Robert Rosen

 

On Independence Day I received a text from a friend in Spain, Martín León Soto: "Congratulations for the 4th of July. That day signaled the start point on the long journey of getting free from the European autocrats so that you can have autocrats of your own." 

 

My response: "But the good news is when Trump's policies drive me into poverty in my old age I won't be taxed on tips when I go back to driving a cab."

 

"Did you really drive a cab?" Martín's wife, Aida Vílchez, asked.

 

Yes, I did, a long time ago... a lifetime ago. I began doing it in college. It was a good way to pick up some extra money. And then I did it to make a living for a few years in the late 70s and early 80s. It was a perfect part-time gig for a freelance writer. I could work three nights a week and make enough money to pay my bills. (My rent at the time was $200 a month.)

 

All this taxi texting reminded me of a cab-driving story that I've told many times but have never written down—until now. 

 

In 1976 a local newspaper, The Villager, asked me to review the movie Taxi Driver, the story of a deranged New York cabbie, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), who accumulates a lot of guns, goes on a shooting rampage, and wants to assassinate a politician. At the press screening, one of the PR people asked if anybody had ever driven a cab. I raised my hand. The woman invited me to go on TV with Martin Scorsese, the director, and Paul Schrader, the screenwriter, to talk about how realistic the film is.

 

I went on the show, Midday With Bill Boggs, and told the story of my friend, I'll call him "Sam," a taxi driver who'd gotten me into cab driving. Sam, a writer, was also on the rifle team at a local college, and he often talked about how he wanted to shoot the president, Richard Nixon, and then grant me an exclusive jailhouse interview. Schrader liked the story so much, when the show was over he invited me to go back to the hotel with him and Scorsese. So I got into the limo with the two of them and went back to the hotel. Scorsese didn't say a word the whole time. But Schrader was super-friendly. I sat in his hotel room for the better part of an hour interviewing him, and the story ran in The Villager as a combination review/interview.

 

Epilogue: Sam did not assassinate Nixon (as you may have guessed). But he did shove a chocolate cream pie into the face of born-again Watergate conspirator Charles Colson in a hotel elevator in San Francisco.

 

"Jesus told me to hit you with a pie because you're a fraud," Sam told him.

 

"Jesus forgives you," Colson replied.

 

You can read about the pie incident in the New York Times of Feb. 11, 1978. It's the last item in the "Notes on People" column.

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The good people of The Sleazoid Podcast wouldn't be the first to suggest that Beaver Street is a movie that needs to be made. R.C. Baker, of The Village Voice, said in his Amazon review, "Vivid and funny, Beaver Street moves at a cinematic pace, a period piece that picks up the story of modern porn where Boogie Nights leaves off." And, of course, I, too, have entertained such big-screen fantasies, musing over the possibility of Martin Scorsese directing (Who does sleazy and gritty better?), Justin Timberlake portraying a younger me, and Paul Slimak, whom I call Henry Dorfman in the book, playing himself. (Check out Slimak's work in the Beaver Street promotional video, above.)

Whether or not a filmmaker comes along and snaps up the rights to Beaver Street is obviously beyond my control, and I’m not about to max out my credit cards producing the movie myself. But with Beaver Street scheduled to be published in the US sometime in 2012 and Nowhere Man about to undergo an Italian Renaissance, I’m feeling unusually optimistic.

So, I’m putting the idea out there, my daily message in a bottle: Come on, Hollywood, let’s make Beaver Street, the movie. If it ain’t a natural, I don’t know what is.

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