Climax of ‘Taxi Driver’ actually less gory than it was supposed to be

CinemaRetro:

When Taxi Driver was released to theaters in 1976, the ending was so bloody that in order to avoid receiving an X rating from the MPAA, the director was faced with cutting down the scenes, something he did not want to do. He opted instead to de-saturate, or lessen the amount of color, in the sequence so it would not look as graphic. This action was incorporated into the film artistically to represent what the murder scene might have looked like in the tabloids. On the film’s 35th anniversary in 2011, the film was released on Blu-ray. Since times have changed, there was an effort afoot to re-saturate the film and make it look the way that it was intended to look prior to the color reduction process. Unfortunately, that color negative could not be located, and there is talk that it might not have survived. Mr. Shapiro’s photographs of this brutally violent sequence, replicated in this book, might be all that visually remains of this controversial sequence.