The road to hell was paved with good intentions for fresh-faced John Lindsay, the incoming mayor of a troubled New York. In 1966, his first year in the job, Lindsay launched a bold new initiative to boost film production. The pioneering Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting offered producers a single one-stop shooting permit, cutting the tangle of bureaucratic red tape and transforming the city into a giant movie set. “For the first time, our parks and museums, streets and courthouses, libraries and monuments are open,” he said. “All the things that make New York unique have been made available to film people.”
Lindsay’s big gamble paid immediate dividends. New York-based productions first doubled, then trebled, funnelling much-needed funds to the stricken local economy. In practice, though, the younger filmmakers swerved the monuments and museums and instead beat a path to less salubrious sights. They shot the mean streets and ghettos, the porn theatres and flophouses. They captured the complete urban blight of a metropolis in meltdown. So the Mayor’s Office of Film became a monkey’s paw situation. Lindsay’s wish came true in the worst possible way – drenched in nightmarish neon and magnified on the screen.
Lindsay can be glimpsed – albeit thickly fictionalised – in the form of Charles Palantine, the blandly charismatic politician who haunts the wings of Taxi Driver (1976). Martin Scorsese’s noir classic now stands as the apotheosis of this new wave of grubby New York stories; the biggest of the so-called “Bad Apple” genre of films, which flourished in the city for nearly a decade, from John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969) through to Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979).
Without the Mayor’s Office of Film, there would likely have been no The French Connection (1971) or Dog Day Afternoon (1975); no Death Wish (1974), Super Fly (1972), or The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974). These pictures were predominantly low-budget and a little rough around the edges, the cinematic equivalent of a defrocked priest or a disgraced ex-cop. They besmirched New York’s image by casting it as a hazardous crime scene or a hellish underworld. Except that – guess what, go figure – they may have been the making of it, too.
“This city is an open sewer,” Travis Bickle tells Palantine as he ferries the man uptown in his cab, and most viewers at the time may well have agreed. New York in the Seventies was a heinous hot mess. The place was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, with its murder rate rocketing, its infrastructure collapsing, and its tax base diminished by decades of white flight.
Matters reached a head during the summer heatwave of 1975, when a strike by sanitation workers left 58,000 tons of garbage on the streets and the fire stations were shuttered following a round of mass redundancies. And it was against this backdrop – the spiking temperatures, the mounds of flammable waste – that Scorsese set out to make his film, touring the then-sketchy neighbourhoods of the East Village, Times Square and Lincoln Centre. He kept his sightline low to frame the tatty bodegas and adult bookstores, and to catch the human flotsam that came out at night. Travis can’t sleep and can’t settle, and claims that the city gives him a near-constant headache. It’s full of filth and scum, he tells Palantine. It ought to be flushed down the toilet.
This year marks a joint celebration of sorts. It’s the 60th anniversary of the Mayor’s Office of Film – which is still going strong, generating $5bn (£3.7bn) each year – and the 50th birthday of Taxi Driver itself, which opened at Manhattan’s Coronet Theater in February 1976. That’s ancient history, the best part of a lifetime ago, and tourists now would be hard-pressed to match Bickle’s 1970s Gomorrah with the low-crime luxury playground it became. The city cleaned up its act, and changed beyond recognition. When the director JC Chandor filmed 2014’s A Most Violent Year, a crime drama that looked back at Gotham’s darkest days, he wound up shooting the picture in Detroit. New York, he decided, no longer looked like New York.
Economists will tell you that Wall Street saved the city: that strategic investment in real estate and the stock market helped steady the ship, reverse the fiscal crisis, and pave the way for gentrification; the sterile sunny uplands of the Nineties and beyond. And no doubt this is true. But arts and culture played a role as well.
History records that Milton Glaser’s famous “I Love New York” advertising campaign was conceived in 1977, a year after Taxi Driver’s release. It was reportedly hatched in the back of a Manhattan cab, and commissioned as a corrective to the image of the city painted by Scorsese and his ilk. That’s a reasonable response, although it rather misses the point, because Bad Apple movies loved New York too, in their way. The likes of Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Saturday Night Fever (1977) and The French Connection found gold in the ruins, weaponised and monetised social tensions. They presented the city as edgy and exciting, a fun place to live so long as you were hip enough to keep pace. Slowly but surely, Gotham emerged from the swamp. The low rents were a draw, and the East Village woke up. Times Square turned respectable, eventually to a fault.
In the closing minutes of Scorsese’s movie, Travis is shot in the neck and looks to be bleeding out. We assume he’s a goner, left for dead, only for the film to suddenly resuscitate him. Confoundingly, the tale proceeds to stick the man back behind the wheel of his cab, and has him hailed as a hero by the press and the public alike. I’ve always seen this finale as a cold comment on the nature of celebrity, but it may also be a comment on the nature of New York. The city rushed to destruction, but was redeemed by its people. It was dead on its feet, and then bounced back all the stronger. Business picked up, the Big Apple was saved, and Mayor Lindsay’s bold mission had a happy ending after all.
