It's the 40th anniversary of "Taxi Driver" (released on February 8, 1976), the movie that gave Robert De Niro his most famous line, put Martin Scorsese on the map, proved that the pre-teen Jodie Foster was an Oscar-worthy thespian, and (most notoriously) was cited by John Hinckley as an inspiration for his assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.
In honor of the film's anniversary, here are 25 things you need to know about how Travis Bickle came to be.
2. Martin Scorsese saw the script as early as 1972, but didn't yet have the clout to make it, much less cast the then-unknown Robert De Niro in the lead. It would be another couple of years -- after Scorsese and De Niro earned critical acclaim for "Mean Streets," and De Niro won an Oscar for "The Godfather Part II" -- that Columbia finally made a deal with Scorsese and De Niro.
4. When "Taxi Driver" was greenlit, De Niro was in Italy, filming Bernardo Bertolucci's "1900." He'd fly back from Italy to Manhattan and drive a cab on weekends to prepare for his role, then fly back to Italy for another week of filming there.
6. De Niro picked up Travis' Midwestern accent from American GIs he met at a military base in Italy. He taped their conversations and listened to them to develop Travis' voice.
8. Scorsese wanted De Niro's "Mean Streets" co-star Harvey Keitel to play the role of campaign worker Tom, but Keitel wanted the smaller role of Sport, the pimp. Turns out Keitel knew a pimp in his own Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan. Keitel took the man to the Actors Studio, and together, they beefed up Sport's scenes by improvising dialogue for the character.
10. Jodie Foster was only 12 years old when she was cast as Iris, the child prostitute. and the role was considered so risqué that she had to have a social worker on the set with her. She also had to spend several hours with a therapist to prove that she wouldn't be psychologically scarred by the role. She also had to have a stand-in perform some of Iris' more provocative actions. The stand-in was Foster's sister, Connie, eight years older but no taller.
12. Albert Brooks was primarily known as a stand-up comedian when Scorsese gave the future film director his first movie role as Tom, Betsy's wary colleague. Like many of the other actors, Brooks made up much of his own dialogue in improvisations during rehearsals.
14. Leonard Harris, who played candidate Charles Palantine, wasn't an actor, but he was familiar to New York audiences as a drama and book critic on local TV.
16. Steven Prince, who played gun dealer Easy Andy, was such a character that Scorsese later made a documentary about him, 1978's "American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince." In that film, Prince talks about his career as Neil Diamond's road manager and about his own history of heroin addiction. One of his stories -- about jabbing an overdosing woman in the heart with an adrenaline syringe -- was supposedly the inspiration for the famous similar incident in "Pulp Fiction."
18. Travis' notorious Mohawk haircut came from his Vietnam veteran background. Schrader had learned from other vets that soldiers would sometimes shave their heads that way when they were about to go on commando missions, and that everyone knew it was wise to avoid Mohawked soldiers because they were psyching themselves up for the slaughter. De Niro couldn't actually shave his head that way because the film was shot out of sequence, so he had to wear a bald cap with a strip of hair on it, pasted over his crew cut.
20. The sequence was so bloody that it almost earned the film an "X" rating just for violence. To earn the film an R-rating, the filmmakers desaturated the colors in the sequence, so that the blood wasn't so red.
22. The unforgettable instrumental score to "Taxi Driver" was the final work in the celebrated career of composer Bernard Herrmann, who'd scored such landmark movies as "Citizen Kane" and "Psycho." He recorded the music in just two days and died hours after finishing the sessions.
24. In the months after its release, "Taxi Driver" won the Palme D'Or, the top prize at the Cannes film festival. In 1977, it was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor (for De Niro), Best Supporting Actress (for Foster), and Best Score. (No nominations for Scorsese or Schrader.) On Oscar night, the film was shut out.
25. There's been much speculation as to whether the film's finale, in which Travis is lionized and enjoys a brief reunion with Betsy, is to be interpreted as actual events or just the fantasy of the dying Travis. Scorsese and Schrader have said that Travis does live at the end, but that he's still as lonely and alienated as ever -- and is still a ticking time bomb. Said Schrader: "I think the syndrome is just going to start all over again."
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