A 50th anniversary celebration of ‘Taxi Driver’

This election season you can streamline your news intake with up first. Our team of reporters and editors works overnight so you can start every morning with three stories you need to know in short episodes, 12-14 minutes long, to save you time and your sanity. Follow up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air, I'm David Biancoley. Fifty years ago next week, the movie Taxi Driver was released.

It established director Martin Scorsese as a vital new filmmaker and provided key early film roles for everyone from Jody Foster and Harvey Keitel to Sybil Shepherd and Albert Brooks. And, of course, there was Robert De Niro in the title role as New York cab driver Travis Bickle. De Niro already had won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar two years before, playing young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II. But Taxi Driver is the movie that shot him into the stratosphere. One of the most iconic scenes in that movie is one that the actor improvised, standing before a full length mirror in Travis's noisy apartment, and testing out a new weapon he jerry rigged,

It was a pistol that would slide down from his sleeve, ready to cock and fire, and De Niro, as Travis, not only was staring down the image in the mirror, he was threatening him. I'm standing here, you make the move. You make the move. Your move. Don't try it, you find you talking to me?

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (51 minutes, 8,420 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.