How Martin Scorsese almost took drastic action to protect 'Taxi Driver': 'I was going to do it'

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That time when the director almost went full Travis Bickle on the MPAA.
There's identifying with your lead character, and then there's this!
Apple TV+ released a clip promoting their forthcoming five-part documentary series Mr. Scorsese — the one that has every cinephile on the globe salivating. Director Rebecca Miller has gotten her hands on a ton of terrific archival footage, as well as secured interviews with a slew of director Martin Scorsese's colleagues and associates, like Steven Spielberg, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Spike Lee, Sharon Stone, Margot Robbie, Brian De Palma, Thelma Schoonmaker, Mick Jagger (!), Paul Schrader, Jodie Foster, and, before he passed away, Robbie Robertson.
Miller also got the two-time Scorsese leading man (and infrequent public speaker) Daniel Day-Lewis on camera, which isn't as much of a surprise as you might think, as he is, indeed, the director's husband.
The first clip of the series revisits a story many fans of his work already know — that both the MPAA and Columbia Pictures gave him a hard time about the initial cut of Taxi Driver, the revolutionary film he released in 1976, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and cemented him as a major cinematic force. What Mr. Scorsese does is get to the bottom of just how far the quintessential New York filmmaker was willing to go to save his project.
"Marty was very upset," Scorsese's pal Steven Spielberg explained in the clip. "I get a call at the office, and he said, 'Steve, Steve, this is Marty. Can you come over to the house? They want me to cut all the blood spurting, they want me to cut the guy who loses his hand!'"
Scorsese was, of course, describing the big conclusion to Taxi Driver in which Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle character descends to the darkest recesses of Hell (today an exclusive neighborhood with New York University student housing) to rescue Jodie Foster's character from, as Bickle puts it, "the scum, the filth, the dogs" plus some other terms we've decided to edit out.
"He was going crazy, there were stories he wanted to kill the head of the studio," fellow director Brian De Palma chimed in.
That's when Miller can be heard asking the now cuddly Instagram-friendly auteur, "You had a gun?"
Rolling his eyes, the Killers of the Flower Moon director corrected, "I was gonna get one," then, with a chuckle, added, "but I wasn't gonna get it."
When pressed, he confessed, "I was angry, I was gonna threaten them, I said I was gonna' shoot or some[thing] — I have no idea, I was [just] threatening."
A little more seriously, and perhaps recognizing how much this tall tale was sounding like the ending of Taxi Driver, he said, "What I wanted to do — but not with a gun — I would go in, find out where the rough cut is, and break the windows and take it away. They were gonna destroy the film anyway, so let me destroy it. I'll destroy it. But before destroying it, I'm gonna steal it."
Funnily enough, a scenario just like this did eventually get realized on film. You can watch Blake Edwards' 1981 movie S.O.B. for more.
Luckily, Spielberg and others calmed Scorsese down, even though he said, "The more they said no, the more I said I was going to do it."
In time, someone had the brilliant idea that, as Spielberg said, "mollified the MPAA." They took the final sequence and tinted the color a little. By reducing the garish red and making it, as Scorsese described, "feel more like a tabloid, mak[ing] it grainy," they were able to keep the ending.
"It saved the movie," a triumphant Spielberg recalled. "He didn't have to cut any of the violence; he just had to take the color red down to a kind of brown."
"It saved the movie," a triumphant Spielberg recalled. "He didn't have to cut any of the violence; he just had to take the color red down to a kind of brown."
Now, as to whether Travis Bickle was a villain or hero, or, as some people think, actually died in the big climax, making the final sequence a death vision, that's something only you can decide for yourself.Mr. Scorsese will debut on Apple TV+ on October 17.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly