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Living in New York in the mid-1970s, Mark Edmundson was a cab driver, an occasional writer, and, most important, a moviegoer. It was a good time to be a film buff. Martin Scorsese had released Taxi Driver; Paul Schrader wrote and directed Blue Collar; and Robert Altman made The Long Goodbye and California Split. “I can’t really tell you whether these movies summarized a national mood, but they summarized some moods of mine,” writes Edmundson. “Matinees are therapy for those who can’t afford therapists.” Even when life seemed to be going nowhere, at the movies “there was always a chair, at least unoccupied if not specifically assigned, stained with Coke, crackling with popcorn bits.”
