Taxi Driver
WHAT WENT WRONG
Sad Boom Media
4.8 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2026
⏱️ 80 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This year marks the 50th anniversary of 'Taxi Driver', which is somehow even more relevant now than it was in 1976. But the truth is 'Taxi Driver' almost didn't make it to the screen.
This week, Chris and Lizzie break down how Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader fought to make a dark, deeply uncommercial script on a shoestring budget, that made the studio nervous from the start. Discover why the Board of Education nearly blocked Jodie Foster's controversial casting, and how Robert De Niro stepped in as her de facto acting coach on set. Plus find out how Scorsese wound up as a last minute replacement for one of his own actors, and why the production almost drove him to go full Travis Bickle on the studio execs... until Steven Spielberg talked him down.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, dear listeners, and action, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, |
| 0:23.6 | your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies |
| 0:27.6 | and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone one that young |
| 0:32.7 | men will understand is perhaps a critique of certain aspects of masculinity and not something to aspire to. |
| 0:38.8 | We'll get into it. As always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined by my co-host, my intrepid explorer of |
| 0:44.8 | the manosphere, so to speak. As one of our listeners said, Chris hangs out with the Muppets while |
| 0:50.8 | Lizzie has to research neo-Nazis. And I said, Lizzie chooses to research |
| 0:55.5 | neo-Nazis, and she chooses to research Travis Bickles. Lizzie, what do we have today? |
| 1:01.5 | We have taxi driver, Chris. It's the 50th anniversary of taxi driver this year. And I think that's |
| 1:08.0 | pretty remarkable because it really feels like a movie that could have come out yesterday. |
| 1:13.4 | Well, it would be called Uber Driver. |
| 1:15.1 | Yeah. |
| 1:15.5 | Yeah, yeah, yeah. |
| 1:16.7 | But just as scary. |
| 1:18.3 | We have a lot to talk about. |
| 1:19.3 | I'm very excited. |
| 1:20.6 | Before we get into it, if you have not listened to Friday's Out of Frame episode, it does cover the entire story of Jody Foster and the stalker |
| 1:29.9 | that she acquired kind of because of taxi driver John Hinkley Jr. and then his attempted |
| 1:35.3 | assassination of President Ronald Reagan, and it features red-handed. So go back and listen to it. |
| 1:40.7 | You don't need to listen to it before this, but it is a nice companion piece to this episode. So with that being said, Chris, had you seen Taxi Driver before as a young man, |
| 1:50.6 | a young man, and what did you make of it watching it this time? Had seen it as a young man, |
| 1:55.6 | and now watched it as an oldman. I rewatched Mean Streets, and then I rewatch Taxi Driver, and then you actually asked me to watch another movie, which I did, which we'll come up later that we'll talk about. |
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