By Steve Sailer
11/02/2022
Quentin Tarantino has published a book, Cinema Speculation, of his views on other people’s movies, such as Taxi Driver:
Now to be fair, seemingly, Scorsese never considered the change of Sport’s race from black to white as big a deal as I do.
I’m pretty sure where Mr. Scorsese was coming from — if there was a chance of riots leading to the film being pulled from cinema screens that wasn’t a chance worth taking. Besides, Marty had wanted the film to have a part for Harvey Keitel and he was frustrated that it didn’t (he originally offered Harvey the part of Cybill Shepherd’s flirtatious coworker, but the actor turned it down).
So if by making the pimp character white, that opened up a good role for Harvey Keitel, great! Problem solved.
But Keitel forced the fraudulent aspect of the conceit because he wanted to meet a real-life counterpart.
Yes, Harvey Keitel wanted to meet a real-life white New York pimp. Not realizing that the “Great White Pimp” was a mythological cinematic creation. Nevertheless, Schrader was tasked with hitting the streets of New York looking for a white pimp for Harvey to base his character on. Needless to say, since there weren’t any white pimps in New York, Schrader never found one. He said, every once in a while somebody might say, “Yeah, I think I heard about one who hangs out about six blocks away, but I ain’t never seen ’em.” If there was a white pimp out there, Schrader said, he never found him. So Keitel was forced to do all of his character research with a black gentleman of leisure.[Cinema Speculations, “Taxi Driver (1976)“]
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