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Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. This episode tells the story of a long standing Hollywood myth, one that Martin Scorsese eventually acknowledged in an interview with Stephen Spielberg in twenty fifteen. Now, Spielberg and director Brian de Palma have both recounted this story on the record in other places as well, Spielberg most notably in the excellent Peter Biskin book Easy Riders in Raging Bulls. I of course have no idea what specific words were spoken during the
faithful night in question. However, just as the directors in this story who are the main characters in this story, Steven Spielberg, Brian de Palma, John Millius, Paul Schrader, and Martin Scorsese, just as they have done in the numerous films they've directed depicting real life events, films like Schindler's List, The Untouchables, Dillinger, Raging Bull and The Irishman, to name a few, I followed their lead and relied not only on research of the event in question, but also on
research are the characters in this story to inform the dialogue here.
In Metal Job.
This is a story of one of the greatest movies of all time, a movie that was fictional, with real life murder coursing through the filmmaking. And this is a story about one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Actually it's a story about a couple of the greatest filmmakers of all time. And it's about life and death and art and all the things that make us suckers for great drama. It's a story about one night in particular,
one time in Hollywood in particular, and revenge. It's a story about Martin Scorset in his film Taxi Driver, a film whose composer died only hours after completing the movie's intense score. Great music, Unlike that music. I played a few at the top of the show that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my melotron called Firing Squad Audition MK two. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover by Paul Simon. And why would I play
you that specific slice of internal rhyme cheese? Could I afford it because that was the number one song in America on February eighth, nineteen seventy six, and that was the day Taxi Driver hit theaters, marking the continuation of one of the greatest careers in filmmaking. On this episode Life, Death, Art Revenge, seventies Hollywood in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, I'm Jake Brennan and this this disgrace Land. People think making a movie is a lot like making anything else.
It's not.
It's not like making a record, it's not like writing a book.
It's not even like.
Staging a play. It's infinitely more difficult than all of those things. People who make records and write books and stage plays, for the most part, cannot make movies. And there's a reason they don't, because it's this savage endeavor that will quite literally kill you and destroy your soul if you're not careful and or lucky or both. Some have compared making a movie to going to war. I've never been to war, so I'm not gonna go that far.
But I think a better.
Analogy, though also imperfect, would be to say making a movie is a lot like giving birth every day for two years straight. I was there in the room for the birth of both of my sons. I saw the excruciating pain my wife went through as both of those big headed Brennans passed through her birth canal. And before you guys send me your hate mail, I ran this analogy by my wife, who sanctioned in the pain of birth is unimaginable to me, but I know that that
pain is concentrated. At the most we're talking twenty four hours, but usually less. Imagine that pain over and over again every single day for two years, and now we're getting close the pain involved with making a movie. Every day a new fight, a new hassle, a new raging fire to put out, another existential artistic challenge, to navigate another
chip off your soul. I've made records, I've written and published a book, and yes, I even tried getting a big budget Hollywood movie made with an A list celebrity involved. And I can tell you trying to make a movie is a brutal, soul sucking endeavor that is not for the faint of heart. Hollywood is sodom disguised as paradise.
It's lot's wife bent.
Brutally over the back of a casting coach. It's pimps bobbing through fresh chum for their ten percent. It's shameless ambition, wafting like beastly pheromones on the back of the Santa Anas. Well, once you make it over the moat, patrolled by an army of lizard skinned assistance, and into the hallowed grounds of the studio system, that's when quote all the animals come out, the horrors, skunk pussies, queens, fairies, doper's, junkies,
sick venyl unquote. Hollywood is relentless. It never lets you off the hook, no matter how successful you are, no matter how psychotic you are. So listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore, a man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit.
Here is a man who stood up.
Martin Scorsese twitched in the cutting room. It had been days since he'd slept insomnia, just like the lead character, Travis Bickle, the revenge minded, lonesome cavey motoring Scorsese's first studio film, Taxi Driver. Things have been easier on the director's last film, Mean Streets. There was no studio, Thus little oversight. Taxi Driver was a different East Columbia Pictures
ponied up nearly two million dollars. It might have been the director's vision, but it was their money, and they wanted to return on that money, and they weren't fucking around. And that's why Scorsese couldn't sleep. He needed this final scene of the film to be perfect. The normally kinetic, fast talking East Coast director sat Stone still quietly observing.
The action on the projected picture.
A young Robert de Niro mohawked and shaved for battle, Creeping through the crime and grime of seventies New York City into the climactic scene as the taxi driver character, Travis Bickle. Travis walked with purpose from the taxi cab to the front stoop. That purpose had been missing from his gait in the earlier scenes. This was the climax, This was the moment the character was building toward all along.
Finally something for him to do, something big. He was going to rescue the little girl and kill anyone who got in his way, even if it meant dying himself. Dying would be a bonus. Actually, what did this life given him? Anyway, nothing but loneliness and rage, rejection at every turn, an extreme inability to relate to anyone or anything except for the needs of a helpless little twelve and a half year old girl turned into a prostitute by this scum of the earth. Pimp Matthew aka Sport.
Sport got it first.
At close range.
Travis shot him on the street outside the brothel with his stub nosed thirty eight. Travis then stormed inside and confronted the pimps bagman, who collected the cash from the Johns outside the disgusting smelling room where Iris supplied her trade. Travis took aim and fired, this time with the heavy artillery, with the forty four magnum the Elephant Killer. But the man was no elephant. The bagman raised his hand in defense,
the bullet blasted off four of his five fingers. Blood splattered everywhere all over the brothels hallway, all over Travis's face. Just then another gunshot, this one from behind Travis from Sport, who somehow survived the close range bullet from the thirty eight and made his way into the brothel after Travis. The bullet grazed Travis's neck.
The motelod.
Travis took game with his forty four blasted Sport away and then stumbled in a daze toward Iris. In that room, Iris was the only thing that mattered, saving her, delivering her from this hellscape of a city, avenging the sins that had been carried out against her, the defiling of this innocent young girl by predators. She was powerless against that dynamic resonated with Travis. He too was powerless. His innocence, too, had been stripped away by forces he couldn't control. Iris Iris Iris.
Travis put two more bullets into Sport for.
Insurance, and another into the bagman before making his way to Iris's room. Then the John emerged into the hallway and caught Travis off guard, firing a bullet into his arm. Tavisong loaded a full round into the John, at least three bullets in the face, more to the torso blood spewed red and hot from the John's cheeks and his chest. The John fell backward into Iris's room, and there she was. She screamed in horror at the dead man, who had
just collapsed on the floor. Travis moved toward her, but now the bagman was on his feet and on top of Travis, on his back, actually screaming, ignoring him. Travis continued to march toward Iris. Iris was all that mattered. Iris was all there was, and the bagman managed to tackle Travis to the ground. In the tussle, Travis stabbed
him through his hand. Screams filled the whorehouse. Travis grabbed the dead John's gun lying on the floor, and shot the screaming bagman through his face, exiting his brains to the wall next to Iris, who was by this point hysterical. Travis's job was done. He'd freed Iris, avenged her stolen innocence, and by extension, his too. He put the gun to the bottom of his chin and pulled the trigger. The
chamber was empty. The scene was perfect. It was as violent a scene as a Hollywood studio had ever produced, except the movie hadn't yet been fully produced. It was still being edited, and the studio had yet to approve the final cut. Three characters were killed in this fictional scene, and this scene was about to result in.
A very real death.
Martin Scorsese sat pensively in his Mohome apartment high above Hollywood. The location had been prescribed by doctor's orders. Scorsese's asthma was so bad that his physician required him to live above the LA's smog line. Hollywood the only city in the world where this New York director could gain access to the resources needed to direct the kind of personal pictures he wanted to direct, on the same scale as the greats he admired who came before him, Howard Hawks,
john Ford, Vincent Minelli. This city was literally choking him to death. And if it wasn't the city itself, it was the studio. Scorsese had just returned from screening his final cut of Taxi Driver for Columbia Studio executive Stanley Jaffey.
Jaffey hated it too.
Violent, and there was no way, in his estimation, the Taxi Driver would be granted an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. With the way Scorsese had constructed the final scene, an X rating was almost certain, and an X rating meant a major reduction in revenue, So from the studio executive's perspective, there was only one option. He demanded Martin Scorsese re edit the end of Taxi Driver to make it less violent in order to garner
a more favorable rating from the MPAA. In the meeting, Scorsese said nothing. The rage inside him shocked him silent. Who was this guy to tell him how to cut his movie. His criticism wasn't reserved only for the end either. The executive Jaffey, wanted Scorsese to lose the so called artsy shots of Travis and of New York City from earlier in the film as well, claiming they were disrupting the momentum and that audiences weren't going to flock to the theaters on mass to see a student art film.
They wanted action, They wanted Charles Bronson blasting away bad guys, and as many scenes as possible and death wish but you know, not as violent as the ending of Taxi Driver that Scorsese was suggesting.
Audiences, according to the executive.
Wanted action. They didn't want Gadar and Antonioni. Scorsese realized he was now taking orders from a philistine. It wasn't worth the argument. So now Eerie sat in his apartment pondering what to do. His rising headache made it nearly impossible to concentrate on finding a solution. He scanned the room. The script pages were scattered across the coffee table. The typewriter housed a sheet of paper covered with the filmmaker's manic ramblings, all caps, no spaces, and there were empty
pill bottles half full open bottles of wine. A television on in the corner in a circle of John's.
Keeping watch over the apartment.
On the TV John Ford's The Searcher showed John Wayne's Ethan Edwards character seeking revenge on the wall, a movie poster John Houston's classic Tale of Vengeance Moby Dick. Then on the TV table Scorsese's forty four Magnum, an exact replica weapon of choice of his revenge fueled character Travis Bickle. Scorsese picked up the gun and then picked up the phone.
H Scorsese's friend, the young director Stephen Spielberg, fresh off the release of his Perfect Studio produced box office smash Jaws, ignored the phone and focused on the book he was reading, Jacques Valais, The Invisible College. What a group of scientists
has discovered about UFO influence on the human race. Another of Scorsese's friends, another director, Brian de Palma, the man responsible for introducing Scorsese to Robert de Niro, He too ignored the ringing telephone on his nightstand, surrounded by notes with angry messages from a nerdy horror author up in Maine. De Palma ignored those messages just as he ignored his phone. Instead, he rolled over to focus on the naked beach blanket hippie blonde in his bed. The phone director John Millius's
place went unanswered as well. John had other things to do, like pack for his trip to the Philippines, where the film he'd written, Apocalypse Now for friend Francis fort Coppola was in production. Word it was, it was a disaster.
And over at Paul Schrader's place, as Paul.
Cleaned his own gun, he too ignored his phone, except Paul knew it was his friend Marty calling with more bad news about the taxi driver's script that Paul himself had written, which Scorsese was having a hard time finishing. Paul Schrader was as pissed off as John Millius was in a rush, as Brian to Palmer was indifferent, as
Steven Spielberg was distracted. But Martin Scorsese was determined, so he kept calling, and the phones kept ringing until one and then all of his friends heard the distraught states Scorsese was in. On the other end of the line. He was like nothing they'd ever heard before. Even for the notoriously high strung Scorsese, this state he was in was serious. Marty was as sleep deprived as Travis Bickle and on twice as many pills. His anger was as palpable as the La smog on a scorching summer day.
He was rambling like a madman, talking twice as fast as normal, something about the cocksuck studio, fuck with the ricotta cheese for brains, How the Solas automaton didn't want violence, Well, then how would he deal with this kind of violence, the kind that drove a young promising director to blasting his own brains all over the walls of his apartment. They all moved with sudden urgency into their cars, racing through the streets of Hollywood up into the dead man
curves of Mahall, nearly killing themselves in the process. One by one, all four directors wheeled into Scorsese's driveway at the same time, exited their cars, raced to the locked front door, tried pushing it open, banged on it, profusely rang the doorbell, readied themselves to batter ram it down with all of their combined force.
And then.
The massive shotgun blast rang. In the New Year, January first, nineteen seventy two, three years earlier, the shotgun was a substitute for fireworks. John Millius stood on the porsch of Margo Kitders Nicholas Beach a frame and fired his gun out over the Pacific Ocean. None of Margot's guests were shocked,
especially not Margot's boyfriend Brian de Palma. Guns were always around, and why wouldn't they be John Millius, who had written the script for Apocalypse Now, and to Palma, who had written the excellent Hitchcock style thriller Sisters starring kidder In her housemate Jennifer Salt, and Steven Spielberg, who was also milling about the New Year's Day party he'd just released
the excellent thriller Duel for television. And Paul Schrader, at the time a subversive film critic, but who was working on a script about a lonesome, homicidal cab driver.
All of these filmmakers.
Were revolutionaries, so yeah, guns were up in the mix. Guns were necessary. If not literally then figuratively, what these filmmakers were endeavoring to do creatively was high stakes by any means.
Necessary type stuff.
Their goal, both collectively and individually, was as audacious as it was dangerous, to make extremely personal movies with the backing of the major Hollywood studios, so that they could reach as wide an audience as possible. It's not like the Hollywood studios hadn't made big budget films that reached
massive audiences before. Of course they had, but the studios had never turned control of those pictures over to a band of young outsiders who didn't come up as directors through the studios, who came instead from film schools, and who wanted to make movies that expressed their own personal experiences and that spoke to the tumultuous time times they were living through and spoke directly to the young people
living through those times at that moment. This was before Spielberg's Jaws and before any real success for any of these so called Hollywood brats. This was the early nineteen seventies. This was a moment in time in Hollywood that had never existed before and would never exist again, a time when the town was still on a contact tie from the success of nineteen sixty nine's Easy Rider, an adult movie written not just about young people, but four young people.
The film changed the industry. Studio executives were forced to reckon with the fact that they were losing money because the films.
They were creating were out of touch.
Therefore, they needed fresh creative perspective from young directors who came from outside the studio system, and for the first time in Hollywood's history, came from, like I said, film school.
That's where this group.
Of young filmmakers came from, and that's why the mood was so jubilant. They knew that not only were they revolutionaries, some of them literally toting guns, they knew that they had Hollywood by the balls, and it was only a matter of time before one or all of them broke through.
In a big way.
The confidence did not, however, extend to Martin Scorsese, who was at that moment, sulking on the beach, fully assembled and perfectly pressed pants, buttoned up, big collared starch shirt and shine shoes, looking as East coast as one could on a West Coast beach, watching Margo Kidder and her equally sexy housemate Jennifer Salt sunbathe in their bikinis. Scorsese's own girlfriend, Sandy Wintrop, daughter of Warner Brothers studio executive
Fred Winetrop, didn't seem to mind. She also didn't mind being referred to in mean streets as the wine trot brought by de Niro's Johnny Boy character. But I digress. It was the early seventies, liberation was in the air.
Scorsese pondered his dilemma. How in the hell was he or empty, fast talking Italian kid from New York with no money gonna make the types of movies he wanted to make movies that reflected the violence, spiritual confusion, and sexual frustration he'd experienced back in New York City's Little Italy neighborhood where he grew up amid real life gangsters
and godlike priests. How is that possible in the town like this, where the sun and the smog and the smiles and the shit talk comed along an incessant contradiction. How had he ended up here? Him Martin Scorsese, a tailor's son on a god forsaken beach with a studio boss's daughter, as a girlfriend and ambition as big as the Pacific Ocean staring back at him, threatening to swallow him whole. He did not have an answer, but at
least he had friends. Steven Spielberg stopped by SCORSESEI on the beach on his way into the water and asked him if.
He wanted to join him for a dip. Come on, let's go in the ocean.
Spielberg directed, no, no, no, it's very it's evil. There's things out there you don't even want to know about. Scorsese replied, are you afraid of jellyfish? There's no jellyfish out there? Spielberg responded, no, no.
No, things with teeth.
Spielberg gave up and moved toward the water. His imagination burned like the hot sand beneath his feet. Interior, Martin Scorsese's apartment night. We fast forward into nineteen seventy five, to the night of Back, to the moment before our hero, Martin Scorsese loses it and decides to call on his friends to come save him. The camera shows a close, full body profile shot of our hero sitting in a comfortable chair just a few feet from a small television
on a small television stand. His leg extends out with his cowboy boot perched on the television. He carefully extends pressure from his foot to slowly rock the TV back and forth on its stand. We see that he is stowing and holding a massive black forty four magnum pistol in his hand. Resting in his lap is a half empty jar of peanut butter that our hero eats out of for a spoon. The television plays an old black and white film, Stanley Kubrick's The Killing from nineteen fifty six.
Our hero stares at the action on the screen, still carefully pressing his foot against the television, causing it to teeter ever so slightly, before returning upright, daring it to tip over on the television. Character actor Timothy Carey, one of Hollywood's great bad guys, leaves his hideout with his rifle concealed in a guitar case, and then speeds away
off to the racetrack to pull a job. He posts up away from the track with a clear sight line to his mark, the thoroughbred racehorse that he must keep
from winning, that he must kill. It occurs to our hero Martin Scorsese in that moment that the studios are like the great Thoroughbreds in Kubrick's film, racing down the Stretch, these big bohemus lumbering through our culture, winning and losing an equal measure with the highest of stakes being ridden hard by their studio executives, stampeding over the souls of some of our greatest creative minds. Scorsese feels a tinge
of rage. He presses harder against the television with his foot, causing it to wobble, almost to the point of tipping over, and then returning once more on the screen. The thoroughbreds race around the track. Timothy Carrey takes aim with his rifle, and when the moment is just right, he fires without prejudice at the racing beast, stopping it dead in its tracks.
We hear the action from the film in the background, but our attention is drawn to the hushed, manic mumbling from our hero, sitting opposite the TV, still pressing against it with his foot, still rocking it dangerously back and forth. As Scorsese watches the television action, he becomes disassociated. He's looking at the TV, but he's no longer seeing anything
but visions of violence, his own violence. What was previously the sound of his mumbling morphs into the rambling of a madman as Martin Scorsese, he begins reciting his own taxi driver dialogue to bring to life the violent vision in his head.
We're gonna sit you see him? Do you see him? You see him?
Right?
I want you to see him because that's my movie.
But that's not my film.
It's not my film. You know whose film it is?
Huh?
No, you would know whose film it is.
I'm just saying, but you know whose fili it is?
Huh?
The studios film. How do you like that a studio.
Executive owns my film?
And I'm gonna I'm gonna kill him if.
There's nothing else, I'm just I'm gonna I'm gonna kill him.
Now what do you think of that? Hm? I said, what do you think of that? Don't answer? You don't have to answer everything. I'm gonna kill him.
I'm gonna kill him with a forty four magnum pistol. I have a forty four magnum pistol and I'm gonna kill him with that gun. Now, did you ever see did you ever see what a forty four magnive pistol could do to a studio executive's face.
I mean, you need to fucking destroy it.
Just blow it right apart.
That's what it can do to a face.
Now, did you ever see what it can do to a studio executive's fat fucking mouth? That?
You should see that.
You should see what a forty four Maggie is gonna do with a studio executive's fat fucking molt.
You should see.
Just then, Scarsese's foot pushes the television to touch too far, toppling it over onto its back, exploding its tubes and causing a small plume of smoke to shock our hero out of a seat. Scarsese then stumbles hurriedly toward it. Phone he dials, waits impatiently. On the other end, we hear Steven Spielberg, Hello, Stephen, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to kill him.
We'll be right back after this. We're We're We're.
Martin Scorsese's best friends in Hollywood. Steven Spielberg, Brian de Palmer, John Millius, and Paul Schrader all pulled into his driverway at the same time, ready to save their friend from doing something stupid that would change his life forever. When they entered his home, they were shocked to see the broken television, the forty four magnum, the empty wine bottles, and the pills and cocaine paraphernalia.
All out in the open.
But none of that was nearly as shocking as the state Martin Scorsese was in a manic, paranoid anger on the verge of tears. Scorsese paced nonsense, stop, his words coming out in a torrent. His friends tried to get him to slow down, but he would not. Eventually they took the hint, Sat and let Marty. Event the problem became evident immediately. Taxi Driver, the film was done as
far as Scorsese was concerned. He'd shown it to the studio executive at Columbia responsible for the film, and before he got to his point, it was obvious to Spielberg and Di Pama and everyone else that Scorsese did not get the response he wanted from the studio. Taxi Driver
had been years of work. It started a young, incredibly talented Robert de Niro, fresh off his Oscar win for Best Supporting Actor and Godfather Too, and it had been written by Paul Schrader, but it was Martin Scorsese's movie.
The film was a perfect reflection.
Of Scorsese as a person, all the anger, all the alienation he felt, first as a small weak boy growing up in a massive, violent city, and then as a vulnerable, creative young man trying to make it in a corrupt autumn like Hollywood.
Taxi Driver.
As it was, was as perfect as it could get from Martin Scorsese's perspective. He'd squeezed every penny out of his meager two million dollar budget. He'd milked every influence from every great director he'd studied growing up, which is to say all of them, Truffau and Bergmann, Powell and Presburger, and of course the Johns, Ford and Houston and too
many others to mention. Every scene in the film was intentionally designed to move to Nero's Travis Bickle character toward his violent resolution, and every shot carefully calibrated to emotionally impact the viewer. There was no more editing left to do. Martin Scorsese couldn't see how he could change anything in the film, even if he wanted to. By this point, he was creatively spent, like his character Travis Bickle Martin Scorsese hadn't slept in days. He felt the boundary between
art and reality slipping away. He was sure he tripped some figurative wire and was now.
Clinically in but that didn't matter.
All that mattered was making sure that his film was shown on screens in the way that he intended.
Audiences to see it.
The studio executives, in particular Stanley Jaffy from Columbia Pictures, weren't going to allow that to happen, Scorsese explained to his friends in the room. Paul Schrader, the film screenwriter, wanted to know why. The reason, Scorsese explained had nothing to do with the writing. It was because of the final edit and the final scene. The action was too violent,
too bloody. The studio was convinced that if they submitted the film as it was to the Motion Picture Association of America the MPAA, that it would most certainly receive an X rating, and an X rating would kill box office returns.
Only a fraction of.
The audience the studio was counting on would show up to see the film. Scorsese didn't want an X rating either, but he wasn't convinced that his final scene, the one with Travis Bickle blasting the bag man's fingers off of his hand and blood splattering all over his own face before he blasts the brain the bag man out of the back of his head and.
All over the brothel wall.
Scorsese believed that even though this scene went for it in a way that other films hadn't, that audiences were ready for it, and the MPAA would not give it an X. It was nineteen seventy five Taxi Driver, he believed would receive an R rating, but again Scorsese explained, the studio disagreed.
They were insisting that.
Scorsese cut the entire ending and come up with a less violent way to conclude the film. What did they know, Millius asked, Scorsese thought about it.
Big John was right.
The studios didn't know shit. Scorsese looked at the broken TV on the floor and asked his friends if they knew what he'd been watching before they showed out. The Palma said looks like bad television, and the others laughed, because in nineteen seventy five there was only bad television, an old Kubrick picture. Scorsese said, the killing his friends, nodded and smiled in approval. Sterling Hayden. De Paumas said affectionately, Hayden was a cammy snitch. Schrader quipped, Hayden was a
goddamn war hero. Millis protested, Timothy Carey is my favorite in that film, Spielberg offered. Scorsese lit, up, that's right, Timothy Carrey, great character actor. Do you know the story of Timothy Carey and Harry Cohne. The others gave him blank stares. Scorsese took it as his cue to go on. Timothy Carey was auditioning for Harry Cohne in the early fifties, back when Columbia stilled a lot of juice and Coan
was the studio head. You know, I don't know for which picture Timothy Carey was auditioning for, but Coan was there and the audition, and you know, con was a real bastard when he wanted to be.
You've heard the stories.
Anyways, the audition isn't going well, and I don't know what gets said, but something gets said, maybe from Cone, maybe from the director.
Who knows.
The point is Timothy Carey is standing up there acting his guts out for these fucking animals who know nothing about art, who know only from dollars and cents, and Timothy Carey's losing it, you know. So in the middle of the audition, Timothy Carey reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pistol. Con in the others in the room get real stiff. Con looks around for his fixer, but his fixer isn't in the room. There's no muscle. It's just him and whoever this blind director is that
he's got in the room with them. Timothy Carey then holds the gun up, points the gun at Cone in the middle of the audition and says, very calmly, but you know, he's kind of trembling. He's so emotional. He's pointing the gun at one of the biggest studio heads in Hollywood, and he says, this is so humiliating standing up here and acting for you people who know nothing about actors, nothing about my art. And then and then he fires the gun. The gun though fully loaded, yes,
but fully loaded with blanks. Cone of course didn't know that. Con must have shitit his pants, but he had it coming. Timothy Carey was right to do it. These fucking executives. This guy, my guy Jaffi. He doesn't know anything about film, So I know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do what Timothy Carey did, but I'm gonna do it for real. Hm, I'm gonna shoot him. I'm gonna kill him for killing my filmer.
Sller Throller.
Sllerller.
Back in the mall halland apartment, Martin Scorsese sat on his sofa with his head between his knees, listening to his filmmaker friends talk about of murdering the studio executive who was ruining his film. Spielberg de Palma Emilius offered calm reasoning, but no solutions. Schrader offered nothing. He sat quietly, fingering his small thirty eight sumb nose that he took everywhere A real butte that gun. If he didn't know any better, you'd think Schrader, screenwriter of Taxi Driver, approved
of Scorsese's plan to kill the Columbia executive. Scorsese picked his head up from between his knees, leaned back on the couch, stretched his arms, and surveyed his apartment that he destroyed earlier in anger. The voices of his friends were jumbled. It was as if he was disconnected from the reality he was situated in. He was there, but he wasn't. His sleep deprivation had pushed him into an ethereal realm of disassociation. The voices murmured in the background.
His eyes took in the damage. Then he looked to the wall and the John Houston Moby Dick movie poster caught his eye. His brain snapped in a focus. That's it, of course, he blurted out into the room, Moby Dick. Everyone else stopped talking, looks of confusion on all of their faces, save for Paul Schraders, who gave a slight chuckle and nod of acknowledgment.
As he continued to fiddle with his thirty eight. That's it, that's the solution.
Scorsese said, as he pointed to the movie poster on the wall. Spielberg got it next. A big smile came over his face. That's right, the colorization.
De Palma walked toward the poster, staring at it. You mean, desaturate the.
Colors in your final scene like Houston did in the whole picture. Uh huh, Scorsese said. Milius chimed in desaturating the eastern color negative you shot on will do what How does that solve anything? You still get the bloody a scene a Hollywood studio has ever potentially produced. Strader, annoyed, answered for Scorsese, desaturating it makes the blood look less realistic.
But Spielberg interrupted, Scorsese finished his friend's sentence. Desaturating it like Houston did in his picture, gives the scene an ethereal feel. And that works, you know, because in that climactic scene, Travis is in a trance and then we cut to the dan U man without the saturation.
The desaturation will.
Make the look of the film less realistic.
Sure, but it'll actually make it.
More shocking, Spielberg said, right. Scorsese agreed, more shocking.
So I win. It's actually better. It's better.
Scorsese fell out and laughter. Brian de Palma wanted to know if that put an end to Marty's revenge fantasy. Scorsese just kept on laughing. John Millius offered to see if his buddy Francis Ford Coppola had a line on any tanks from the upcoming Apocalypse Now Shoot. Big John would gladly storm the offices of Columbia and take Marty's guy out. Everyone but Paul Schrader laughed. Schrader seemed disappointed, Too bad, he said, staring wistfully at the thirty eight
in his lap. Brian de Palmer walked over to him and gave Schrader his best Sonny corleone, you want to gun down a studio executive because he slapped Marty's film.
Around a little bit.
Huh, what do you think this is the army where you.
Shoot him a mile away?
No, you gotta get up close like this about a bing.
You blow the.
Brains all over your nice ivy league suit. Schrader smiled finally, and everyone else cracked up. Scorsese stopped laughing first and got real serious. You know, he said, it actually is a lot like Francis's film. It's a lot like The Godfather this year, except it's the opposite. When Hagen says it's not personal, Sonny, it's strictly business, the apartment went dead silent. Scorsese went on, except it is. It is
personal making these pictures. It's personal for me, it's personal for you and you and you and you this one, I know it's personal for Bob, for everyone, involved except the business people while making movies. It's not business. It's strictly personal. Slow Zoom out high above the five filmmakers talking, hugging, and exchanging goodbyes. Taxi Driver was released with the edit Martin Scorsese wanted and the desaturated film technique at the
end of the movie shock moviegoers and thrilled critics. Taxi Driver won the prestigious pond Ur at the nineteen seventy six camp Film Festival, who was nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor for Robert de Niro, and Best Supporting Actress for Jodi Foster at the nineteen seventy six Academy Awards. The film generated nearly thirty million dollars at the box office on a two million dollar budget. Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver was a business success because the director kept his
creation personal. Any other way would have been a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan in this this disgrace Land all right, thanks for hanging out with me in nineteen seventies Hollywood for this episode.
I hope you dug it.
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