When Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro first teamed up in 1973’s Mean Streets, few could have predicted the seismic impact their partnership would have on both American cinema and the city of New York itself. Over the next two decades, the duo would create a string of iconic films—eight in total by 1995, including Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Casino—that not only redefined the crime genre but also captured the gritty, feverish pulse of a metropolis on the brink.
But behind those legendary collaborations lies a story of missed opportunities, creative choices, and a city transformed by the very movies that once seemed to tarnish its reputation. As both the 60th anniversary of New York’s Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting and the 50th birthday of Taxi Driver arrive in 2026, the intertwined destinies of Scorsese, De Niro, and the Big Apple have never been more apparent.
It all began with a gamble by New York’s mayor, John Lindsay, in 1966. Facing a city in economic and social turmoil, Lindsay launched the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting, offering filmmakers a single, streamlined permit to shoot across New York’s parks, museums, streets, and monuments. “For the first time, our parks and museums, streets and courthouses, libraries and monuments are open,” Lindsay declared. “All the things that make New York unique have been made available to film people.” According to The Independent, this bold move doubled, then trebled, the number of film productions in the city, funneling much-needed funds into a struggling local economy.
Yet, as history would have it, the filmmakers who flocked to New York weren’t interested in its postcard landmarks. Instead, they pointed their cameras at the city’s underbelly: the mean streets, the flophouses, the neon-lit porn theaters, and the neighborhoods teetering on the edge of collapse. The result was a new wave of cinema—the so-called “Bad Apple” genre—defined by films like Midnight Cowboy (1969), The French Connection (1971), Super Fly (1972), Death Wish (1974), and, of course, Scorsese’s own Taxi Driver (1976).
“This city is an open sewer,” Travis Bickle, De Niro’s haunted cabbie, tells the fictionalized mayoral candidate Charles Palantine in Taxi Driver. The line echoed what many New Yorkers felt at the time. The city’s murder rate was soaring, its infrastructure crumbling, and its finances in freefall. In the summer of 1975, a sanitation strike left 58,000 tons of garbage piled on the streets, while fire stations closed amid budget cuts. Scorsese, ever the chronicler of urban decay, set out to capture this chaos, filming in the East Village, Times Square, and Lincoln Centre—areas then known more for danger than glamour.
But if these films painted New York as a city on the edge of the abyss, they also played a role in its salvation. As The Independent notes, the “Bad Apple” movies didn’t just exploit the city’s troubles—they found a strange beauty in its ruins and, perhaps unwittingly, made it alluring to a new generation of artists, dreamers, and risk-takers. The low rents and edgy reputation drew creative types to neighborhoods like the East Village, setting the stage for the city’s eventual gentrification and rebirth. By 2026, the Mayor’s Office of Film is thriving, generating $5 billion a year for the city and standing as a testament to the enduring power of cinema to both reflect and reshape reality.
For Scorsese and De Niro, the city has always been more than a backdrop—it’s a character in its own right. Their collaborations are inextricably linked to New York’s evolution, from the squalor of the 1970s to the luxury playground it would become. Yet, their partnership was never a given. After their eighth film together, Casino in 1995, nearly a quarter-century passed before they reunited for 2019’s The Irishman (with a brief detour for the 2015 short The Audition, an advertising piece for Asian casinos). In the interim, both men pursued other projects, with De Niro declining to star in The Last Temptation of Christ and turning down the role ultimately played by Martin Sheen in The Departed.
Their creative paths nearly crossed again in the late 1990s, when De Niro signed on to play a mob boss in crisis in the comedy Analyze This. Naturally, he approached Scorsese to direct. But the director, ever mindful of treading familiar ground, declined. “We always checked in,” Scorsese explained, as cited in Far Out Magazine. “He wanted me to do Analyze This, and I said, ‘We already did it. It was Goodfellas.’” The difference between the two films was clear: one a decades-spanning epic of violence and consequence, the other a lighthearted caper built on De Niro’s chemistry with Billy Crystal. For Scorsese, the time wasn’t right to return to the mafia well—at least, not for a comedy.
Still, the bond between the two men endured. When the moment came to tackle De Niro’s passion project, Killers of the Flower Moon, there was never any doubt about who should direct. De Niro considered Scorsese the only suitable choice, a testament to the trust and creative synergy they had built over decades. Their recent collaborations, including The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon, have not only reunited them on screen but also brought Leonardo DiCaprio into the fold, creating a new triad of cinematic talent under Scorsese’s watchful eye.
Meanwhile, the city that once seemed doomed by its own cinematic image has undergone a transformation few could have foreseen. The “I Love New York” campaign, conceived in 1977 as an antidote to the city’s tarnished reputation (and reportedly dreamed up in the back of a Manhattan cab), helped recast the Big Apple as a place of opportunity and excitement. Yet, as The Independent points out, the “Bad Apple” films loved New York in their own way, finding gold in its ruins and monetizing its tensions. The city may have been down, but it was never out.
Today, tourists would be hard-pressed to reconcile Travis Bickle’s nocturnal hellscape with the sanitized, low-crime metropolis New York has become. Even filmmakers like JC Chandor, who sought to recreate the city’s violent past in 2014’s A Most Violent Year, had to decamp to Detroit for authenticity—New York, he decided, no longer looked like New York.
Yet, the legacy of Scorsese, De Niro, and their cinematic New York endures. Their films captured a city at its lowest ebb, but also helped spark its revival. As Taxi Driver celebrates its 50th anniversary, and the Mayor’s Office of Film marks six decades of shaping the city’s image, it’s clear that art and urban life remain locked in a dynamic, unpredictable dance. The movies may have once painted New York as a “hellish underworld,” but they also helped pave the way for its redemption—on screen and off.
Sometimes, the stories we tell about a place become the very engine of its renewal. For Scorsese, De Niro, and the city that made them legends, that story is still unfolding.