Escape from New York
Escape from New York is a 1981 American independent science fiction action film co-written, co-scored, and directed by John Carpenter. It stars Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasence, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton, and Adrienne Barbeau.
The film, set in a then-near-future world of 1997, concerns a crime-ridden United States, which has converted Manhattan Island in New York City into the country's sole maximum security prison. Air Force One is hijacked by anti-government insurgents who deliberately crash it into the walled-off borough. Former Special Forces and current federal prisoner Snake Plissken is given just 24 hours to go in and rescue the President of the United States, after which, if successful, he will be pardoned.
Carpenter wrote the film in the mid-1970s in reaction to the Watergate scandal. After the success of Halloween, he had enough influence to begin production and filmed it mainly in St. Louis, Missouri, on an estimated budget of $6 million. Debra Hill and Larry J. Franco served as the producers. The film was co-written by Nick Castle, who played Michael Myers in Halloween.
Released in the United States on July 10, 1981, the film received positive reviews from critics and was a commercial success, grossing more than $50 million at the box office. The film was nominated for four Saturn Awards, including Best Science Fiction Film and Best Direction. The film became a cult classic and was followed by a sequel, Escape from L.A., which was also directed and written by Carpenter and starred Russell.
Plot
In 1988, amidst war between the United States and an alliance of China and the USSR, Manhattan has been converted into a maximum security prison to address a 400% increase in crime.In 1997, while flying President John Harker to a peace summit in Hartford, Air Force One is hijacked by a terrorist group. The President is handcuffed with a briefcase and put into an escape pod that drops into Manhattan as the aircraft crashes.
Police, led by Commissioner Bob Hauk, are dispatched to rescue the President. Romero, a subordinate of the Duke of New York, warns Hauk that the President has been captured and will be killed if further rescue attempts are made. Meanwhile, former Special Forces soldier Snake Plissken is about to be imprisoned in Manhattan after being convicted of robbing the Federal Reserve. Snake accepts a deal from Hauk in which he will be pardoned in exchange for rescuing the President in time for the summit. To ensure his cooperation, Hauk has Snake injected with micro-explosives that will sever his carotid arteries in 22 hours. If Snake is successful, Hauk will neutralize the explosives.
Snake uses a stealth glider to land atop the World Trade Center, then follows the President's tracking device to a vaudeville theater, only to find the tracker on the arm of a vagrant. Inspecting the escape pod, Snake is ambushed by starving crazies, and his radio is destroyed. He is rescued by "Cabbie," a jovial character who drives a taxi.
Cabbie takes Snake to Harold "Brain" Hellman, an adviser to the Duke and a former associate of Snake. An engineer, Brain has established a gasoline refinery fueling the city's remaining cars; he tells Snake that the Duke plans to lead a mass escape across the 69th Street Bridge, using the President as a human shield. Snake forces Brain and his girlfriend Maggie to lead him to the Duke's hideout at Grand Central Terminal. Snake finds the President but gets shot in the leg with a crossbow bolt and is overpowered by the Duke's men.
While Snake is forced to fight Duke's champion Slag in a deathmatch, Brain and Maggie kill Romero and flee with the President. Snake kills Slag and finds the trio trying to escape in the glider. Inmates drop the glider off the roof, forcing the group to street level, where the Duke and his followers confront them. Cabbie arrives and offers to take them across the bridge. He reveals that he bartered with Romero for a cassette tape that contains information about nuclear fusion, intended to be an international peace offering. The President demands the cassette, but Snake refuses to hand it over.
The Duke gives chase, setting off mines as he tries to catch up. Brain guides Snake, but they hit a mine, and Cabbie is killed. As they continue on foot, Brain accidentally stumbles onto another mine. A distraught Maggie sacrifices herself to slow the Duke. Snake and the President reach the containment wall, and guards hoist the President up. The Duke opens fire, killing the guards before Snake subdues him. As the rope is lifting Snake, the Duke attempts to shoot him, but the President takes up a dead guard's rifle and kills the Duke. Snake is hoisted to safety, and Hauk's doctor neutralizes the explosives in his neck.
As the President prepares for a televised speech to the leaders at the summit meeting, he off-handedly thanks Snake for saving him and offers only half-hearted regret for the deaths of his colleagues; Snake walks away in disgust. Hauk offers Snake a job as his deputy, but he keeps walking. The President's speech commences, and he plays the cassette. To his embarrassment, it only plays Cabbie's favorite song, "Bandstand Boogie". As Snake walks away free, he pulls the real cassette from his pocket and destroys it.
Cast
Production
Development and writing
Carpenter originally wrote the screenplay for Escape from New York in 1976, in the aftermath of Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal. Carpenter said, "The whole feeling of the nation was one of real cynicism about the president." He wrote the screenplay, but no studio wanted to make it because, according to Carpenter, "t was too violent, too scary, too weird". He had been inspired by the film Death Wish, which was very popular at the time. He did not agree with this film's philosophy, but liked how it conveyed "the sense of New York as a kind of jungle, and I wanted to make a science-fiction film along these lines".International Film Investors agreed to provide 50% of the budget, and Goldcrest Films signed a co-financing deal with them. They ended up providing £720,000 of the budget and making a profit of £672,000 from their investment after earning £1,392,000.
Casting
, the film's financial backer, preferred Charles Bronson, Tommy Lee Jones or Chuck Norris to play the role of Snake Plissken to Carpenter's choice of Kurt Russell, who was trying to overcome the "lightweight" screen image conveyed by his roles in several Disney comedies. Carpenter refused to cast Bronson on the grounds that he was too old, and because he worried that he could lose directorial control over the film with an experienced actor. At the time, Russell described his character as "a mercenary, and his style of fighting is a combination of Bruce Lee, The Exterminator, and Darth Vader, with Eastwood's vocal-ness." Russell suggested that the character should wear an eyepatch. All that matters to Snake, according to the actor, is "the next 60 seconds. Living for exactly that next minute is all there is." Russell used a rigorous diet and exercise program to develop a lean and muscular build. He also endeavored to stay in character between takes and throughout the shooting, as he welcomed the opportunity to get away from the Disney comedies he had done previously. He did find it necessary to remove the eyepatch between takes, as wearing it constantly seriously affected his depth perception.Pre-production
Carpenter had just made Dark Star, but no one wanted to hire him as a director, so he assumed he would make it in Hollywood as a screenwriter. The filmmaker went on to do other films with the intention of making Escape later. After the success of Halloween, Avco-Embassy signed producer Debra Hill and him to a two-picture deal. The first film from this contract was The Fog. Initially, the second film he was going to make to finish the contract was The Philadelphia Experiment, but because of script-writing problems, Carpenter rejected it in favor of this project. However, Carpenter felt something was missing and recalls, "This was basically a straight action film. And at one point, I realized it really doesn't have this kind of crazy humor that people from New York would expect to see." He brought in Nick Castle, a friend from his film-school days at University of Southern California, who played "The Shape" in Halloween. Castle invented the Cabbie character and came up with the film's ending.The film's setting proved to be a potential problem for Carpenter, who needed to create a decaying, semi-destroyed version of New York City on a shoestring budget. The film's production designer Joe Alves and he rejected shooting on location in New York City because it would be too hard to make it look like a destroyed city. Carpenter suggested shooting on a movie back lot, but Alves nixed that idea "because the texture of a real street is not like a back lot." They sent Barry Bernardi, their location manager, "on a sort of all-expense-paid trip across the country looking for the worst city in America," producer Debra Hill remembers.
Bernardi suggested East St. Louis, Illinois, because it was filled with old buildings "that exist in New York now, and have that seedy run-down quality" that the team was looking for. East St. Louis, sitting across the Mississippi River from the more prosperous St. Louis, Missouri, had entire neighborhoods burned out in 1976 during a massive urban fire. Hill said in an interview, "block after block was burnt-out rubble. In some places, there was absolutely nothing, so that you could see three and four blocks away." Also, Alves found an old bridge to serve as the "69th St. Bridge". The filmmaker purchased the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge for one dollar from the government and then gave it back to them, for the same amount, once production was completed, "so that they wouldn't have any liability," Hill remembers. Locations across the river in St. Louis were used, including Union Station and the Fox Theatre, both of which have since been renovated, as well as the building that would eventually become the Schlafly Tap Room microbrewery.