Yet it’s shot through with rays of light – the first people Snake meets, in an earlier scene, are the audience at a theatre watching a drag musical about the state of New York. The film shifts gears right after this, but it does drive home how bleak life within the prison city is. This culminates in an attack by sewer-dwelling inmates, in a scene that feels like it came from a zombie movie. Especially in the early scenes after Snake arrives in New York and is exploring it alone, when dark figures run through the background and the score ratchets up the tension. He trained heavily for the role and imbues Snake with a physicality and charm that burned him into the cultural zeitgeist.Ĭastle had added the dark comedy to the film, but Carpenter’s direction added another genre to the mix. The standout performance is Russell’s, though. The thin premise is given life by the cast, which included cult film favourites like Isaac Hayes and Harry Dean Stanton, alongside industry veterans like Donald Pleasance and Lee Van Cleef. The basic premise of the film is that the President’s plane has crashed inside the prison island of Manhattan, and Plissken (a one-eyed ex-war hero turned criminal on his way to the prison) is offered a pardon in exchange for getting him out. Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken piloting a glider into the ruins of New York. Escape changed that by giving him his most iconic role as “Snake” Plissken. He was typecast as a “nice guy” comedy actor, an everyman hero. He starred in two sequels to it, and a few other comedies, over the 1970s. Nobody, not even Russell, knows why.) Russell made several movies before he had his breakout Disney hit, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. (The same year Walt Disney died of lung cancer, and one of his final acts was to write “Kurt Russell” on a piece of paper. At the age of 15, he signed a ten-year contract with Disney. Born in 1951, he appeared in several shows (including The Man From UNCLE) as a child actor. It’s impossible to overstate how much Escape redefined Kurt Russell’s career. Instead, he decided to follow the “dark comedy” theme and cast a comedy actor: Kurt Russell. He was worried Bronson or Jones would try to exert too much control. Carpenter wanted an actor who would follow his directions, though. They also advocated for Tommy Lee Jones, who had starred in The Eyes of Laura Mars, a thriller Carpenter wrote. The film had been partially inspired by Death Wish (less the plot than the mood, and the idea of “New York as a jungle”), and the studio wanted Charles Bronson to play the lead. Frank Doubleday as Romero, the creepy spokesman for the island’s prisoners. Between the two of them (with the assistance of Debra Hill once again) they turned that script into Escape From New York. He had a friend, Nick Castle, who was a comedy scriptwriter (and who had been under Michael Myers’ mask in Halloween). Even then he knew it needed something more. It was “too scary and weird” for most studios, until Carpenter became a star director. Then he picked back up a story he had written in 1976, which became his next movie.Ĭarpenter had written the script originally in the days after Watergate, and it was infused with the cynicism of America at the time. He followed it up with another horror movie, The Fog. As well as directing, he co-wrote the script (alongside his producer Debra Hill) and even composed the famous score for the film. Carpenter preferred to work as an auteur. That profit margin opened a lot of doors in Hollywood. Filmed on a budget of $300,000, the film made over $65 million at the box office. His breakout hit was Halloween in 1978, a work inspired by Italian giallo movies that became one of the foundational works in the slasher genre. Having won an Oscar at the age of 22 for Best Short Film, he’d gone on to direct several films over the course of the 1970s. John Carpenter was hot property in Hollywood at the time. The best CGI 1981 had to offer, showing how Manhattan became a prison. It was in this environment that John Carpenter had the idea: what if they didn’t bother trying to deal with crime in New York City? What if they just decided to wall it all off to make it go away? That’s the premise of Escape From New York. At the same time, the Watergate scandal obliterated public trust in the government’s ability to deal with anything, really. By the 1970s this trend had been noticed by the media, with films like Death Wish in 1974 and The Warriors in 1979 representing the general view of a city ruled by criminals. From the 1960s onward crime rates gradually increased in the Big Apple, driven by ideologically motivated underinvestment in social services and the gradual self-sustaining nature of social rot. America has always feared its cities, and no city has inspired more fear than New York in the 1980s.
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