In the theatrical cut, Travis gives him the 20 back and tells him This is yours.I cant really remember why I think this is or is not strange.
Apollo Twin Movie Books FromMy mind is something of a fog as to why I came upon it the way I did but I do remember one of my favorite movie books from the old house on 45th Street (the one that actually got LEFT in the garage when we moved and was never seen again) did contain a very shocking still from the movie (Travis standing over the convenience store robber after having shot him) that made it look very gritty and very terrifying.Upon conferring with either of my parents about the movie, I recall them both somewhat recoiling and my dad saying Nope. My odds of the cool guy who let me rent R rated movies working the day I could find the time to make the now-lengthy walk turned out to be shockingly elusive. ![]() But network television DID still serve a certain purpose and UHF channels continued to routinely program movies into their late-night slots. Apollo Twin Driver Was ScheduledIn Oklahoma City, one of the three UHF channels was Channel 34 and it was on such a late night slot, Taxi Driver was scheduled to play. I set my VCR to record the movie and watched it the next day. And Taxi Drivers Network Cut is a rare bird as its exceedingly difficult to come across unless you randomly know someone who still has it socked away on a VHS tape in the back of a closet somewhere. And its totally the version I familiarized myself with the first ten or so times I watched it. It seems odd to say but the gist of the story was there despite the fact that there were radical cuts where whole scenes were excised including, of all things, the You Talkin To Me scene. So, of course, imagine my confusion when this was the most mentioned scene in all of my movie books. The first porno theater scene was there, the second one, directly before he plays with his guns and builds the wrist contraption, was not. I cant quite remember how they got around the date with Betsy but I seem to remember them keeping the shots of the porno film that employs biological slides and whacking out the rest and then doing a quit cut of her moving out of the row and leaving the theater. We got to see Travis shoot the robber but we did not get to see the shopkeeper beat his corpse with the shutter rod. The final shootout, already saturated by Scorsese to receive an X rating, was a blurry whir of cuts, excising most all of the slow motion Roger Ebert expounded on in his review which, of course, caused further confusion for me. At the conclusion, the cops come in and point their guns at Travis and the gun to the head pantomime is gone in favor of a transition to the overhead shot that, again, excises the close-ups of Sports body, most of the blood on the walls, and a great deal of the doom march that is Bernard Hermanns score. It basically goes from the room to the hallway and then cuts to the exterior crane shot. Some of Traviss voice-over narration was gone so I was especially shocked to eventually hear the line Sometimes when I bring the cab back I have to clean the cum off the back seat as, in the television cut, none of that was there but, inexplicably, sometimes I clean off the blood was left in as a dangling rejoinder to nothing. Because, to pad out the running time after cutting so much, the television cut had been augmented with scenes that were cut out of the theatrical release (a common practice, by the way). So the scene with Easy Andy, the gun salesman, which had gone on a bit longer and transitioned Travis from wearing his jacket to not as he takes it off to see how putting the gun in the back of his belt will feel to which Andy says Isnt it a little honey It had been shortened in the theatrical cut, opting for an elliptical jump in time where Travis has his jacket on in one shot and off in the next. In the theatrical version, the old man who runs the building asks for the room money and indicates that hes watching the time. For in the television cut, the scene runs a bit longer and the old man first guesses that Travis is packing heat and requests that he gives up his piece and then tells him that hes watching the time. ![]()
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