Taxi Driver and the Advent of Graffiti in New York City as Seen in Movies from 1971-1979

This is a typical scene from the movie Taxi Driver 1976, looking through the rainstreaked windshield on the city streets at night.

For no particular reason I'm watching The French Connection, 1971. Twenty minutes into the movie I get this weird feeling - it's filmed entirely in New York City, and parts of it look pretty close to what you would see if you went there today, 2024. But something was missing. 

There's no graffiti in the entire movie. It's filmed all throughout New York, on the streets downtown, on the elevated subways way uptown. Inside the subways, on the platforms. Brick walls, under bridges, it's all there. And not one inch has a piece of graffiti on it. 

There's one scene where far in the distance there might be like a hobo sign next to a loading dock behind a building. And maybe a scrawled Tony somewhere, maybe permanent marker. 

I thought that like most things, graffiti didn't just come from nowhere and all at once. There's always something that comes before. But no, not for graffiti. Like sure the aerosol spraycan came out in the 50's, but it took something to make it catch on. And that something must have happened in New York City sometime before 1979, when we see the movie The Warriors and a city consumed by crime, and graffiti. 

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The Warriors, just like French Connection, relies on the subway almost as another character - here they're using it to evade both gangs and cops, like some omnipotent and very reliable sidekick. This is why I like using these two movies as the limits of this completely unscientific study - in the history of graffiti, the subway is important enough to be like a character in itself.

On the origin of graffiti in New York City, the easy way out of this question is to point to the blackout, summer of 1977. This event is often credited as the birth of Hip Hop, because it's when all the now-famous DJs got their equipment (for free). All these DJs now have sound systems and turntables, and they can have big parties, and the scene explodes. Anyway, that's the easy answer. 

I thought it would be better to look at it through the lens of movies filmed in New York City from 1971 to 1979, so here we go:

The French Connection, 1971

• It's filmed in New York City, but there's no graffiti. None.

The climax of the film takes place inside a series of subway cars, and we see various subway stations, brick walls, payphones. You get a good sampling of the city, and can be sure, no graffiti. This is the beginning.

Super Fly, 1972

• Trace amounts (first 20 min, last 10 min).

This is filmed mostly in Harlem. 

Mean Streets, 1973

• No graffiti (a flower, in spray paint, 20 min).

Note this is filmed in an Italian neighborhood circa 1970, not sure where, but granted it's not the best place to go looking for graffiti at this time. 

Death Wish, 1974

• Here we go. First scene in NYC, graffiti on the elevated subway.
• The hoodlum at the supermarket buys spraypaint and then vandalizes the inside of the guy's house with it (and his name is Spraycan in the credits)
• Bronson's first murder, in Riverside Park, graffiti everywhere (45 min)
• Scenes inside the subway are still clean (53 min)

This is the first real appearance of graffiti in a movie in New York City, and it comes hard. The very premise of this movie is about the rampant crime that has grown in recent years and crept into every area of the city, and one man was so victimized that he became a vigilante and started straight shooting people. 

So this movie is about crime, about bad people doing bad things. And the aerosol spraycan makes an immediate appearance. Within the first twenty minutes, there's a scene where a bunch of hoodlums follow this guy into his apartment building, and one of them starts spray paining all over the inside of the building, and then all inside his apartment, a real sign of lawlessness. The guy's name in the credits is Spraycan.

But actual examples of graffiti are limited to Riverside Park, which is smacked. The cover of the movie poster shows Charles Bronson aiming his gun at someone, but right behind him is a wall tagged with black spray paint, the letters stylized in a way that says authentic, in-the-wild graffiti. Likely Riverside Park was already a party spot before the influx of DJ equipment following the '77 blackout.

Prisoner of 2nd Ave, 1975

• Black and white block letters on a wall, "BIKE" (3 min)

Three Days of the Condor, 1975

• Busted-ass proto-graffiti (22 min)

Marathon Man, 1976

• Central Park (9 min and 44 min)
• Scribble scrabble (1:18 min)

Next Stop Greenwich Village, 1976

• Nothing.

Filmed in the then-Jewish neighborhood of Flatbush, or Brownsville, somewhere in between, and also Greenwich Village in Manhattan; you're not seeing any graffiti, not even on the subway (10 min)

Taxi Driver, 1976

Here, we are at an impasse. It was released in 1976 but filmed in the summer of 75 during a heat wave and a citywide garbage collectors strike. The way it was filmed, and the places it filmed, were supposed to show the dying gasp of a city on the verge of bankruptcy, which it was.

You might think a movie like this would have lots of graffiti, but no. In fact, there's no graffiti in the entire movie. Granted, it's really hard to see anything because so many scenes are him driving, so he's going too fast to see the walls, and you're looking through the windshield of his car so it's blurry, and it's like always raining so it's even more blurry, and also, he works nights, so it's always dark. Sorry to say, even if there were graffiti in the movie, it would be pretty hard to see. 

That being said, there still seems to be no graffiti anywhere, not at the 57th Street cab station, not even in the "bad" neighborhoods in Harlem with the hookers and the hoodlums, nowhere. There's some basic magic marker written in the hallway of the whorehouse (1:24 min). 

But alas, go search images for the film and you'll find all of them are shots of Robert De Niro in front a wall that's absolutely shattered, yet the movie itself has no graffiti in it. There's two different images that seem to reappear, and I've copied them below. 

So here's a movie, 1975-1976, where the movie itself shows no graffiti, but the marketing was certain to make the point very clear - graffiti is a thing, it's bad, and it's here.

Here is an example of one of the photographs for Taxi Driver showing graffiti in the background. 

Here is another example of one of the photographs for Taxi Driver showing graffiti in the background. 

Saturday Night Fever, 1977

• Filmed almost entirely in Bay Ridge Brooklyn, and began in March of 77 and lasted 3 months (Vanity Fair article), so it was still before the "blackout"
• The subway is trashed (1 min)
• Brick wall (4 min)
• Under the bridge, proto-graffiti (27 min)
• Throwups at the "Barracuda" joint (48 min)
• Brick wall, mix of proto- and early graffiti (1:17 min)
• Barracuda's again (1:28 min)
• Subways are rocked, inside and out, and even the stations too (1:50 min)

It's impossible to ignore now. Something tells me things were already heating up prior to filming in March 1977, and only months before the "blackout". Taxi Driver is filmed in the summer of 75 and we don't see any graffiti. So the entire year of 76 between these two movies seems like a good place to put the thumbtack on the map. Unfortunately, there's not enough good material from this exact time period. 

Superman, 1978

• Doesn't count.

It's overproduced, too controlled, too sanitized; like if there was graffiti they would have paid to have it removed from the scene. And it's the only movie filmed in NYC from 1978.

The Warriors, 1979

• The title has drips and the whole credits font is written as if it were from a spraycan (1 min)
• Inside the subway and out, rocked (2 min)
• Supposed to be the Bronx but it's actually Riverside Park, and, same as Death Wish, it's rocked (7min)
• There's a scene in a cemetery, and either the whole thing is a stage or they put a fake tombstone in there, and it's spraypainted with a "W" on it for Warriors; all the other graffiti in there is bootie, I think it's fake (19 min)
• So far every single scene in the movie has graffiti, some proto- some regular (20 min)
• Sprays the guy in the face with a can of paint, like it's a weapon (1:15 min)

I suspect some scenes had the graf added on purpose, it's just so bad, and yet other scenes have really good stuff around, so it's hard to tell.

This is where I realize that movies have fake graffiti. I take for granted that I can tell the difference, but I think it's so obvious at times that anyone could tell.

Anyway, it's interesting to think about graffiti as a sign of lawlessness, crime, deteriorating social values, you name it. When a person making a movie wants to create a good, believable set for a movie about gritty city life, they either find a wall with graffiti on it, or they make the wall with graffiti on it. This brings me to the last movie, outside the 1970's decade, but added here just for their use of fake graffiti:

Escape from New York, 1981 

• This one for good measure. 
• At 1:20 you can see real good what fake graffiti looks like in a movie in 1981. The whole thing is simulacra by the way, since it's supposed to be NYC but it's really filmed in East St. Louis.

In 1971, if you wanted to make a movie set look gritty, you might turn over a garbage can, get some broken bottles on the sidwalk, let loose a couple rats, but you never thought to yourself, man what I really need is to get some tags scribbled on this stop sign. Graffiti simply didn't exist. Something that resembles graffiti has always existed, and everybody knows Pompei had it scribbled on the walls back in 79 AD. But it simply didn't mean the same thing as it does today.

When you to want to make your movie set look a little more hard core, you don't draw Kilroy on the payphone. It also didn't matter if you wrote TAKI 183 on the payphone because it didn't really look like graffiti yet, and it didn't mean then what it meant by 1977.

When it first appeared, at least through the lens of the movies filmed in NYC 1971-1979, it meant "crime"; it meant a city completely out of control. Nothing says "we have completely given up governing our society" like wild, undecipherable scribble on every visible surface. Since then, you absolutely cannot say the same thing without it.