 |
|
Taxi
Driver: The bloody shoot-up: 13th Street, East Village
|
|
|
TAXI DRIVER
filming locations
|
|
 |
CREDITS
|
|
“All
the animals come out at night – whores, skunk pussies,
buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal.
Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum
off the streets. ”
Robert d e Niro
is so iconic as unhinged loner Travis Bickle, it's hard
to remember anyone else was ever in the frame, but first
choice for the role was crooner Neil Diamond. How tempting
does that sound? Next up was Jeff
Bridges under the direction of Robert Mulligan.
But sense prevailed and we got the dream teaming of
Martin Scorsese
and de Niro,
and one of the key films of the seventies. 1976 was
a vintage year. Apart from Taxi
Driver, we had Alan
J Pakula's compelling take on Watergate, All
The President's Men, and Sidney
Lumet's scabrous Network.
So the Academy gives Best Picture to... Rocky.
Uh, yeh.
From the opening notes of Bernard Hermann's brooding,
jazzy score (his last) to the climactic 'God's eye view',
Scorsese's
classic remains as thrilling as it ever was, with legendary
performances from de
Niro and Jodie
Foster, and seventies New
York, before the big clean-up, the perfect, bilious
breeding ground for urban paranoia.
Scorsese,
naturally, uses real New
York locations. The city is constantly changing,
sprucing up and becoming gentrified, and some of the
locations no longer exist. The cab office Bickle works
out of was at the western end of
57th Street, at 11th Avenue. The building
is still there, but the photogenic backdrop has been
bulldozed to make way for the West Side Highway.
Gone too is the café where Bickle meets with
Wizard (Peter Boyle)
and the other drivers. It was a real cabbies’ hangout,
the Belmore Cafeteria, which stood on Park
Avenue South at 28th Street.
The porno theatres, where Bickle spends his days, are
along the 48th Street
block of Eighth Avenue.
The political rally is on Seventh
Avenue at 38th Street. Bickle sports a mohican
to shoot the senator at Columbus
Circle. He’s finally picked up by Betsy
(Cybill Shepherd)
outside the St
Regis Hotel, 2 East 55th Street at Fifth Avenue.
You can still, though, see the site of the bloody carnage,
when 'God's lonely man' wipes out the lowlifes in his
quest to rescue the young hooker, Iris (Jodie
Foster). The scuzzy 'hotel' is a house at 226
13th Street, between Second and Third Avenues,
in the East Village.
|
|
|
|
 |
FILMING
LOCATIONS FOR TAXI DRIVER
|
|
TRAVEL
|
|
