person

Robert De Niro

Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. The actor whose rewrites and rehearsal-room inventions are all over both films, often more than the credits admit.

acting
actor
scorsese
new-hollywood
authorship

Film	Role	Credit
Mean Streets (1973)	Johnny Boy	`sos 221`
Taxi Driver (1976)	Travis Bickle	`sos 222`

How he got there

Brian De Palma introduced him to Scorsese at a Christmas dinner given by Jay Cocks and Verna Bloom (sos 41, sos 42). They had grown up blocks apart in Little Italy without meeting: De Niro's crowd was on Broome Street, Scorsese's on Prince (sos 42).

He did not choose Johnny Boy:

He offered me four parts—not Charlie, that was Harvey's part, but four others. I didn't know which one to do.

— Kelly, unpaged

"One day Harvey said, 'I can see you doing Johnny Boy.' I hadn't thought of playing him at all" (Kelly, unpaged).

The authorship question

De Niro keeps turning up as a writer. His papers at the Harry Ransom Center show him rewriting Johnny Boy's lines, annotating motivation, and asking Scorsese for "more of me, one scene, added" (smc 309). On Mean Streets that produced the back-room scene, whose authorship is still argued over (Mean Streets — the back room). On Taxi Driver it produced "You talkin' to me?" (De Niro wrote in the margins, Taxi Driver — the mirror). Colin Tait's conclusion about the method is the one to hold onto: it "embodies writing rather than improvisation" (smc 312).

After Mean Streets

"Robert De Niro was now a hot property" (sos 48). Coppola saw the film and cast him in The Godfather Part II (sos 49).

A case for Acting and for the site's recurring question about who authors a film. Related: Harvey Keitel, Martin Scorsese.

Go on, then

person Harvey Keitel The actor in each of Scorsese's first three films on this site: Charlie in Mean Streets, Ben in Alice, Sport in Taxi Driver. Scorsese's stand-in before De Niro was.
scene After Hours — the diner A man alone with a Henry Miller paperback, a woman at the next table who knows the book, and a camera that pounces. Ten minutes that set up the whole night, and borrowed more than anyone admitted at the time.
scene Mean Streets — the back room Charlie tells Johnny Boy he has to pay. Johnny Boy tells him a story about a poker game, a raid and a man called Joey Clams, and loses the thread himself. Everyone agrees it's the heart of the film. Nobody agrees who wrote it.
film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) Scorsese's studio women's picture: a widow, a kid, a road east, and an argument with every film Alice grew up watching.
film Mean Streets (1973) Four young men in Little Italy, a debt nobody will pay, and a would-be saint who keeps putting his hand in the fire. Scorsese's first film in his own voice, made in Los Angeles for almost nothing.
idea De Niro wrote in the margins De Niro's annotated shooting script rewrote Travis's dialogue, and the changes reached Schrader's final draft. The film's most quoted line has no screenwriter.