The Neon Bible - Flashback: Taxi Driver
It saved Paul Schrader from suicide, cemented Martin Scorsese's reputation, and made Robert De Niro a legend. But child star Jodie Foster wasn't so lucky. And neither was President Regan...
When he first conceived Taxi Driver in 1973, aspiring screenwriter Paul Schrader was in a bad way. Not only had he lost his job a the American Film Institute, the LA-based film critic had been kicked out of his house by his wife. Schrader's homelessness and unemployment brought with it alcoholism and depression. His spirits sank so low he even considered suicide. Instead, he wrote a bleak study of urban alienation that came to define the brutality of line on America's city streets.
Taxi Driver told the story of Travis Bickle, a naïve, psychologically unstable loner whose loathing of the city's low-life inhabitants leads him to take up arms against pimps and politicians alike. Dark and unrelenting, Schrader's impressive screenplay passed through the fingers of Brian De Palma and producers Julian and Michael Phillips before it reached Martin Scorsese, a director from the Corman school who had just enjoyed his first critical success with Mean Streets. Scorsese loved the script and knew that Mean Streets star Robert De Niro was just the man to play Travis.
Twelve months after he contemplated killing himself, Schrader signed his first major film contract. But although closing the deal resolved some of Schrader's problems, it marked the beginning of Scorsese's. The casting of 14-year-oild Jodie Foster as child prostitute Irish raised charges of paedophilia, resulting in the presence of a social work on set throughout the shoot. Scorsese quarrelled with producer Julia Phillips over the casting of Cybill Shepherd as Travis's fantasy woman, Betsy, and filming went way over schedule as leading man De Niro questioned Scorsese about his 'motivation' for everything - from how to kill Harvey Keitel's pimp character Sport to such simple tasks as setting his cab's meter.
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