'It's gone...'
Martin Scorsese reflects on the New York that inspired Taxi Driver in a documentary marking the film’s 50th anniversary
Columbia
- Radio Times Staff
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You learn very quickly when you’re in the cab how to look into the rear-view mirror and make an assessment,” says Michael Goldfarb. “You make an assessment like a cop. That person is OK. That person’s going to be a problem.”
A native New Yorker, Goldfarb’s family left when he was eight, but he returned after college in the summer of 1975, wanting to act. To meet his rent, he joined Dover Garage as a “hack”, licensed to drive a yellow cab. When Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver was released the following year, passengers started looking back.
“I was not supposed to be an actor,” Goldfarb admits. Nor to drive a cab. He became a journalist and later a prize-winning broadcaster and author. Now in the third act of his career, he revisits the past with Taxi Driver at 50: New York, Then and Now.
Taxi Driver has become “this emblem, this historical cultural cue, when people think of New York,” Goldfarb says. Screenwriter Paul Schrader, writing in Los Angeles, saw in the film’s protagonist, Travis Bickle, a universal, Dostoevskian figure, but director Martin Scorsese, from Manhattan’s Little Italy, grounded the film in the particulars of New York City.
The 'princes of the city' allowed New York to rot away
Presenter Michael Goldfarb
In the 1970s, New York was facing bankruptcy. Parts of the Bronx were as bad as scenes Goldfarb would later see in Sarajevo, with people living in the burnt-out shells of homes. But he was never scared – he was angry. Travis Bickle was angry about the “scum” he saw on the streets: “All the animals come out at night.” But Goldfarb was angry with those who had allowed the city to decline: the New York elite – businessmen, bankers and union leaders. “These guys were the true princes of the city. They met together, and they decided what the city would be. And they allowed it to rot away.”
Garbage piled up. Arsonists and accidents burnt buildings down. Blackouts hit; then riots. Serial killer David Berkowitz stalked the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. Yet musicians, writers and artists thrived. Rents were cheap. As a driver, Goldfarb set the meter running on figures including novelist Philip Roth, director Peter Brook and pop artist Andy Warhol. Minimalist composer Philip Glass also drove cabs out of Dover Garage, continuing after he became famous.
Scorsese has noticed the change from then to now. Residents complained he was taking up space while filming in Little Italy. In the documentary he says, “I belong here. It isn’t that I’m here with the trailer and taking up your area. It’s not your area. It’s mine, but it’s not mine. It’s gone. They don’t know who lived and died there. You know? And how they died. How they suffered.”
New communities have moved in. Cricket is played in parks once crammed with baseball diamonds. The streets are safer. But rents are too high, earnings too low. Cab drivers have to compete with Uber and Lyft for fares. “There’s a difference between coming to New York as an immigrant, as my grandparents did, and people who arrive in their parents’ BMWs after going to very elite universities to have a New York experience,” says Goldfarb, aware of the irony.
He left, too, but he held out as long as he could. “There is no sense of love for the place. True love. I’ve spent most of my life in London, and here I am talking about New York because” – he uses the German word that conveys the concept of homeland, home, belonging – “it’s my heimat.”
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He knows he will never return to the city now, except for work. But when he looks back in the mirror, he makes an assessment like a cop. New York has survived; it is just not his city any more. “That New York hasn’t existed for 40 years, but it doesn’t matter.” TIM HARDY
Authors
Radio Times Staff
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