Context
Director Martin Scorsese was born in New York City to
Italian immigrant parents in 1942.
He grew up in an observant Catholic family in Little Italy, and
at a young age he wanted to be a priest. His dreams soon changed,
however, and he attended New York University film school. After
film school, Scorsese moved west to Hollywood. Roger Corman, a pulp
movie director and producer, hired him to direct Boxcar
Bertha in 1972.
Scorsese's first collaboration with Robert De Niro, who plays Travis
in Taxi Driver, was on Mean Streets (1974),
a film about Catholic Italian-Americans in Little Italy that was
rooted in Scorsese's own childhood experiences. The next film Scorsese
directed was Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, for
which Ellen Burstyn won a Best Actress Academy Award, the same year
that Robert De Niro won Best Supporting Actor for his role in Francis
Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part II. These Academy
Awards helped Scorsese raise the funds to make Taxi Driver in 1976.
The film received huge critical acclaim, cementing
Scorsese's reputation as a major director. In addition to Taxi
Driver, Scorsese has directed over twenty-five films, including
the documentary Italianamerican (1974),
the highly controversial The Last Temptation of Christ (1988),
and, more recently, the popular Goodfellas (1990) and Gangs
of New York (2002).
Taxi Driver elevated Scorsese's status
as a director, and it assured Paul Schrader's reputation as a major
screenwriter. In the mid-1970s,
Schrader was an up-and-coming screenwriter whose first screenplay, The
Yakuza (1975),
was considered a success even though the film had not performed
well financially. Taxi Driver's success bolstered
Schrader's career and ensured his place in the Hollywood community.
Although some scenes in Taxi Driver were influenced
by the actors, the film follows Schrader's screenplay closely, more
so than Scorsese has followed his other films' screenplays. Many
of Schrader's later screenplays deal, like Taxi Driver, with
one man's loneliness and alienation, including American
Gigolo (1990)
and the more recent Bringing Out the Dead (1999), which
is in many ways an update and homage to Taxi Driver.
Like Scorsese, Schrader grew up in a religious household. He did
not see a film until his late teens, so his influences are more
literary than cinematic. While writing Taxi Driver,
he was under the spell of existentialist novels such as Albert Camus's The
Stranger and earlier portraits of loneliness such as Fyodor
Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground.
Scorsese made Taxi Driver in the mid-1970s,
a decade famous for its diverse and innovative films. The 1970s
produced a group of directors, sometimes called the "film school
brats," that included Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin
Scorsese, George Lucas, and Brian de Palma. These men were young
Americans who had studied European filmmakers at film school, and
they were also the first generation of filmmakers to have grown
up watching television. Their movies feature close attention to
technical detail, while demonstrating an encyclopedic knowledge
of film and television history. At the same time, their films were
not just art house pictures but huge box office successes, funded
by Hollywood.
The fall of the Hollywood studio system at the end of
the 1950s, combined
with the various political upheavals of the 1960s,
including the sexual revolution, the anti-Vietnam movement, and
the civil rights movement, made predicting the public's taste increasingly difficult.
During the early 1970s
the largest studios lost over $500 million.
They knew their methods of attracting audiences, which included
using big name stars, making high-budget musicals, and releasing
films based on popular novels, had become outdated. Studios became
open to giving money to young and unknown directors who could make
more original and risky movies. Taxi Driver centers
on a racist, sociopathic, and violent protagonist and features a twelve-year-old
prostitute, but at the time of its release it was a popular, well-received
film. The movie was critically acclaimed in the United States, received
four Oscar nominations, and did even better financially in Europe.
Taxi Driver immortalizes New York City
in the 1970s, a city vastly
different from the New York we know today. The city's filth is exaggerated
in the film partly because it is seen through Travis Bickle's skewed
perspective, but during 1975,
when the movie was filmed, New York was literally a filthy city.
New York nearly filed for bankruptcy in 1974,
so when the New York City trash collectors went on strike in the
summer of 1975, causing
the streets to fill with warm garbage, the city didn't have the
funds to fix the problem. One of the promises Jimmy Carter made
when campaigning for the presidency, which he won in 1976,
was that he would make sure New York City wouldn't have to file
for bankruptcy. Taxi Driver presents a true-to-life
portrait of what Manhattan once was. Times Square was filled with
peep shows and prostitutes, and during the summer of 1975,
when the film takes place, the country was in the middle of a presidential
campaign where one of the main issues was moving beyond the Vietnam
War, which had officially ended only in 1973. We
can easily imagine an ex-marine in New York being disgusted by the
filth, finding the politicians who are supposed to help him to be artificial,
and feeling that he needs to approach the city as he would a special
combat mission.
