1976

Taxi Driver

DIR. MARTIN SCORSESE

EVERETT

Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, the titular taxi driver, cruising Manhattan’s mean streets.

Somebody’s going to get me one of these days,” the controversial politician George Wallace once told the Detroit News. “I can just see a little guy out there that nobody’s paying any attention to. He reaches into his pocket and out comes the little gun.” On May 15, 1972, Wallace’s premonition came true when a “little guy” named Arthur Bremer fired five times at the politician during a Maryland campaign stop, paralyzing Wallace for life.

The man and the event eventually inspired screenwriter Paul Schrader, who saw in Bremer a mirror of his own frustration and fury. (“Travis Bickle is me,” he once said. “At the time I wrote [Taxi Driver], I was in a rather low and bad place.”) But unlike the assassin, Schrader parlayed his existential angst into a script “to exorcise the evil I felt within me.”

The work caught the attention of Martin Scorsese, ultimately becoming the director’s neo noir classic Taxi Driver, which follows Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), a disturbed Vietnam vet, as he prowls a degenerate New York City in his cab. The self-appointed savior of a child prostitute (Jodie Foster), Bickle ends up trying to assassinate a politician. The film was very much of its time: In 1976 Manhattan was edgy and dangerous. (That year, the New York Times printed a list of 101 things to love about New York City, including “People who haven’t left yet.”)

Unnervingly, the film’s dynamics played themselves out in real life in 1981, when John Hinckley Jr. tried to get Foster’s attention by attempting to assassinate then-president Ronald Reagan. Schrader and Scorsese were even interviewed by FBI agents, who wanted to know if Hinckley had contacted them. Though he didn’t respond truthfully at the time, Schrader later admitted that he had received letters (which he ignored) from “this kid in Colorado who wanted to know how he could meet Jodie Foster.”

Recently Scorsese has said that he would have made the film in 3-D if he could have. Imagine Taxi Driver at IMAX theaters alongside Finding Dory.

© COLUMBIA PICTURES, COURTESY PHOTOFEST

Above: De Niro (left) and director Martin Scorsese on the set.

© COLUMBIA PICTURES, COURTESY PHOTOFEST

Jodie Foster as the child prostitute whom Bickle tries to save. Fueled by screenwriter Paul Schrader’s feelings of despair, anger, and stasis, the film also reflected the life of Arthur Bremer, who attempted to assassinate Alabama governor George Wallace in 1972. ”I want something to happen,” Bremer wrote in his infamous diaries. “I want a big shot & not a little fat noise . . . tired of writing about . . . what I failed to do again and again.” Later, the film infamously inspired John Hinckley Jr.’s 1981 attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. “I love you forever,” Hinckley wrote to Foster in an unmailed letter, just before he made his move.