Driver Taxi

It also includes the full-length narrative by Professor Robert Kolker (author of the renowned A Cinema of Loneliness), which lends the movie an analytical level of academia with an accent on composing, structuring, repeated subjects and imagery, as well as the pictorial and theme-based influence of Hitchcock (especially Psycho), John Ford (The Searchers), Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Featuring extra detail on Scorsese's manufacturing story and other movies, Kolker's comment is the next best thing to participating in a championship on taxi drivers. Practical interactivity allows the viewer to see the movie itself and the corresponding pages of Schrader's Schrader playbook without any interruption. Among the three hour featured items are "Scorsese on Taxi Driver" (16:52), in which the filmmaker talks about the origin of the movie (his colleague Brian De Palma wrote Schrader's scenario for Scorsese), the effect of the footage on the producer Michael and Julia Phillips, which proves his abilities (and thus secures funding from Colombia), and various other facets of the work.

Michael Phillips tells in "Producing Taxi Driver" (9:53) the story of the discovery of Schrader's script, the acquisition of Scorsese as a stage direction, Columbia's takeover of the movie Green-Light, the assumption of the part of the on-set producers (while his spouse, the deceased Julia Phillips, acted as the studios liaison) and the appreciation of the movie's crucial and long lasting impact and business deal.

Prof. Kolker explores the solitude issues that predominate the movie in the intriguing 21-minute 21-minute documentary "God's Lonely Man" and Schrader explores the hardship that resulted in his writing the script during a two-week visit to an ex-girlfriend's empty Los Angeles home. "The Influence and Appreciation is an 18-minute homage to Scorsese, with interview with De Niro, Oliver Stone (a Scorsese pupil at NYU Academy of Film), Roger Corman (producer of Scorsese's early movie Boxcar Bertha), Cybill Shepherd, Albert Brooks, Jodie Foster and others.

The 22-minute report "Taxi Driver Stories" features several New York taxi driver stories in the past and present about the history of taxi travel in the seventies, the way the business has evolved since then, and the various joys and challenges of taxi travel in New York City.