Product Description
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Winner of the prestigious Golden Palm at the Cannes Film
Festival (1976) and nominated for 4 Academy Awards including Best
Picture (1976), TAXI DRIVER stars Robert De Niro in Martin
Scorsese's classic film of a psychotic New York cabbie driven to
violence by loneliness and desperation. Co-starring Jodie Foster,
Albert Brooks, Harvey Keitel, Peter Boyle and Cybill Shepherd.
Set Contains:
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Columbia/TriStar's two-disc Collector's Edition of Taxi Driver
represents a quantum leap over the single-disc Collector's
Edition from 1999. On disc 1, Martin Scorsese's 1976 masterpiece
has been remastered in high definition, and is once again
presented in its accurate 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen aspect
ratio. The all-new commentary by screenwriter Paul Schrader
occupies less than half of the film's total running time, but
Schrader's comments are wide-ranging and richly informative
regarding the origins of the film's titular character Travis
Bickle, why Schrader chose that name for the character ("a clash
of romantic and harsh"), the necessity of favoring images over
words, collaborating with Scorsese and Robert De Niro, and
various matters of theme, character, and dialogue. Also new to
this release is the full-length commentary by University of
Virginia media studies Professor Robert Kolker (author of the
accled book A Cinema of Loneliness ( /dp/0195123506 )), who
brings an academic depth of analysis to the film, with emphasis
on composition, structure, repeated motifs and images, and the
visual and thematic influences of Hitchcock (especially Psycho),
John Ford (The Searchers), Jean-Luc Godard, and Rainer Werner
Fassbinder. With additional details relating to production
history and Scorsese's other films, Kolker's commentary is the
next best thing to attending a master's class on Taxi Driver.
Also on disc 1: A handy interactive feature allows viewers to
seamlessly switch from the film itself to corresponding pages of
Schrader's original screenplay.
Disc 2 is loaded with over three hours of special features,
beginning with "Scorsese on Taxi Driver" (16:52), in which the
director discusses the origins of the project (fellow director
Brian De Palma brought Schrader's script to Scorsese), the
personal impact of the material, proving his skills to producers
Michael and Julia Phillips (and thus securing financing from
Columbia), and various other aspects of production. In "Producing
Taxi Driver" (9:53), Michael Phillips relates the process of
discovering Schrader's screenplay, attracting Scorsese as
director, getting the film green-lit by Columbia, assuming the
role of on-set producer (while his wife, the late Julia Phillips,
served as studio liaison), and appreciating the film's critical
and commercial success and long-term influence. In the
fascinating 21-minute featurette "God's Lonely Man," Prof. Kolker
examines the loneliness themes that dominate the film, and
Schrader discusses the personal hardships that led him to write
the screenplay during a two-week stay in an ex-girlfriend's empty
apartment in Los Angeles. "Influence and Appreciation" is an
18-minute tribute to Scorsese, featuring interviews with De Niro,
Oliver Stone (a student of Scorsese's at NYU film school), Roger
Corman (producer of Scorsese's early feature Boxcar Bertha),
Cybill Shepherd, Albert Brooks, Jodie Foster and others. In the
22-minute featurette "Taxi Driver Stories," several
past-and-present New York taxi drivers share colorful anecdotes
about driving cabs in the 1970s, the way the industry has changed
since then, and the various pleasures and difficulties of driving
taxis in New York City.
Disc 2 continues with "Making Taxi Driver," a 70-minute
documentary carried over from the 1999 single-disc Collector's
Edition. It remains the definitive documentary about the film's
production, featuring interviews with all of the primary cast and
crew including cinematographer Michael Chapman and legendary
make-up effects master Dick Smith. "Travis' New York" is a
six-minute featurette about the state of New York (especially
Times Square) during the Taxi Driver era of the mid-1970s,
featuring interviews with former New York mayor Ed Koch and
others. "Travis' New York Locations" is a split-screen comparison
feature showing then-and-now footage of nine Taxi Driver
locations from 1975 (when the film was ) and 2006. (You'll be
surprised by some of the differences, while other locations
remain almost completely unchanged). In a 4-minute introduction,
Scorsese discusses the vital importance of his original
storyboards (in terms of on-set preparedness, etc.), and the
"Storyboard to Film Comparison" (8:20) clearly demonstrates how
the director's crude yet well-organized drawings were (in most
cases) precisely translated into cinematic images. When using the
"Play All" option, the photo galleries run as a 9-minute
slide-show arranged in four categories (Bernard Herrmann's Score,
On Location, Publicity Materials, and Scorsese on Location).
--Jeff Shannon