Free Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert by Roger Ebert Page B

masterpiece. In 1974 he made his big critical and box office success, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, for which Ellen Burstyn won an Oscar. Scorsese was established, was "bankable."
    His new film, which opens here Friday at the McClurg Court, Lincoln Village, and five suburban theaters, is Taxi Driver with Robert De Niro-a violent and frightening return to the New York of Mean Streets. It looks like another hit.
    Scorsese and I met for lunch during his visit last week to Chicago and were joined by Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver. They were a study in opposites: Schrader, a midwestern Protestant in pullover sweater and tie, and Scorsese, a New York Italian American, in jeans and a beard. But they'd been working together on this screenplay since 1972.
    SCORSESE: Because there's a lot of violence to this picture, some of the New York reviews are calling it an exploitation film. Jesus! I went flat broke making this film. My films haven't made a lot of money. Right now, I'm living off my next film.

    SCHRADER: If it's an exploitation film, I wish we had a dollar for every time we were told it would never be a success at all. This screenplay was turned down by everybody.
    SCORSESE: We showed it to some New York media educators, and I thought we'd get lynched. And we showed it to some student editors ... there was one wise guy there I recognized from a screening we had of Alice. He asks whether, after all my success, I'm about ready to fall on my ass. I've hardly gotten started!
    SCHRADER: We get almost no valid reactions immediately after the screenings. The immediate response is usually very visceral and angry. But if this film weren't controversial, there'd be something wrong with the country.
    EBERT: What you give us is this guy, De Niro, who comes from nowhere-we get hardly any background-and drives a cab in New York and eventually we realize he's seething inside, he's got all this violence bottled up ...
    ScoRSESE: And he goes back again and again to where the violence is. One of the reviewers, I think it was Andrew Sarris, said how many times can you use 42nd Street as a metaphor for hell? But that's the thing about hell-it goes on and on. And he couldn't get out of it. But you're right that we don't tell you where he comes from, or what his story is. Obviously, he comes from somewhere and he picked up these problems along the way.
    SCHRADER: I wrote it that way after thinking about the way they handled in cold Blood. They tell you all about Perry Smith's background, how he developed his problems, and immediately it becomes less interesting because his problems aren't your problems, but his symptoms are your symptoms.
    EBERT: Pauline Kael has said that Scorsese, Robert Altman, and Francis Ford Coppola are the three most interesting directors in the country right now-and that it might be due to their Catholicism, that after Watergate, the nation feels a sort of guilt and needs to make a form of reparation, and that Catholics understand guilt in a way that others don't, that they were brought up on it.
    SCORSESE: Guilt. There's nothing you can tell me about guilt.

    SCHRADER: I've got a lot of Protestant guilt.
    SCORSESE: You can't make movies any more in which the whole country seems to make sense. After Vietnam, after Watergate, it's not just a temporary thing; it's a permanent thing the country's going through. All the things we held sacred-the whole Time-Life empire ... whoosh! Well, Time's still left.
    EBERT: In a lot of your movies, there's this ambivalent attitude toward women. The men are fascinated by women, but they don't quite know how to relate to them ...
    SCORSESE: The goddess-whore complex. You're raised to worship women, but you don't know how to approach them on a human level, on a sexual level. That's the thing with Travis, the De Niro character-the taxi driver. The girl he falls for, the Cybill Shepherd character-it's really important that she's blond, a blue-eyed goddess.
    SCHRADER: