By BRUCE BENNETT
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/
March 16, 2011
"There's always an element of serendipity when something works," the director and screenwriter Paul Schrader said recently. Mr. Schrader was speaking about "Taxi Driver," the 1976 film he wrote and Martin Scorsese directed with Robert De Niro in the title role. Thirty-five years after their collaboration had its debut, claimed the Palme d'Or at Cannes, redefined New York City on the screen and began working its way deep into the American cultural psyche, "Taxi Driver" has been digitally restored by Sony Pictures. A new print of "Taxi Driver" will begin showing for two weeks at Film Forum on Friday in advance of a blu-ray release later this year.
"I wrote the script in six days," Mr. Schrader said of the film's gestation. Creating "Taxi Driver," he explained, was as much therapy as expression: "I was in a particular rough patch and I felt this character becoming me. I was afraid of him. I wrote it so that I could get rid of him—get him outside of me and look at him and exorcise myself of him."
When the result went before the cameras in July of 1975, Mr. Schrader said his personal connection to Travis Bickle and the blurred moral landscape of mid-'70s New York City were echoed and reinforced by Mr. Scorsese and by Mr. De Niro. "It plugged into our lives at just the right time." Mr. Schrader said. "I think Bob and Marty and I all knew this guy."
Cinematographer Michael Chapman credits a mutual familiarity with New York itself for the film's hallucinatory, detailed vision of the city. "All of us who were deeply involved in making [the film] lived in New York," Mr. Chapman said. "All of us had strong feelings and a view of New York."
Mr. Chapman allowed that the film's modest budget forced creatively auspicious practical compromises during principal photography. "It's something that happens over and over again," he said. "The physical situation and the technology determines the aesthetics. We were a low-budget movie so we couldn't do a lot of the things people would do in those days." Rather than secure Travis Bickle's Checker cab on a trailer and use costly lighting rigs to illuminate passing building fronts, Mr. Chapman said he and the production team "let the city light itself. Because of that it looks, I think, as ominous and realistic as it does. We didn't have the time or the money to do anything else."
When the Motion Picture Association of America threatened to give the finished product an X rating for violence, the production team's facility for ingenious compromise was further tested. Having labored to realize Travis Bickle's climactic one-man, multi-weapon assault with the same detailed realism as the rest of the film, Mr. Scorsese chose to subtly distance the movie's audience from Travis's actions by re-rendering the sequence in a less representational light.
"I used the phrase 'toned the color down,'" Mr. Scorsese told an audience attending the "Taxi Driver" restoration unveiling at the DGA Theater last week.
Citing experiments in altering color film tones undertaken by director John Huston and cinematographer Oswald Morris in 1956's "Moby Dick" and 1967's "Reflections in a Golden Eye," Mr. Scorsese had the section of edited film negative depicting the attack reprinted to radically shift the scene's color values. The alteration was undertaken at Manhattan's TVC labs, a behind-the-scenes city location that, like so many onscreen in the film, has vanished in the intervening 35 years. So has the original piece of negative, and with it the ability to return the sequence to its prior appearance.
"There's this impression from some people that we can easily go back and restore the original color that generated the controversy," said Grover Crisp, Sony's senior vice president of asset management, restoration and digital mastering, who, under the supervision of Messrs. Scorsese and Chapman, oversaw the digital restoration of the film. "Technically it's not possible to do that." According to Mr. Crisp, technicians previously shepherding the film's image from celluloid to video for prior DVD editions have inadvisedly attempted to put color back into the sequence without either Mr. Scorsese or Mr. Chapman's input. "All they could do is to kind of digitally mess with the print, which is not a good thing to do," Mr. Chapman said.
At the DGA Theater, Mr. Scorsese explained that he remains pleased with the result of the compromise. "I liked it a lot," the director said, "it gave [the film] more of a tabloid feel." Recalling a city that so unalterably transformed since "Taxi Driver" had its premiere at the Beekman Theater in 1976, Mr. Scorsese smiled, shrugged and told the crowd at the 2011 premiere: "The whole picture should've looked that way."
35 Years Later, Taxi Driver Still Stuns
By J. Hoberman
The Village Voice
http://www.villagevoice.com/
March 16, 2011
Some motion pictures produce the uncanny sensation of returning the spectator’s gaze. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver—a movie in which the most celebrated line asks the audience, “Are you talkin’ to me?”—is one such film. It came, it saw, it zapped the body politic right between the eyes.
Celebrating its 35th anniversary with a newly restored print and a two-week Film Forum run, Taxi Driver was a powerfully summarizing work. It synthesized noir, neorealist, and New Wave stylistics; it assimilated Hollywood’s recent vigilante cycle, drafting then-déclassé blaxploitation in the service of a presumed tell-it-like-it-is naturalism that, predicated on a frank, unrelenting representation of racism, violence, and misogyny, was even more racist, violent, and misogynist than it allowed.
The 12th top-grossing movie of 1976, Taxi Driver was not just a hit but, like Psycho or Bonnie and Clyde, an event in American popular culture—perhaps even an intervention. Inspired by one failed political assassination (the 1972 shooting of presidential hopeful George Wallace), it inadvertently motivated another (the 1981 attempt on President Ronald Reagan). The movie further established its 33-year-old director as both Hollywood’s designated artist and, after Taxi Driver was awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes, an international sensation—the decisive influence on neo–New Wave filmmakers as varied as Spike Lee, Wong Kar-wai, and Quentin Tarantino.
Scorsese didn’t direct Taxi Driver so much as orchestrate its elements. Lasting nearly 20 minutes and fueled by Bernard Herrmann’s rhapsodic score, the de facto overture is a densely edited salmagundi of effects—slow motion, fragmenting close-ups, voluptuous camera moves, and trick camera placement—that may be the showiest pure filmmaking in any Hollywood movie since Touch of Evil. Certainly no American since Welles had so confidently presented himself as a star director. And yet Taxi Driver was essentially collaborative. It was the most cinephilic movie ever made in Hollywood, openly acknowledging Bresson, Hitchcock, Godard, avant-gardists Michael Snow and Kenneth Anger, and the John Ford of The Searchers. Moreover, the movie’s antihero, Travis Bickle—a homicidal combination of Dirty Harry and Norman Bates who describes himself as God’s Lonely Man—sprang from the brain of former film critic Paul Schrader and, as embodied for all eternity by the young Robert De Niro, all but instantly became a classic character in the American narrative alongside Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield.
Citizen of a sodden Sodom where the steamy streets are always wet with tears, among other bodily fluids, Bickle embarks each evening on a glistening sea of sleaze. Seen through his rain-smeared windshield, Manhattan becomes a movie—call it “Malignopolis”—in which, as noted by Amy Taubin in her terrific Taxi Driver monograph, “the entire cast of Superfly seems to have been assembled in Times Square” to feed Travis’s fantasies. The cab driver lives by night in a world of myth, populated by a host of supporting archetypes: the astonishing Jodie Foster as Iris, the 12-year-old hooker living the life in the rat’s-ass end of the ’60s, yet dreaming of a commune in Vermont; Harvey Keitel as her affably nauseating pimp; Peter Boyle’s witless cabbie sage; and Cybill Shepherd’s bratty golden girl, a suitably petit-bourgeois Daisy Buchanan to Travis’s lumpen Gatsby.
Brilliant and yet repellent, at times even hateful, Taxi Driver inspired understandable ambivalence. (At Cannes, the announcement that it had won the Palme d’Or was greeted with boos.) How could reviewers not be wary? Taxi Driver is nakedly opposed even to itself, as well as the culture that produced it. For Travis, all movies are essentially pornographic; had he met his creators, he would surely, as observed by Marshall Berman in his history of Times Square, consider them purveyors of “scum and filth.” It’s the slow deliberation with which this lunatic kicks over his TV and terminates his connection to social reality that signals his madness—and the filmmaker’s.
Like Werner Herzog’s Aguirre or Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver is auteurist psychodrama. Not for nothing did Scorsese give himself a cameo playing a character even wiggier than Travis. Who can possibly imagine the internal fortitude or psychic cost this movie required or exacted? Certainly no one connected with Taxi Driver ever again reached such heights (or plumbed such depths), although Albert Brooks became a significant filmmaker in his own right, while Scorsese and De Niro would come close with Raging Bull and The King of Comedy—two movies that equal or surpass Taxi Driver in every way except as the embodiment of the historical spirit.
Recalling his youth, Baudelaire wrote of simultaneously experiencing the horror and the ecstasy of existence. So it is with Taxi Driver . The pagan debauchery the child Scorsese saw in Quo Vadis is played out in the Manhattan of 1975 A.D. Hysterical yet sublime, the movie crystallizes one of the worst moments in New York’s history—the city as America’s pariah, a crime-ridden, fiscally profligate, graffiti-festooned moral cesspool. Scorsese ups the ante by returning endlessly to his boyhood movie realm of 42nd Street, which, in the mid-’70s, was a lurid land of triple-X-rated cinema, skeevy massage parlors, cruising pimp mobiles, sidewalks crammed with hot-pants hookers, and the customers who on any given weekday evening, according to NYPD stats, were patronizing porn-shops at the rate of 8,000 per hour.
It was while Taxi Driver was in post-production that the Daily News ran the headline “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” The movie is Scorsese’s hometown farewell (a love letter quite different from Woody Allen’s). Like Nero, he torches the joint and picks up his lyre. Taxi Driver is a vision of a world that already knows it is lost. A third of a century later, the Checker cabs are gone, as are the taxi garages at the end of 57th Street and the all-night Belmore cafeteria. Times Square has been sanitized, the pestilent combat zone at Third Avenue and 13th Street where Iris peddles her underage charms has long since been gentrified. New York is no longer the planet’s designated Hell on Earth. (Six years after Taxi Driver , Blade Runner would dramatize a new urban space.)
No nostalgia, though: In other aspects, the world of Taxi Driver is recognizably ours. Libidinal politics, celebrity worship, sexual exploitation, the fetishization of guns and violence, racial stereotyping, the fear of foreigners—not to mention the promise of apocalyptic religion—all remain. Taxi Driver lives. See it again. And try to have a nice day.
jhoberman@villagevoice.com
Passion Still Drives Scorsese Masterwork
by Josh Boone
The Virginian-Pilot
http://hamptonroads.com/
April 8, 2011
Blu-ray widescreen, 1976, R for violence and language
Best extra: A new high-def documentary “Influence and Appreciation: A Martin Scorsese Tribute,” features interviews with Oliver Stone, Robert De Niro, Roger Corman and others
“MEAN STREETS” MAY have garnered critical acclaim, but it was “Taxi Driver,” Martin Scorsese’s seething, volatile, follow-up, that scorched the American psyche. Writer Paul Schrader’s disturbing look at the mental breakdown of a NYC taxi driver that culminates in an assassination attempt and a whorehouse bloodbath, still retains its visceral power.
“Taxi Driver’ is a vigilante picture,” Oliver Stone says in the new, high-definition documentary, “Influence and Appreciation: A Martin Scorsese Tribute.” Stone had just returned from Vietnam to be mentored by Martin Scorsese, his teacher at New York University. “Marty had hair down to his shoulders,” he says “He struck me right away as a lunatic, in the sense that his energy was ferocious, and he loved, loved film.”
That unsettling, searing passion comes full circle – 35-years later – as “Taxi Driver” now receives a breathtaking, 4K restoration (double the quality of Blu-ray) that looks and sounds absolutely great on Blu-ray and easily one of the most impressive releases since the format’s inception. Consider this an early contender for Blu-ray of the year.
There are several hours of newly made and carry-over bonus features. Big treats are three audio commentaries, including the 1986 Criterion Collection track from the laser disc which features Scorsese and Schrader.
New featurettes include “Taxi Driver Stories” with interviews from real cabbies who worked the Big Apple in the ‘70s. “God's Lonely Man” has Schrader on board to discuss writing the screenplay and its origins. Producer Michael Phillips explains his involvement in “Producing Taxi Driver,” while the previously mentioned “Influence and Appreciation” showcases Scorsese through his colleagues and other filmmakers. All of the 2007 DVD extras have been carried over as well, including a feature-length making-of documentary from the previous DVD.
Many interesting behind-scenes tidbits can be gleaned from the wealth of bonus material. The shoot itself took place during a heat wave and garbage strike, and underage Jodie Foster had to undergo psychological testing to prove that she wouldn’t be psychologically damaged by her part (she would be nominated for an Academy Award). We also learn that De Niro got a cabbie license in preparation for his role and spent some time driving around the city picking up fares. He also wore Schrader’s boots and jacket and listened to taped readings of Arthur Bremer’s diaries at Schrader’s request. Bremer shot presidential candidate George Wallace in ‘72, leaving him paralyzed; he was in prison for 35 years for the crime. “Taxi Driver’s” initial X-rating is also discussed, detailing how Scorsese was forced to desaturate the color of the blood in the finale.
“Taxi Driver” was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
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