DISGRACELAND - Martin Scorsese (Pt. 2): One Night. One Murder. Five Directors

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

Hollywood:1975. Martin Scorsese sits in his apartment, enraged. He wants to literally kill the man who is ruining his to-be-released film, Taxi Driver. Scorsese’s friends, filmmakers Stephen Spielberg, Brian De Palma, John Milius, and Paul Schraeder rush to Scorsese’s side to talk him out of committing murder, but when they arrive, their friend Marty acts less like himself and more like his Travis Bickle character from the film he’s trying to save. This is the story of that night.  Martin Scorsese is certainly one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Jake wants to know: who is your favorite filmmaker? Tell us at 617-906-6638, [e-mail], or on socials @disgracelandpod. This episode contains content that may me disturbing to some listeners, including graphic depictions of violence and self-harm. This episode was originally published on February 25, 2025. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to exclusive content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at ⁠disgracelandpod.com⁠ Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - ⁠GET THE NEWSLETTER⁠ Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: ⁠Instagram⁠ ⁠YouTube⁠ ⁠X⁠ (formerly Twitter)  ⁠Facebook Fan Group⁠ ⁠TikTok To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things, Tana Monsu, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes a suspect is found guilty before a verdict is ever read in court. On the Wicked Words podcast, I talk with the writers who dig deep into the cases that changed history,

including Marsha Clark, who went from prosecuting one of the most famous murder cases to writing crime fiction. It doesn't matter that you didn't take part in the murder. If you were at the scene at all, you're guilty of murder. Every week, the real story is revealed. Join us every Monday for new episodes of Wicked Words. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode contains content that may be disturbing to some listeners.

Please check the show notes for more information. Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis. This episode tells the story of a long-standing Hollywood myth, one that Martin Scorsese eventually acknowledged in an interview with Stephen Spielberg in 2015. Now, Spielberg and director Brian De Palma have both recounted the story on the record in other places as well, Spielberg, most notably in the excellent Peter Biscan book, Easy Riders and Raging Bulls. I, of course, have no idea what specific words were spoken during the Faithful Night in question. However, just as the directors in this story, who are the main characters in this story, Stephen Spielberg, Brian De Palma, John Millius, Paul Schrader, and Martin Scorsese,

just as they have done in the numerous films they've directed depicting real-life events, films like Schindler's List, The Intouchables, Dillinger, Raging Bowl, and the Irishman, to name a few. I followed their lead and relied not only on research of the event in question, but also on research of the characters in this story to inform the dialogue here. in. Mellow John. This is a story of one of the greatest movies of all time, a movie that was fictional,

with real-life murder coursing through the filmmaking. And this is a story about one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Actually, it's a story about a couple of the greatest filmmakers of all time. And it's about life and death. and art, and all the things that make us suckers for great drama. It's a story about one night in particular, one time in Hollywood in particular, and revenge. It's a story about Martin Scorsese and his film Taxi Driver, a film whose composer died only hours after completing the movie's intense score. Great music. Unlike that music I played for you

at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron called Firing Squad Audition, MK, 2. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover by Paul Simon. And why would I play you that specific slice of internal rhyme cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on February 8, 1976. And that was the day taxi driver hit theaters. marking the continuation of one of the greatest careers in filmmaking. On this episode, life, death, art, revenge, 70s Hollywood, and Martin Scorsese's taxi driver.

I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgrace land. People think making a movie is a lot like making anything else. It's not. It's not like making a record. It's not like writing a book. It's not even like staging a play. It's infinitely more difficult than all of those things. People who make records and write books and stage plays, for the most part, cannot make movies.

And there's a reason they don't. Because it's a savage endeavor that will quite literally kill you and destroy your soul if you're not careful and or lucky or both. Some have compared making the movie to going to war. I've never been to war, so I'm not going to go that far. but I think a better analogy, though also imperfect, would be to say making a movie is a lot like giving birth, every day for two years straight. I was there in the room for the birth of both of my sons.

I saw the excruciating pain my wife went through as both of those big-headed Brennan's passed through her birth canal. And before you guys send me your hate mail, I ran this analogy by my wife, who sanctioned it. The pain of birth is unimaginable to me, but I know that that pain is concentrated. At the most, we're talking 24 hours, but usually less. Imagine that pain over and over again,

every single day for two years, and now we're getting close to the pain involved with making a movie. Every day, a new fight, a new hassle, a new raging fire to put out, another existential artistic challenge to navigate, another chip off your soul. I've made records. I've written and published a book.

And yes, I even tried getting a big-budget Hollywood movie made with an A-list celebrity involved. And I can tell you, trying to make a movie is a brutal, soul-sucking endeavor that is not for the faint of heart. Hollywood is Sodom disguised as paradise. Its Lott's wife bent brutally over the back of a casting couch. It's pimps bobbing through fresh chum for their 10%.

It's shameless ambition wafting like beastly pheromones on the back of the Santa Ana's. Once you make it over the moat, patrolled by an army of lizard-skinned assistants, and into the hallowed grounds of the studio system, that's when, quote, all the animals come out. The horrors, skunk-pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal, unquote. Hollywood is relentless. It never lets you off the hook. No matter how successful you are,

no matter how psychotic you are. So listen, you fuckers, you screw heads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up. Martin Scorsese twitched in the cutting room. It had been days since he'd slept. Insomnia.

Just like the lead character, Travis Bickle, the revenge-minded lonesome cavy motoring Scorsese's first studio film, Taxi Driver. Things have been easier on the director's last film, Mean Streets. There was no studio. Thus, little oversight. Taxi driver was a different beast. Columbia Pictures ponied up nearly $2 million. It might have been the director's vision, but it was their money,

and they wanted to return on that money. And they weren't fucking around. And that's why Scorsese couldn't sleep. He needed this final scene of the film to be perfect. The normally kinetic, fast-talking East Coast director sat stone still, quietly observing the action on the projected picture. A young Robert De Niro mohawked and shaved for battle. Creeping through the crime and grime of 70s New York City

into the climactic scene as the taxi driver character, Travis Bickle. Travis walked with purpose from the taxi cab to the front stoop. But that purpose had been missing from his gait in the earlier scenes. This was the climax. This was the moment the character was building toward all along. Finally, something for him to do, something big. He was going to rescue the little girl and kill anyone who got in his way, even if it meant dying himself.

Dying would be a bonus, actually. What did this life give him anyway? Nothing but loneliness and rage. rejection at every turn. An extreme inability to relate to anyone or anything except for the needs of a helpless little 12-and-a-half-year-old girl turned into a prostitute by this scum-of-the-earth pimp, Matthew, a.k.a. Sport got it first. At close range,

Travis shot him on the street outside the brothel with his stub-nosed 38. Travis then stormed inside and confronted the pimp's bagman, who collected the cash from the Johns outside the disgusting. smelling room where Iris applied her trade. Travis took aim and fired. This time with the heavy artillery, with the 44 Magnum, the elephant killer. But the bag man was no elephant.

The bagman raised his hand in defense. The bullet blasted off four of his five fingers. Blood splattered everywhere, all over the brothel's hallway, all over Travis's face. Just then, another gunshot. This one from behind Travis, from Sport,

who somehow survived the close-range bullet from the 38 and made his way into the brothel after Travis. The bullet grazed Travis's neck and more than. Travis took game with his 44, blasted sport away, and then stumbled in a daze toward Iris in that room. Iris was the only thing that mattered, saving her, delivering her from this hellscape of a city, avenging the sins that had been carried out against her,

the defiling of this innocent young girl by predators she was powerless. against. That dynamic resonated with Travis. He too was powerless. His innocence too had been stripped away by forces he couldn't control. Iris, Iris. Travis put two more bullets into sports for insurance and another into the bagman before making his way to Iris's room. Then the John emerged into the hallway and caught Travis off guard, firing a bullet into his arm. Travis unloaded a full round into the John. At least three bullets in the face, more to the torso. Blood spewed, red, and hot from the John's cheeks and his chest.

The John fell backward into Iris's room, and there she was. She screamed in horror at the dead man, who had just collapsed on the floor. Travis moved toward her, but now the bagman was on his feet and on top of Travis. On his back, actually, screaming. Ignoring him, Travis continued to march toward Iris. Iris was all that mattered. Iris was all there was. And the bagman managed to tackle Travis to the ground.

In the tussle, Travis stabbed him through his hand. Screams filled the whorehouse. Travis grabbed the dead John's gun lying on the floor and shot the screaming Bagman through his face, exiting his brains onto the wall next to Iris, who was by this point hysterical. Travis' job was done. He'd freed Iris, avenged her stolen innocence,

and by extension his two. He put the gun to the bottom of his chin and pulled the trigger. The chamber was empty. The scene was perfect. It was as violent a scene as a Hollywood studio had ever produced, except the movie hadn't yet been fully produced. It was still being edited, and the studio had yet to approve the final cut.

Three characters were killed in this fictional scene, and this scene was about to result in a very real death. Martin Scorsese sat pensively in his Mohan apartment high above Hollywood. The location had been prescribed by doctor's orders. Scorsese's asthma was so bad that his physician required him to live above the L.A. smog line. Hollywood. The only city in the world where this New York director could gain access to the resources needed to direct the kind of personal pictures he wanted to direct. On the same scale as the greats he admired who came before him, Howard Hawks, John Ford, Vincent Minnelli.

this city was literally choking him to death. And if it wasn't the city itself, it was the studio. Scorsese had just returned from screening his final cut of taxi driver for Columbia Studio executive Stanley Jaffe. Jaffe hated it, too violent. And there was no way in his estimation that taxi driver would be granted an R-rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. With the way Scorsese had constructed the final scene,

an X rating was almost certain. and an X-rating meant a major reduction in revenue. So, from the studio executive's perspective, there was only one option. He demanded Martin Scorsese re-edit the end of taxi driver to make it less violent in order to garner a more favorable rating from the MPAA. In the meeting, Scorsese said nothing. The rage inside him shocked him silent. Who was this guy to tell him how to cut his movie?

His criticism wasn't reserved only for the end either. The executive, Jaffe, wanted Scorsesey to lose the so-called artsy shots of Travis in New York City from earlier in the film as well, claiming they were disrupting the momentum, and that audiences weren't going to flock to the theaters en masse to see a student art film. They wanted action. They wanted Charles Bronson blasting away bad guys in as many scenes as possible in Death Wish, but, you know, not as violent as the ending of taxi driver that Scorsese was suggesting.

Audiences, according to the executive, wanted action. They didn't want Gendar and Antonioni. Scorsese realized he was now taking orders from a Philistine. It wasn't worth the argument. So now, Erie sat in his apartment pondering what to do. His rising headache made it nearly impossible to concentrate on finding a solution. He scanned the room. Script pages were scattered across the coffee table.

The typewriter housed a sheet of paper. covered with the filmmaker's manic ramblings, all caps, no spaces. And there were empty pill bottles, half-full-open bottles of wine, a television on in the corner, and a circle of John's keeping watch over the apartment. On the TV, John Ford's, the searchers, showed John Wayne's Ethan Edwards' character seeking revenge. On the wall, a movie poster, John Houston's classic tale of vengeance, Moby Dick. And on the TV table, Scorsese's 44 Magnum. An exact replica, weapon of choice of his revenge-fueled character, Travis Bickle.

Scorsese picked up the gun and then picked up the phone. Scorsese's friend, the young director, Stephen Spielberg, fresh off the release of his perfect studio-produced box office smash, Jaws, ignored the phone and focused on the book he was reading. Jacques Valais is the Invisible College. What a group of scientists has discovered about UFO influence on the human race. Another of Scorsese's friends, another director, Brian De Palma, the man responsible for introducing Scorsese to Robert De Niro,

he too ignored the ringing telephone on his nightstand, surrounded by notes with angry messages from a nerdy horror author up in Maine. De Palma ignored those messages just as he ignored his phone. Instead, he rolled over to focus on the naked beach blanket hippie blonde in his bed. The phone at director John Milius's place went unanswered as well. John had other things to do, like Pack for his trip to the Philippines where the film he'd written, Apocalypse Now for friend Francis Ford Coppola, was in production. Word was it was a disaster. And over at Paul Schrader's place, as Paul cleaned his own gun, he too ignored his phone.

Except Paul knew it was his friend Marty, calling with more bad news about the taxi driver's script that Paul himself had written, which Scorsese was having a hard time finishing. Paul Schrader was as pissed off as John Millius was in a rush as Brian De Palma was indifferent as Stephen Spielberg was distracted. But Martin Scorsese was determined. So he kept calling, and the phones kept ringing, until one and then all of his friends heard the distraught state Scorsese was in on the other end of the line. He was like nothing they'd ever heard before.

Even for the notoriously high-strung Scorsese, this state he was in was serious. Marty was his sleep deprived as Travis Bickle and on twice as many pills. His anger was as palpable as the L.A. smog on a scorching summer day. He was rambling like a madman talking twice as fast as normal. Something about the Coxuck Studio fuck with the ricotta cheese for brains. How the solo Sotomaton didn't want violence? Well then, how would he deal with this kind of violence?

The kind that drove a young promising director to blasting his own brains all over the walls of his apartment. They all moved with sudden urgency. Into their cars, racing through the streets of Hollywood, up into the dead man curves of Mulholl, nearly killing themselves in the process. One by one, all four directors wheeled into Scorsese's driveway at the same time, exited their cars, raced to the locked front door, tried pushing it open, banged on it profusely,

rang the doorbell, readied themselves to batter ram it down with all of their combined force. And then... There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that, trust your girlfriends.

I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends... Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no.

I vowed I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark.

When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an act or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? You'd rather be disappointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb.

And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance. Like he's about to attack me. Like making karate noises. And his entire, the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going, and the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. I immediately know that I've been at sleepwalk. David O'Yellow. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts.

Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Durbin. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Moderato from Stranger Things. Tana Monsu. Camilla Marone,

Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Remember when you'd walk into your local video rental place and there were always those two employees behind the counter arguing about movies? Well, that's us.

I'm Millie to Cherico. And I'm Casey O'Brien. And now we're arguing about movies on our podcast Dear Movies I Love You from the Exactly Right Network. Can I say something about the Criterion Clause? Go ahead, dude. They're letting too many people in there. Okay, that's another film, Gripe I got to.

Sadly, that rental place doesn't exist anymore. It's probably a store that sells running shoes. Or an ice cream shop with an extra P and an E at the end. So consider us your slacker movie clerks in podcast form. I would like to establish a timeline of the moment you figured out who Channing Tatum was. Every Tuesday, we dig into the movies we can't stop obsessing over, from hidden gems to big screen favorites. New episodes drop every week on the exactly right network. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The massive shotgun blast rang in the new year. January 1st, 1972, three years earlier. The shotgun was a substitute for fireworks. John Millius stood on the of Margot Kidder's Nicholas Beach A-frame and fired his gun out over the Pacific Ocean. None of Margo's guests were shocked, especially not Margo's boyfriend, Brian De Palma. Guns were always around. And why wouldn't they be? John Millius, who had written the script for Apocalypse Now and De Palma, who had written the excellent Hitchcock-style thriller Sisters, starring Kidder in her housemate, Jennifer Salt. And Stephen Spielberg, who was also milling about the New Year's Day party, He'd just released the excellent thriller duel for television,

and Paul Schrader, at the time a subversive film critic, but who was working on a script about a lonesome, homicidal cab driver, all of these filmmakers were revolutionaries. So, yeah, guns were up in the mix. Guns were necessary, if not literally, then figuratively. What these filmmakers were endeavoring to do creatively was high stakes, by any means necessary type stuff. Their goal, both collectively and individually, was as audacious as it was dangerous,

to make extremely personal movies with the backing of the major Hollywood studios so that they could reach as wide an audience as possible. It's not like the Hollywood Studios hadn't made big-budget films that reached massive audiences before. Of course they had. But the studios had never turned control of those pictures over to a band of young outsiders who didn't come up as directors through the studios, who came instead from film schools, and who wanted to make movies that expressed their own personal experiences and that spoke to the tumultuous times they were living

through and spoke directly to the young people living through those times at that moment. This was before Spielberg's Jaws and before any real success for any of these so-called Hollywood brats. This was the early 1970s. This was a moment in time in Hollywood that had never existed before and would never exist again. A time when the town was still on a contact tie from the success of 1969's Easy Rider. An adult movie written not just about young people, but for young people. The film changed the industry. Studio executives were forced to reckon with the fact that they were losing money because the films they were creating were out of touch. Therefore, they needed fresh creative perspective from young directors who came from outside the

studio system. And for the first time in Hollywood's history came from, like I said, film school. That's where this group of young filmmakers came from. And that's why the mood was so jubilant. They knew that not only were they revolutionaries, some of them literally toting guns, they knew that they had Hollywood by the balls. And it was only a matter of time before one or all of them broke through in a big way. The confidence did not, however, extend to Martin Scorsese,

who was at that moment sulking on the beach. fully assembled and perfectly pressed pants, buttoned up, big collared, starched shirt, and shine shoes, looking as east coast as one could on a west coast beach, watching Margot Kidder and her equally sexy housemate Jennifer Salt, sunbathe in their bikinis. Scorsese's own girlfriend, Sandy Weintraub, daughter of Warner Bros. Studio Executive Fred Weintraub, didn't seem to mind. She also didn't mind being referred to in mean streets as The Weintraub brought by De Niro's Johnny Boy character, but I digress. It was the early 70s.

Liberation was in the air. Scorsese pondered his dilemma. How in the hell was he, a runty, fast-talking Italian kid from New York with no money, going to make the types of movies he wanted to make? Movies that reflected the violence, spiritual confusion, and sexual frustration he'd experienced back in New York City's Little Italy neighborhood where he grew up amid real-life gangsters and godlike priests. How was that possible in a town like this? Where the sun and the smog and the smiles and the shit talk hummed along incessant contradiction? How had he ended up here? Him? Martin

Scorsesey, a tailor's son. On a godforsaken beach with a studio boss's daughter as a girlfriend, an ambition as big as the Pacific Ocean staring back at him threatening to swallow him whole. He did not have an answer. But at least he he had friends. Stephen Spielberg stopped by Scorsese on the beach on his way into the water and asked him if you wanted to join him for a dip. Come on, let's go in the ocean, Spielberg directed. No, no, no, it's very bad.

It's evil. There's things out there you don't even want to know about, Scorsese replied. You afraid of jellyfish? There's no jellyfish out there. Spielberg responded. No, no, no. Things with teeth. Spielberg gave up and moved toward the water.

His imagination burned. like the hot sand beneath his feet. Interior, Martin Scorsese's apartment, night. We fast forward into 1975 to The Night of. Back to the moment before our hero, Martin Scorsese, loses it and decides to call on his friends to come save him. The camera shows a close, full-body profile shot of our hero sitting in a comfortable chair, just a few feet from a small television on a small television stand.

His leg extends out with his cowboy boot perched on the television. He carefully extends pressure from his foot to slowly rock the TV back and forth on its stand. We see that he is stoic and holding a massive black 44-magnum pistol in his hand. Resting in his lap is a half-empty jar of peanut butter that our hero eats out of with a spoon. The television plays an old black and white film,

Stanley Kubrick's The Killing from 1956. Our hero stares at the action on the screen, still carefully pressing his foot against the television, television, causing it to teeter ever so slightly before returning upright, daring it to tip over. On the television, character actor Timothy Carey, one of Hollywood's great bad guys, leaves his hideout with his rifle concealed in a guitar case and then speeds away off to the racetrack to pull a job. He posts up away from the track with a clear sight line to his mark, the thoroughbred racehorse that he must keep from winning, that he must kill. It occurs to

our hero Martin Scorsese in that moment, that the studios are like the great thoroughbreds in Kubrick's film racing down the stretch. These big behemists lumbering through our culture, winning and losing an equal measure with the highest of stakes, being ridden hard by their studio executives, stampeding over the souls of some of our greatest creative minds. Scorsese feels a tinge of rage. He presses harder against the television with his foot, causing it to wobble, almost to the point of tipping over and then returning once more. On the screen, the thoroughbreds race around the track. Timothy Carey takes aim with his rifle, and when the moment is just right, he fires without prejudice at the racing beast, stopping it dead in its tracks. We hear the action from the film

in the background, but our attention is drawn to the hushed manic mumbling from our hero sitting opposite the TV, still pressing against it with his foot, still rocking it dangerously back and As Scorsesee watches the television action, he becomes disassociated. He's looking at the TV, but he's no longer seeing anything but visions of violence, his own violence. What was previously the sound of his mumbling morphs into the rambling of a madman. As Martin Scorsese begins reciting his own taxi driver dialogue to bring to life the violent vision in his head. We're going to sit. See him? Do you see him?

You see him, right? I want you to see him because that's my movie. But that's not my film. It's not my film. You know whose film it is? Huh? No, you would know who's film it is. I'm just saying, but you know who's film it is? Huh? The studio's film. How do you like that?

A studio executive owns my film. And I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna kill him. If there's nothing else, I'm just, I'm gonna kill him. Now, what do you think of that? Hmm? I said, what do you think of that? You don't have to answer everything.

I'm gonna kill him with a 44 Magnum pistol. I have a 44 Magnum pistol, and I'm gonna kill him with that gun. Now, did you ever see, did you ever see what a 44 Magnum pistol could do to a studio executive's face? I mean, you need to fucking destroy it. Just blow it right apart.

That's what it can do to a face. Now, did you ever see what it can do to a studio executive's fat fucking mouth? That you should see. That, you should see what a 44 imagine is going to do with the suing executive's fat fucking milk you should see. Just then, Scorsese's foot pushes the television a touch too far, toppling it over onto its back, exploding its tubes and causing a small plume of smoke to shock our hero out of his seat.

Scorsese then stumbles hurriedly toward his phone. He dials, waits impatiently. On the other end, we hear Stephen Spielberg. Hello? Stephen, I know what I'm going to do. We'll be right back after this world. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl.

You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me?

The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe.

On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests, like Amelia Clark. When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. And my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in.

Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance. Like he's about to attack me. Like, making karate noises. And his entire the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going. And the air marshal.

is trying to grab my arms and screaming. And I immediately know that I've been at sleepwalking. David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting.

I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things. Tana Monsu. Camilla Marone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, host of the Wicked Words podcast.

Each week I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters. He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face, and he knows something happened. His father just grabs him and says she's gone. She's gone. These are the cases that leave survivors, families, and the journalists who cover them changed forever. Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits,

and you'll end up doing things you never thought you'd do. you know, you look back at it and you're like, I can't believe that really happened. Join me and step inside the investigation. New episodes drop every Monday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Martin Scorsese's best friends in Hollywood, Stephen Spielberg, Brian DePalma, John Millius, and Paul Schrader, all pulled into his driveway at the same time, ready to save their friend from doing something stupid that would change his life forever. When they entered its home, they were shocked to see the broken television, the 44 magnum,

the empty wine bottles, and the pills and cocaine paraphernalia all out in the open. But none of that was nearly as shocking as the state Martin Scorsese was in. A manic, paranoid anger, on the verge of tears. Scorsese pace nonstop, his words coming out in a torrent. His friends tried to get him to slow down, but he would not. Eventually, they took the hint, sat, and let Marty vent. The problem became evident immediately. Taxi Driver.

The film was done as far as Scorsese was concerned. He'd shown it to the studio executive at Columbia responsible for the film, and before we got to his point, it was obvious to Spielberg and De Palma and everyone else that Scorsese did not get the response he wanted from the studio. Taxi Driver had been years of work. It starred a young, incredibly talented Robert De Niro, fresh off his Oscar win for Best Supporting Actor and Godfather, too.

and it had been written by Paul Schrader, but it was Martin Scorsese's movie. The film was a perfect reflection of Scorsese as a person. All of the anger, all the alienation he felt, first as a small, weak boy growing up in a massive, violent city, and then as a vulnerable, creative young man trying to make it in a corrupt Sodom like Hollywood, taxi driver as it was, was as perfect as it could get from Martin Scorsese's perspective. He had squeezed every penny out of his meager $2 million. budget. He'd milked every influence from every great director he'd studied growing up, which is to say

all of them, Truffaut and Bergman, Powell, and Pressburger, and of course, the Johns, Ford, and Houston, and too many others to mention. Every scene in the film was intentionally designed to move De Niro's Travis Bickle character toward his violent resolution, and every shot carefully calibrated to emotionally impact the viewer. There was no more editing left to do. Martin Scorsese couldn't see how he could change anything in the film even if he wanted to. By this point, he was creatively spent. Like his character, Travis Bickle, Martin Scorsese hadn't slept in days. He felt the boundary between art and reality slipping away. He was sure he tripped some figurative wire and was now clinically insane, but that didn't matter. All that mattered was making sure that his film was

shown on screens in the way that he intended audiences to see it, the studio executives, in particular Stanley Jaffe from Columbia Pictures weren't going to allow that to happen, Scorsese explained to his friends in the room. Paul Schrader, the film screenwriter, wanted to know why. The reason, Scorsese explained, had nothing to do with the writing. It was because of the final edit and the final scene. The action was too violent, too bloody. The studio was convinced that if they submitted the film as it was to the Motion Picture Association of America, the MPAA, that it would most certainly receive an X rating

and an X rating with kill box office returns. Only a fraction of the audience the studio was counting on would show up to see the film. Scorsese didn't want an X rating either, but he wasn't convinced that his final scene, the one with Travis Bickle blasting the bag man's fingers off of his hand and blood splattering all over his own face before he blasts the brains of the bag man

out of the back of his head and all over the brothel wall. Scorsese believed that even though this scene went for it in a way that other films hadn't, that audiences were ready for it, and the MPAA would not give it an X. It was 1975. Taxi driver, he believed, would receive an R rating. But again, Scorsese explained, the studio disagreed. They were insisting that Scorsese cut the entire ending and come up with a less violent way to conclude the film. What did they know, Milius asked. Scorsese thought about it. Big John was right. The studios did no shit. Scorsese looked at the broken TV on the floor and asked his friends if they knew what he'd been watching before they showed out.

De Palma said, looks like bad television. The others laughed because in 1975 there was only bad television. An old Kubrick picture, Scorsese said. The killing. His friends nodded and smiled in approval. Sterling Hayden, De Palma said affectionately. Hayden was a comie snitch, Schrader quiffed. Hayden was a goddamn war hero, Millius protested.

Timothy Carey is my favorite in that film, Spielberg offered. Scorsesey lit up. That's right. Timothy Carey, great character actor. Do you know the story of Timothy Carey and Harry Cohn? The others gave him blank stares. Scorsese took it as his cue to go on. Timothy Carey was auditioning for Harry Cohn in the early 50s.

Back when Columbia still had a lot of juice and Cohn was the studio head, you know? I don't know for which picture Timothy Carey was auditioning for, but Cohn was there and the auditioned, and, you know, Cone was a real bastard when he wanted to be. You've heard the stories. Anyways, the audition isn't going well, and I don't know what gets said, but something gets said. Maybe from Cone, maybe from the director. Who knows? The point is, Timothy Cary is standing up there, acting his guts out for these fucking animals

who know nothing about art, who know only from dollars and cents. And Timothy Cary's losing it, you know? So in the middle of the audition, Timothy Cary reaches into his pocket. and pulls out a pistol. Cone and the others in the room get real stiff. Cone looks around for his fixer, but his fixer isn't in the room. There's no muscle. It's just him and whoever this blind director is that he's got in the room with him.

Timothy Carey then holds the gun up, points the gun at Cone in the middle of the audition and says, very calmly, but, you know, he's kind of trembling. He's so emotional. He's pointing the gun at one of the biggest studio heads in Hollywood, and he says, this is so humiliating, standing up here, and acting for you people who know nothing about actors,

nothing about my heart. And then, and then he fires the gun. The gun, though, fully loaded, yes, but fully loaded with blanks. Cohn, of course, didn't know that. Cone must have shit his pants, but he had it coming. Timothy Carey was right to do it. These fucking executives, this guy, my guy, Jaffe, he doesn't know anything about film.

So I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to do what Timothy Cary did, but I'm going to do it for real. I'm going to shoot him. I'm going to kill him for kids. killing my film. Back in the Mall Holland apartment, Martin Scorsese sat on his sofa with his head between his knees, listening to his filmmaker friends talk him out of murdering the studio executive who was ruining his film. Spielberg, De Palma, Emilius, offered calm reasoning, but no solutions.

Schrader offered nothing. He sat quietly, fingering his small 38-stum nose that he took everywhere. A real beaut, that gun. If he didn't know any better, you'd think Schrader, screenwriter of taxi driver, approved of Scorsese's plan to kill the Columbia executive. Scorsese picked his head up from between his knees, leaned back on the couch, stretched his arms, and surveyed his apartment that he'd destroyed earlier in anger. The voices of his friends were distant, jumbled.

It was as if he was disconnected from the reality he was situated in. He was there, but he wasn't. His sleep deprivation had pushed him into an ethereal run, realm of disassociation. The voices murmured in the background. His eyes took in the damage. Then he looked to the wall and the John Houston Moby Dick movie poster caught his eye. His brain snapped into focus. That's it. Of course. He blurted out into the room, Moby Dick. Everyone else stopped talking. Looks of confusion on all of their faces, save for Paul Schraders, who gave a slight chuckle and nod of acknowledgement as he continued to fiddle with

his 38. That's it. That's the solution, Scorsese said, as he pointed to the movie poster on the wall. Spielberg got it next. A big smile came over his face. That's right. The colorization. De Palma walked toward the poster, staring at it. You mean, desaturate the colors in your final scene like Houston did in the whole picture? Uh-huh, Scorsese said. Milius chimed in.

Desaturating the Eastman color negative he shot on, will be. Do what? How does that solve anything? You've still got the bloodiest scene a Hollywood studio has ever potentially produced. Schrader, annoyed, answered for Scorsese. Desaturating it makes the blood look less realistic. But, Spielberg interrupted. Scorsese finished his friend's sentence. Desaturating it like Houston did in his picture gives the scene an ethereal feel.

And that works, you know? Because in that climactic scene, Travis is in a trance. and then we cut to the denouement without the saturation. The desaturation will make the look of the film less realistic, sure, but it'll actually make it more shocking, Spielberg said. Right, Scorsesey agreed. More shocking. So I win. It's actually better. It's better.

Scorsese fell out in laughter. Brian DePama wanted to know if that put an end to Marty's revenge fantasy. Scorsese just kept on laughing. John Millius offered to see if his buddy Francis Ford Coppola had a line on any tanks from the upcoming Apocalypse Now Shoot. Big John would gladly storm the offices of Columbia and take Marty's guy out. Everyone but Paul Schrader laughed. Schrader seemed disappointed.

Too bad, he said, staring wistfully at the 38 in his lap. Brian DePama walked over to him and gave Schrader his best Sonny Corleone. You want to gun down a studio executive because he slapped Marty's film around a little bit? Huh? What do you think? This is the army where you shoot him. Shoot him a mile away? No, you gotta get up close like this,

Bada Bing, you blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit. Schrader smiled, finally, and everyone else cracked up. Scorsese stopped laughing first and got real serious. You know, he said, it actually is a lot like Francis's film. It's a lot like the Godfather this year, except it's the opposite. When Hagan says, it's not personal, Sonny, it's strictly business. The apartment went dead silent. Scorsese went on.

Except it is. It is personal. Making these pictures. It's personal for me. It's personal for you. And you and you and you. This one, I know. It's personal for Bob, for everyone involved.

Except the business people. Well, making movies, it's not business. It's strictly personal. Slow zoom out. High above the five filmmakers talking, hugging, and exchanging goodbyes. Taxi Driver was released with the edit Martin Scorsese wanted and the desaturated film technique at the end of the movie shocked moviegoers and thrilled critics. Taxi Driver won the prestigious Pondor at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival

and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor for Robert De Niro, and Best Supporting Actress for Jody Foster at the 1976 Academy Awards. The film generated nearly $30 million at the box office on a $2 million budget. Martin Scorsese's taxi driver was a business success because the director kept his creation personal. Any other way would have been a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is The Scraiceland. All right, thanks for hanging out with me in 1970s Hollywood for this episode. I hope you dug it.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young, people come after me and they want to be an actor or whatever. And my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? You'd rather be disappointed in. Do that. David O'Yelloo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction

or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Moderato from Stranger Things. Tena Monsu. Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver. and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes a suspect is found guilty before a verdict is ever read in court. On the Wicked Words podcast, I talk with the writers who dig deep into the cases that changed history, including Marsha Clark, who went from prosecuting one of the most famous murder cases to writing crime fiction.

It doesn't matter that you didn't take part in the murder. If you were at the scene at a all. You're guilty of murder. Every week, the real story is revealed. Join us every Monday for new episodes of Wicked Words. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.