Scorsese Said He Considered Stealing Taxi Driver Rough Cut, Threatened Studio Over Censorship
Zoe Bennett: The facts matter. Here’s what we know so far.
Martin Scorsese, reflecting on the 1976 release of Taxi Driver, admitted he was furious enough to consider violent threats and even stealing the film’s rough cut from Columbia Pictures when studio executives demanded cuts to graphic violence. The confessional appears in a first-look clip from the Apple TV+ documentary Mr. Scorsese, in which Steven Spielberg and Scorsese recount the heated showdown over the film’s most contentious scenes.
Scorsese, now 82, told Spielberg that Columbia wanted him to remove shots of “blood spurting” and a sequence featuring a man who loses a hand, material the studio feared would attract an adverse reaction from the Motion Picture Association of America. According to Scorsese’s on-camera comments in the clip, he reacted with a mixture of righteous anger and hyperbolic threat: “I was going to get one,” he says when asked whether he got a gun. Scorsese later explained he meant it as a threat, to “maybe just shoot or something,” and that he considered breaking into the studio’s edit room, locating the rough cut, and taking it back rather than allowing the studio to “destroy the film.”
Spielberg, 78, related that he was called to intervene. “Marty was very upset,” Spielberg says in the documentary excerpt, and he remembers telling Scorsese, “Marty, stop that. Marty, you can’t do that.” The two icons’ exchange reveals the stakes young auteur Scorsese felt he was defending: artistic integrity and a version of Taxi Driver that confronted viewers with unflinching depictions of urban decay and violent impulse.
Industry problem-solving followed. Spielberg recounts that studio and ratings pressures were mollified by altering the offending imagery rather than excising the sequences entirely. The workaround reduced the color red to brown and made the violence appear grainier, akin to a tabloid photograph, a creative compromise intended to satisfy the MPAA while preserving Scorsese’s narrative intent. The tactic proved effective: Taxi Driver went on to earn four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and acting nods for Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster, who was 12 when she played the teen in the film.
This anecdote serves as a revealing case study in 1970s Hollywood: an auteur’s battle with studio gatekeepers, the role of ratings bodies in shaping content, and the sometimes theatrical measures filmmakers contemplate to protect their work. Columbia’s caution was rooted in commercial and regulatory risk management; Scorsese’s response illustrates the emotional intensity directors can invest in a film’s final form. The MPAA’s influence at the time often forced filmmakers into creative technical solutions — desaturating color, cropping frames, or regrading footage — that preserved narrative beats while minimizing explicit cues that might trigger harsher ratings.
Contextual data supports this dynamic. Throughout the 1970s, the MPAA rating process tightened its leverage over mainstream distribution; a more restrictive rating could significantly reduce box office potential. Studios, therefore, had strong financial incentives to seek edits. Directors like Scorsese who prioritized realism and moral ambiguity frequently clashed with these economic realities. Taxi Driver’s eventual critical recognition suggests that the compromise reached — toning color rather than cutting scenes outright — allowed the film to retain its thematic core while navigating institutional constraints.
Scorsese’s quip about stealing the rough cut and his candid admission of wanting a gun are delivered with self-aware hyperbole in the documentary, but they nevertheless underscore the high-stakes temperament of creative conflicts. Spielberg’s role as mediator also highlights how peer intervention among top filmmakers can defuse potentially career-stalling confrontations.
Mr. Scorsese premieres on Apple TV+ on October 17, offering further firsthand accounts and archival material that will likely expand on this dramatic episode and others from Scorsese’s long career. Expect more behind-the-scenes revelations about the compromises, friendships, and battles that shaped some of modern cinema’s most enduring works.
That wraps up today’s analysis. Stay tuned for deeper looks at what the documentary reveals next.
Sources: Celebrity Storm and New York Post, Apple TV+, Mr. Scorsese documentary clip
Attribution: Creative Commons Licensed
