[74:03] I hate his little pinky nail. I hate it so much. It's so gross. But yeah, I'll give it to Robert De Niro. He's just wonderful. And just a bunch of handsome short kings in this movie, and he is one of them.

Speaker 1:
[74:16] The short kings will cover the king of comedy.

Speaker 2:
[74:18] Yeah, and Godfather Part II as well. And of course, he is just unbelievable in that.

Speaker 1:
[74:23] Lizzie, thanks for opening up the world of Martin Scorsese, our first Scorsese film. We have many, many more to cover.

Speaker 2:
[74:29] I'm excited to cover more. Obviously, I knew I liked his movies, but I didn't know I liked him as much as I do, and I really do.

Speaker 1:
[74:37] Yeah. And he's done so much for film restoration and also the promotion of foreign films and independent cinema.

Speaker 2:
[74:45] He's a big part of the reason Lawrence of Arabia got restored. I love him. I love him.

Speaker 1:
[74:50] Tomorrow, the article will drop about something problematic about-

Speaker 2:
[74:53] No.

Speaker 1:
[74:53] I'm just kidding. No, it won't.

Speaker 2:
[74:55] Please don't.

Speaker 1:
[74:55] All right, Lizzie. Well, thank you so much for driving us around New York and the back of your cab. And if people are enjoying this podcast, can you tell them the easy ways that they can support it?

Speaker 2:
[75:07] Of course. If you like this show, you can tell a friend or family member. You can leave us a rating or review on whatever podcast you're listening on. You could share us on your Instagram stories. You can also follow us on Instagram at WhatWentWrongPod. You can subscribe in either Apple or Spotify. And if you do that, you will get one bonus episode every month. Usually they're movie reviews. Sometimes there's something a little different. We have some different things coming your way in the coming months. That's at least one bonus episode. Oftentimes, it's more. If you would like to take it a step further, for $5, only $5 to ride this ride, if you can join our Patreon for the small flat fee of $5 a month, you get access to the bonus episodes and an ad-free feed, as well as polls, some little interactive things, some notes from Chris and sometimes me, mostly Chris, and much, much more. If you really want to take it to the next level, for $50 a month, you can get a shout out. I'm not going to do any kind of impression, so I don't know what I could do, just like one of these. Adrian Peng Correa, Angeline Renee Cook, Beatrix Earhart, Ben Shindleman, Blaise Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C. Grace B., Chris Leal, Chris Zucca, David Friscolanti, Darren and Dale Conkling, Don Schiebel, M. Zodia, Evan Downey, Felicia G., film it yourself, Frankenstein, Galen and Miguel, the Broken Glass Kids, the cast and crew of Win A Trip to Browntown, Grace Potter, Half Greyhound, James McAvoy, Jason Frankel, JJ Rapido, Jory Hillpiper, Jose Emilano Salto Del Giorgio, Karina Kanaba, Kate Elrington, Kathleen Olsen, Amy Elgeschlager McCoy, Lazy Freddy, Lena LJ., Lydia Howes, Mark Bertha, Mariposa's Humans, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nate the 9th, Rosemary Southward, Raja, Sadie, just Sadie, Scott Oshida, Soman Chainani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, the Provost family, the O's sound like O's and Tom Christen. Thank you all so, so much.

Speaker 1:
[77:40] Thank you, Lizzie. Next week, Lizzie's running it back. We're changing up our release schedule here because I wanted to cover something from May the 4th, which does fall on a Monday. May the 4th be with you.

Speaker 2:
[77:52] I did not.

Speaker 1:
[77:54] Lizzie didn't. Lizzie wanted to dive into Anne Hathaway Month. That's right. Next week, Lizzie is coming at you with The Devil Wears Prada.

Speaker 2:
[78:02] I'm so excited.

Speaker 1:
[78:03] I'm excited too. It's not only a really good movie, but it's a really interesting movie as a mid-aughts movie. It's a really interesting movie in the career trajectory of Anne Hathaway.

Speaker 2:
[78:14] And Meryl Streep.

Speaker 1:
[78:15] And Meryl Streep. It obviously launched David Frankel's career as a director in so many ways. Emily Blunt. Oh, yeah. Maybe not unexpectedly, but maybe unexpectedly, becoming arguably the most successful of the three for at least a period over the last few years. And Stanley Tucci. We all love Stanley Tucci.

Speaker 2:
[78:32] We love the Tucci. Can't wait.

Speaker 1:
[78:33] Love the Tucci. All right, guys, go watch The Devil Wears Prada. We'll be back with you next week with that movie and a lot more Anne Hathaway after that as well. We're very excited. So thanks again for listening and we'll talk to you soon. Bye.

Speaker 3:
[78:50] To support What Went Wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, subscribe on Patreon, Apple, or Spotify for $5 a month. Patreon subscriptions also come with an ad-free RSS fee. You can also visit our website, whatwentwrongpod.com for more info. What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Boman. This episode was researched by Laura Woods and edited by H Commie.