The Long Shot Pt. 1
March 16, 2010
"This is beat." "Stop whining. You're the one who wanted to go out for dinner."
Predators are boring. Ever see a television program about lions stalking prey? Not very exciting, really. Lots of waiting. Sure, there’s the moment of attack, which, granted, can be dramatic, and preceding it, the chase, but these things happen in seconds, and often times are aborted by the prey. Sometimes the prey is too fast, or too strong, or too wily, or, it picks up scent, and runs off, avoiding serious harm.
I once saw a program on PBS which followed two young male lions who, newly separated from their mother, were trying to execute their very first attack. Their chosen prey? A herd of zebra. But, so amateur were they, they failed again and again in launching a surprise assault. Because of their ineptitude they didn’t eat for many days. And over those days it became so difficult for these two lions to successfully execute an attack on unsuspecting prey that there was authentic concern shown for them by the producers of the film that the two young lions would starve to death.
Kings of the jungle? Hardly. More like two fools in tall brown grass where the only things growling were stomachs. Bad lions.
In Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film, Taxi Driver, there’s a scene which was shot in an all-night Manhattan diner – a diner favored at the time by real life taxi drivers on their meal or coffee breaks. Robert DeNiro’s character in the film, Travis Bickle – the taxi driver in Taxi Driver – sits at a table in this scene with other cabbies, and listens to their banter half-heartedly. Bickle’s furrowed brow tells us he’s also listening to taunting voices in his mind. Travis is going mad.
Robert DeNiro as Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese's 'Taxi Driver'
At one point in the scene we watch as, with the camera above Bickle and looking down over his hands, he drops two Alka Seltzer tablets into a glass of water. We hear them plop beneath the surface of the water and we hear them begin to fizz as they sink to the bottom of the glass. Then, the camera is below, and in front of Travis, on the opposite side of the table, looking up into his face. Travis stares down into his glass of artificial pain relief with a look of deep concentration. Seconds pass. Travis stares. All we hear is the sizzle of the dissolving tablets in the water. Then, we again see the glass from above, from over Travis’s head, but this time, the camera lowers ever closer to the glass until it’s so close the rim of the glass is out of frame, and all we’re left to look at is the roiling surface of the water, and all we hear is its sinister hissing as the medicine in it prepares itself for consumption.
Tom Rolf was the film editor on Taxi Driver. He describes the editing of that scene, as directed by Scorsese:
Marty had very original thinking and one thing he taught me, that I had never realized before and its truly served me well over the years, I think. By hanging on a shot for a long time, you’d get to the point where I’d think, ‘Jeez, that’s way too long. You’ve gotta trim that,’ and then he’d go, ‘No…make it longer. Make it longer…’ when I would think it would be exactly the opposite… What happens, and he’s dead right, if you make [the scene] inordinately long, the audience then looks at it, and they say, ‘What am I looking at this image for for such a long time?’ And then they start reinvesting into the shot so it’s like a second time around, like an athlete getting his breath again and you look at it from a different perspective. It’s a wonderful revelation.
If you live here, don’t worry. I was never there, and don’t know what your address is. I’m not coming over. This picture, though, is a fair representation of a block I once favored on the East Side of Manhattan. I spent many years on this block at night, sitting on three of its stoops, just like these, waiting for my zebra – for my Alka Seltzer to dissolve. These stoops were my all-night diner, and the street was my glass.
More than any other memory from all the thousands of nights I sat – or stood – on darkened Manhattan streets, is the memory of my internal voices telling me always to just wait. Just wait.
It was my long shot. In my waiting, I reinvested in my purpose and perceived need, caught my second breath and had wonderful revelations while being a bad lion.
To be Continued…
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