Continuing our celebration of Taxi Driver at 40, here’s 70 plus minutes of analysis by Lewis of Channel Criswell. He’s a budding filmmaker and I enjoyed his understanding of the Scorsese classic, and I wanted to share it with y’all. It’s also a great opportunity to revisit the movie along with behind the scenes bits from the filmmakers….

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1965, 50 years ago, was a big year for Andy Warhol, the filmmaker: He met Edie Sedgwick who starred in one of his best films, that year’s Poor Little Rich Girl. He also began collaborating with Paul Morrissey who helped Warhol take his cinematic ambitions to another level. Things were going so well behind the camera that Warhol announced his retirement from painting — at least for a little while.

One good turn deserves another, and as we recognize this important period in the artist’s journey as a movie maven, here’s an epic, nearly four hour documentary about the man behind the soup can…

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In 1999, the documentary film American Movie captured the day-to-day struggles of Milwaukee based independent filmmaker Mark Borchardt. At the beginning of the film, Borchardt outlines a feature film he’s struggling to make. That film is called Northwestern, but Borchardt switches gears and decides to finish his short film ,Coven, in hopes that a successfully distributed short will allow him to secure funding and distribution for his masterpiece.

The doc is a classic that pictures Borchardt and his oddball film company in the throes of trying to realize what seems like an impossible dream: to create a great work of art while simultaneously tripping over themselves, their bad habits, troubled lives and the pressures of grinding out a creative life in the midst of working class America.

The doc made Borchardt famous and his finished cut of Coven proves that his dream of being a filmmaker was fueled by real vision and energy all along: The film is shot in starkly contrasting blacks and whites and Borchardt’s spooky framing of the desolate Wisconsin countryside in winter recalls George Romero’s compositions of the Pennsylvania countryside in Borchardt’s favorite film, Night of the Living Dead. And the director’s turn in front of the camera in the lead role of a writer struggling with drugs and alcohol is also commendable.

In the film, Mike is a freelance writer who’s barely making a living. He takes pills to work long hours and drinks so he can sleep. After a close call that lands him in the hospital, a friend convinces Mike to attend a support group meeting. But is the group just the helpful organization they claim to be or something more sinister?

Here’s Coven…

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25 years ago, in February of 1989, filmmaker John Cassavetes died. One of the greatest actors of his generation, Cassavetes mostly turned his back on appearing in front of the camera in favor of self-financing a series of highly personal, deeply polarizing films that continue to vex critics, actors, directors and audiences alike.

I discovered Cassavetes in a book a long time before I discovered him on a screen. He gave me some good advice at a time when I needed it. Paraphrasing: If you’re the kind of artist who hears a voice and you stop listening to that voice, the voice will stop talking to you. I made major life-decisions based on this advice from an interview in a book and I’ve never regretted it.

I first saw Cassavetes as an actor when I was a kid watching The Dirty Dozen on TV with my dad. I saw the films he wrote and directed much later when a retrospective came to my local art house theater in Nashville. The films were scheduled as double features, but I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to pay for each one. The woman taking tickets told me that if I could sit through the first one, the second one was free.

I love these challenging films and this challenging artist who was so maddeningly unrelenting in his love for his art, his family, his friends and his audience. He loved them all so much he’d accept nothing from them — or us — but the absolute best of ourselves. He expected revelations and he found them. And he filmed them.

Here is the man with his friends and family working on one of his greatest…

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