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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The 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 included is the full-length
commentary by University of Virginia media studies Professor
Robert Kolker (author of the accled book A Cinema of
Loneliness ( http://www..com/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. A
handy interactive feature allows viewers to seamlessly view the
film itself and the corresponding pages of Schrader's original
screenplay.
Three hours of special features include 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.
"Making Taxi Driver" is 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
(This review refers to the 2007 Two-Disc Collector's Edition
( http://www..com/Taxi-Driver-Two-Disc-Collectors-Robert/dp/B000R8YC18/ref=sr_1_2?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1298483584&sr=1-2 )
, which shared much of the same bonus features as this release.)