Hollywood Tales

“[Paul] Schrader probed the edges of Hollywood, working as a reader at Warners for fifteen dollars a synopsis and teaching himself screenwriting by working on an original called Pipeliner, something he hoped to direct. Then [Pauline] Kael called him from New York — a critic’s position was about to open in Seattle and she wanted him to take it, to spread the Kael doctrine. he told her about his screenplay and said he needed to think about it, but she demanded an answer on the spot, yes or not. He told her not, and their friendship ended. Then [Beverly] Walker walked out on him. He was devastated, lonely, stone broke — he’d left his wife for Walker, now he’d made two women miserable. He pondered leaving L.A. but then decided to hurl his bottled rage, his wounds, and his frustration into one more screenplay. He pounded it out in Walker’s empty Silverlake apartment.

Each day I waited for the food to run out and the power to be cut off. There was like three weeks left on the rent. These violent self-destructive fantasies that one normally holds at bay started to prey upon me. I had this old Chevy Nova. I drove around at night drinking scotch and going into the peep shows — those damn 8mm loops where you threw a quarter in to keep the loop going. You passed the point where there’s pleasure involved, and it just became a kind of abnegation. I got an ulcer. I finally went to an emergency room, in enormous pain… While I was in the hospital, I had this idea of the taxi driver, this anonymous angry person. It jumped out of my head like an animal. It was like, ‘Oh, this is a fiction; it isn’t you. Put it in a picture where it belongs and get it out of your fucking life where it doesn’t belong.’

Taxi Driver took him seven days to write.”

— from “What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting,” by Marc Norman

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