Film: Grand Rapids Boy Mokes Good Taxi Driver's Paul Shrader

Film: Grand Rapids Boy Makes Good

TAXI DRIVER'S PAUL SHADER                                                       By Jim Trombetta

   Taxi Driver may be the last of the werewolf movies. No full moon or gypsy's curse prompts the transformation of Robert DeNiro's Travis Bickle, but his change is just as horrifying: from a troubled but attractive, even charming youth to a shrill creep stalkng a candidate, to a self-scalped wild man shunted down a dismal cathouse hallway narrow as his fate, where he goes clumsily berserk with four guns and only two hands. Then the spell is broken and he reverts to his former self.

   "At the time I wrote Taxi Driver, which was four years ago, it seemed entirely logical to me," says Paul Schrader in his office on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank. "I wrote both drafts in twelve days and I did not realize until six months later that the script was, in fact, crazy. It was very close to the life I was leading at the time, in the sense that I was wandering around at night, drinking, going to pornography, talking to nobody, completely cut off. I was feeling frustration and just raw anger at being a nobody. The clothes that Bobby's wearing in the movie-those are my clothes and I was wearing them when I wrote it."

   At 30, Paul Schrader is no longer a nobody. He is Hollywood's most noted young screenwriter and director-to-be ( The Hank Williams Story, Blue Collar). He received $300,000 for his screenplay for The Yakuza (directed by Sidney Pollack) and recently concluded an epic deal involving $575,000 for a script titled Hard Core, which will star its producer, Warren Beatty.

   Schrader is a compact man with a muscular, taurine build and manners as mild as the ones Travis started with. His solicitude when you tell him he has gotten your name wrong is touching in a man who has slept with a pistol on his night table because it "makes me more comfortable." He speaks indistinctly but with occasional eloquence, his sentences so carefully constructed they easily span phone calls and assorted interruptions. It is a style suited to a lectern and, as it happens, Paul is teaching a 16-hour course load at UCLA Film School, in addition to writing scripts and concocting deals. Author of Transcendental Style in Film, a study of the directors Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer, and the classic "Notes on Film Noir, " he is one of the few film critics who ever moved successfully into screenwriting. Even more interesting is the fagt that Schrader is a graduate of Calvin College seminary in Michigan, where he trained to become a minister of the fundamentalist Christian Reformed sect in which he was raised and by which he feels he was victimized.

   The Christian Reformed community forbade card-playing, dancing, drinking and smoking- not to mention going to the movies. "People have asked me, don't you find the movie business rough and intimidating?" Schrader says now, "But handling studio executives is the easiest thing in the world if you've fought off that mind control squad your whole life." And hanging on the wall directly behind his head is a sized blow-up of a letter from the principal of Grand Rapids Christian High School, who complains heartbrokenly of irreligious remarks made in Esquire by his former charge. Paul shakes his head at the blow-up. "These church people never let you go." -       Clearly the hardboiled Calvinist God- that Charlie Manson of deities who would as soon flick you into eternal hellfire as think you up in the first place- is never very far from Schrader's work. The damned-if-you do-damned-if-you-don't Puritan perspective is constant in Taxi Driver. DeNiro is a damned soul, a permanent out-of-towner brutalized by the infernal enticements of Scorsese's New York slithering over his windshield.

   "All along he has been the one who, I has turned up the flame under his own I pressure cooker," says Schrader of DeNiro/Travis. "It isn't cabs.it isn't New York, it isn't Vietnam, none of that. It's his own self-destructive mode of behavior which is creating his crisis. He first chooses a woman he knows he cannot have [Cybill Shepherd] and he puts her in a situation where she will have to reject him. The second woman he chooses [Jodie Foster] is a woman who he cannot consummate his love for. He chooses a twelve-and-half-year-old hooker who is too young for him to fuck. "What is fucking him up is that he has this totally archaic sense of morality which he can't get along with because he's drawn to filth and he can't accept filth because he still has the' old morality in his head, and he's caught between the two things.

   "This self-destructive pattern can only culminate in suicide. The reason he kills other people instead of himself is that he's immature, ignorant and American, and Americans have a tendency to act out the existentialist dilemma on their fellow men rather than themselves. He is not mature enough to kill himself and he's forcing other people to kill him. The irony of the movie is that the gun is empty in the end and he doesn't die."

   His concepts are psychoanalytic, but Schrader didn't lose his religion on any shrink's couch. In Taxi Driver, Freud slaps five with Calvin. Neurosis replaces original sin as the force which twists life out of shape, but the doomed psycho and the damned sinner end up stewing in the same pot. In both, the will is corrupt and cannot seek the good, turning a man's hand against himself.

   "Hank Williams is a great American folk hero but is also a character very much like Travis," Paul says about the country singer/songwriter whose story he will direct. "Extremely alienated, lonely, ignorant. His weapon instead of a gun was music, but the same self-destructive pattern applies to him and he, you know, forced himself to die [at age 29]." Hank Williams Jr. will produce the film.

   In addition to Hank Williams, Schrader will be directing another script called Blue Collar. "It's about blue collar anger among auto workers, black and white." Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel have agreed to play in it.

C. 1976 Crawdaddy Magazine. Edited and reprinted with permission.