Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver
File:Taxi Driver poster.JPG
Directed by	Martin Scorsese
Written by	Paul Schrader
Produced by	Julia Phillips & Michael Phillips
Starring	Robert De Niro Jodie Foster Harvey Keitel Cybill Shepherd Peter Boyle Albert Brooks Leonard Harris
Cinematography	Michael Chapman
Edited by	Tom Rolf Melvin Shapiro
Music by	Bernard Herrmann
Distributed by	Columbia Pictures
Release dates	February 8, 1976 10 June, 1976
Running time	113 min.
Country	U.S.
Language	English
Budget	$1.3 Million (estimated)

For other uses, see the 1976 American film.

Taxi Driver is a 1976 film directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Paul Schrader. Set in early post-Vietnam Era New York City, the film stars Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, a lonely, isolated taxi driver and Jodie Foster as the teenage prostitute he attempts to save.

Synopsis

Travis Bickle (De Niro), a Marine who fought in the Vietnam War, is a distant and unstable young man of 26 from the Midwest. As a chronic insomniac, he becomes a nighttime taxi driver in New York City. Travis spends his restless days in seedy porn theaters and driving around Manhattan.

He becomes interested in Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), an aide for New York Senator Charles Palantine, who is running for the presidential nomination and is promising dramatic social change. She is initially intrigued by Travis and agrees to a date with him after he flirts with her and sympathizes with her own apparent loneliness. On the date, however, Travis takes her to a pornographic film. Offended, she ends the date early and takes a taxi home alone. The next day he tries to reconcile with Betsy, phoning her and sending her flowers, but all attempts are in vain.

File:Taxi Driver still 5.jpg

"You talkin' to me?" Alone in his apartment, Travis postures and practices his moves in front of the mirror.

Rejected and depressed, Travis's obsession with violent assertiveness begins to consume him. Already quite disgusted by what he witnesses while driving through the city at night in his cab, he becomes increasingly paranoid and starts acting out his vigilante fantasies. He buys a .44 Magnum, a .38 revolver, a .25 Colt, and a .380 Walther. In what might be the most famous scene of the entire movie, he practices a menacing speech in the mirror, where he practices pulling out his .25 Colt that he attached to a spring loaded "holster" on his left arm. ("You talkin' to me?"), one that was ad-libbed by DeNiro.

Travis is sickened by what he considers the moral decay around him. Iris (Foster), a 13 year-old child prostitute, gets in his cab one night to escape her pimp. Later he talks to her pimp and pays for her time, although he does not have sex with her and instead tries to convince her to leave her pimp. The next day, they go have breakfast and Travis becomes obsessed with saving her, despite her lack of interest, explaining that she was "stoned" when she tried to escape, and that her pimp Matthew (Harvey Keitel), whom she calls "Sport", appears to be a kind and caring person. Travis then tries to convince her to return home to her parents and go back to school, but fails. Of Sport, Travis says, "Someone has to do something to him...he is the lowest kind of person on earth, He is the worst...sucking scum I have ever seen."

File:Taxi Driver still 1.jpg

Travis Bickle with a mohawk before trying to assassinate Senator Palantine.

Travis then plans to assassinate Senator Palantine at a public rally, though his reasons for doing so remain murky. He is spotted by Secret Service men and flees. Travis then returns to his apartment for awhile, and drives to Alphabet City where he shoots Sport, before storming into the brothel and killing the bouncer, the wounded Sport (who has followed Bickle), and Iris's mafioso customer.

A brief epilogue of sorts ends the film and shows Travis recuperating from the incident. He receives a letter from Iris's parents who thank him for saving their daughter, and the media hails him as a hero for saving her. Travis returns to his job, where one of his fares is Betsy. She comments about his saving of Iris and Travis's own media fame, yet Travis denies being any sort of hero.

Production

In the original draft of the screenplay, writer Paul Schrader had written the role of Sport as a black man. There were also additions of other negative black roles. Scorsese believed that this would give the film an overly racist subtext, so they were changed to white roles. A strong undercurrent of racial tension remains, with black characters being referred to as "spooks," "jungle bunnies," and by other racial titles, as well as Travis exchanging hostile stares with black men on the street.

Travis Bickle's first name was a homage to the Mick Travis character (played by Malcolm McDowell) in If... (1968) and O Lucky Man! (1973), the latter of which was one of Scorsese's favorite films at the time.

When Travis determines to assassinate Senator Palantine, he cuts his hair into a mohawk. This detail was suggested by actor Victor Magnotta, a friend of Scorsese's who had a small role as a Secret Service agent and who had served in Vietnam. Scorsese later noted, "Magnotta had talked about certain types of soldiers going into the jungle. They cut their hair in a certain way; looked like a mohawk ... and you knew that was a special situation, a commando kind of situation, and people gave them wide berths ... we thought it was a good idea."

The actress who played Iris's friend in the film was a working prostitute studied by Jodie Foster to help create her role.

Controversies

File:Taxi Driver still 2.jpg

Jodie Foster as "Iris"

The climactic shoot-out was, for its era, intensely graphic. To attain an "R" rating, Scorsese desaturated the colors, making the brightly-colored blood less prominent. In later interviews, Scorsese commented that he was actually pleased by the color change and he considered it an improvement over the originally filmed scene, which has been lost. However, in the special edition DVD, Michael Chapman, the film's cinematographer, regrets the decision and the fact that no print with the unmuted colors exists anymore.

Some critics expressed concern over young Jodie Foster's presence during the climactic shoot-out. However, Foster stated that she was present during the setup and staging of the special effects used during the scene; the entire process was explained and demonstrated for her, step by step. Rather than being upset or traumatized, Foster said, she was fascinated and entertained by the behind-the-scenes preparation that went into the scene. In addition, before being given the part, Foster was subjected to psychological testing to ensure that she would not be emotionally scarred by her role, in accordance with California Labor Board requirements.

Interpretations of the ending

Some have seen the epilogue, in which Travis is hailed as a hero, as Travis' dying fantasy, while others see it as a real resolution of his acts. Statements by Schrader in which he said the final scenes were meant to comment on how criminals become celebrities in America's unbalanced society, seem to strongly indicate that the ending was not intended to be a fantasy. Comments by Scorsese on the ending also do not show any intent to imply that the ending is taking place only in Travis's head. Nevertheless, a large group of fans, including some film critics, still argue for this interpretation.

At the very end, as Betsy departs his cab, Travis drives away, and a curious ring sounds as Travis quickly adjusts his mirror, before the credits roll on the background of the bright and distorted city lights seen from the cab's perspective. Director Scorsese comments on this final moment in his Laserdisc commentary, mentioning that the "mirror glance" could be a symbol that Travis might fall into depression and violent rage once again in the future. However, it is still open to interpretation.

Roger Ebert has written of the film's ending,

"There has been much discussion about the ending, in which we see newspaper clippings about Travis's 'heroism' of saving Iris, and then Betsy gets into his cab and seems to give him admiration instead of her earlier disgust. Is this a fantasy scene? Did Travis survive the shoot-out? Are we experiencing his dying thoughts? Can the sequence be accepted as literally true? ... I am not sure there can be an answer to these questions. The end sequence plays like music, not drama: It completes the story on an emotional, not a literal, level. We end not on carnage but on redemption, which is the goal of so many of Scorsese's characters."

James Berardinelli, in his review of the film, argues against the dream or fantasy interpretation, stating "Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader append the perfect conclusion to Taxi Driver. Steeped in irony, the five-minute epilogue underscores the vagaries of fate. The media builds Travis into a hero, when, had he been a little quicker drawing his gun against Senator Palantine, he would have been reviled as an assassin. As the film closes, the misanthrope has been embraced as the model citizen -- someone who takes on pimps, drug dealers, and mobsters to save one little girl."

Cast

• Robert De Niro: Travis Bickle
• Jodie Foster: "Easy" Iris
• Harvey Keitel: "Sport" Matthew
• Cybill Shepherd: Betsy
• Peter Boyle: "Wizard"
• Albert Brooks: Tom
• Leonard Harris: Sen. Charles Palantine

Critical response

Taxi Driver was a financial success and was nominated for several Academy Awards and received the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In later years, the film was ranked #52 on the American Film Institute's list of "100 Years, 100 Movies", and #22 on its "100 Years, 100 Thrills". Bickle was also named as #30 on their villains list. It is consistently in the top 40 on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films, and has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Roger Ebert added Taxi Driver to his list of "Great Movies," alongside other Scorsese films also on the list such as Raging Bull, GoodFellas, Mean Streets and The Age of Innocence. The film earned $28,262,574 in the United States.

The film was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the 100 best films of all time.[2]

Awards

Wins

• Cannes Film Festival – Palme d'Or
• New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor – (Robert De Niro)
• BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role – (Jodie Foster)
• BAFTA Award for Best Newcomer – (Jodie Foster)
• BAFTA Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music – (Bernard Herrmann)

Nominations

• Academy Award for Best Picture
• Academy Award for Best Actor – (Robert De Niro)
• Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress – (Jodie Foster)
• Academy Award for Original Music Score – (Bernard Herrmann)
• BAFTA Award for Best Film
• BAFTA Award for Direction – (Martin Scorsese)
• DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures – (Martin Scorsese)
• Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama - (Robert De Niro)
• Grammy Award for Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture – (Bernard Herrmann)
• BAFTA Award for Best Editing – (Marcia Lucas, Tom Rolf, Melvin Shapiro)
• Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay - Motion Picture – (Paul Schrader)
• WGA Award for Best Drama Written Directly for the Screen – (Paul Schrader)

Proposed sequels and spin-offs

In an interview on Inside the Actor's Studio in 1999, Robert De Niro stated that he and Martin Scorsese had discussed the possibility of making a sequel to this film. According to De Niro, the two agreed that it would be interesting to see where Travis Bickle ended up 30 years later. But during Scorsese's interview on the show in 2002, the director stated that he would never make a sequel to any of his films.

In May 2005 Majesco announced that it was going to publish a video game sequel to Taxi Driver, developed by Papaya Studios. [3] In January 2006 the game was canceled due to financial problems. [4]

John Hinckley, Jr.

Taxi Driver was reportedly part of a delusional fantasy on the part of John Hinckley, Jr. which triggered his attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981, an act for which he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. His stated reason was that the act was an attempt to impress Jodie Foster by mimicking Travis' mohawked appearance at the Palantine rally. The movie was so influential that his attorney concluded his defense by playing the movie.

See also

• Assassinations in fiction

External links

• Taxi Driver at IMDb
• Taxi Driver at AllMovie
• Taxi Driver at Rotten Tomatoes
• Template:Filmsite
• Template:Rogerebert
• Taxi Driver fan website.
• Taxi Driver, critiqued by a former taxi driver.
• Taxi Driver, Collection of Essays & Articles.
• Taxi Driver - Review with Maxim