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John Carpenter's Escape from New York is a 1981 science fiction action film directed and scored by John Carpenter. He also co-wrote the screenplay with Nick Castle. Set in the near future where crime in the United States is so bad that Manhattan Island in New York City has become a maximum security prison. Ex-soldier, now legendary fugitive "Snake" Plissken (Kurt Russell) is given 22 hours to find the President of the United States (Donald Pleasence) who has been captured by inmates after his plane crashed on the island. Carpenter originally wrote the film in the mid-1970s as a reaction to the Watergate scandal but no studio wanted to make it because it was deemed too dark and violent. After the success of Halloween, he had enough clout to get the film made and shot most of it in St. Louis, Missouri where a significant portion of the city had been burned out in 1976 during a massive urban fire on a total budget of around USD $7 million.
TaglineThe year is 1997. The Big Apple is the world's largest maximum-security prison. Breaking out is impossible. Breaking in is insane. PlotSpoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The movie is set in a dystopian then-future 1997 where Manhattan Island has been converted into a maximum security prison. The entire island is surrounded by a containment wall and inside, the city is a degrading ruin where the inmates have created their own world from which they can never leave. A crisis arises when Air Force One is hijacked by leftist terrorists opposed to the President's police state regime and crash the plane into the city. The President (Donald Pleasance) manages to escape the doomed plane in an escape pod, but he is soon captured by the inmates. Leaving his bunker on Liberty Island, Police Commissioner Robert Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) goes to the prison island to negotiate the President's release, but the inmates refuse to give him up. Hauk's next option lies in a newly arrived prisoner, "Snake" Plissken (Kurt Russell), a decorated Special Forces combat pilot who was captured after robbing the Federal Reserve Bank in Cleveland. Hauk offers Snake a deal — go inside the prison island in a special jet glider and rescue the President and more importantly, retrieve a cassette tape that contains the secret to nuclear fusion technology before the important "Hartford Summit" commences in 24 hours. If successful, he'll receive a full pardon. Snake reluctantly accepts the deal; however, to ensure that Snake does not simply abandon his mission and try to escape the country in the glider, Hauk has him secretly injected with micro-explosives that will kill him in 22 hours (they will be defused only if he returns with both the President and the tape before the bombs go off). When he learns he has been tricked, Snake threatens to kill Hauk when he gets back.
Snake leaves to search the streets, but is soon attacked by the "Crazies" — insane sewer-dwelling cannibals. Cabbie later comes to Snake's rescue and takes him to see Brain (Harry Dean Stanton), a wise inmate who has made the New York Public Library his personal fortress. Brain is revealed to be Harold Helman, a former partner of Snake's who double crossed him. Brain tries to redeem himself by telling Snake that the "Duke of New York" (Isaac Hayes) has the President, and that he plans a big walk-out across the 59th Street Bridge with the President as a human shield. The Duke unexpectedly arrives to get a diagram of the land mines that guard the bridge and Snake forces Brain and his girlfriend Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau) to lead him back to the Duke's compound. After stealing a car and dodging the Duke's thugs, Snake finds the President is being held in a subway car, but his rescue fails and Snake is captured. Later, the Duke gathers his people and announces the walk-out to thunderous applause. But first, he offers the dramatic death of Snake Plissken. Snake is shoved into an arena to fight with a power-house brute (played by professional wrestler Ox Baker). Meanwhile, Brain and Maggie trick the Duke's men, gain access to the President and kill the guards that have been assigned to him. They free the President, acquire the important cassette and quickly flee to escape New York with Snake's glider. Meanwhile, Snake defeats his opponent and impresses the crowd. The Duke is furious, but not nearly as so as when he learns the President has escaped with Brain. He rounds up his men to chase the President down. In the confusion, Snake slips away and manages to catch up with Brain, Maggie and the President at the WTC, but during their attempted get-away, a gang of Crazies push Snake's glider off the building. Snake and the others soon find Cabbie and Snake takes the wheel of his cab, heading for the 59th Street Bridge. The Duke gives chase in his Cadillac. As they drive over the bridge, Snake hits a land mine and the cab is destroyed. Cabbie is also killed, but Snake tells the others they have to keep moving. Eventually, Brain steps on a mine and is killed as well. Maggie stays behind to mourn her lost lover and face the Duke herself in a suicidal last stand while Snake and the President keep running. When the Duke arrives he runs Maggie over and crashes his car. Snake and the President soon reach the containment wall where guards lower a rope. As Snake waits to be lifted, the Duke attacks him. But, when the Duke turns to grab the rope he is machine-gunned down by the President who screams, "You're the Duke! You're the Duke!" as he is firing. Snake is then lifted to safety and the implanted mini-explosives deactivated. As the President prepares for a televised speech, he thanks Snake for saving him, but doesn't show much emotion for those who died during the rescue. Snake begins to leave passing Hauk on the way out. Hauk asks Snake if he still wants to kill him where Snake replies that he's tired and may do it later. The President's speech commences and he offers the content of the pre-recorded cassette to the summit. To the President's embarrassment, the tape has been switched for a cassette of Cabbie's favorite swing music. As Snake leaves the prison, he tears apart the all-important nuclear fusion tape which he'd switched earlier. ProductionCarpenter originally wrote the screenplay for Escape from New York in 1976 during the time of the Watergate scandal. Carpenter told Starlog magazine, "The whole feeling of the nation was one of real cynicism about the President. I wrote the screenplay and no studio wanted to make it"[citation needed] because, according to Carpenter, "it was too violent, too scary, too weird."[1] He has also been inspired by the film Death Wish which was very popular at the time. However, he didn't agree with the film's philosophy but liked how it conveyed "the sense of New York as a kind of jungle, and I wanted to make an SF film along these lines."[2] Carpenter had just made Dark Star but no one wanted to hire him as a director so he figured that 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 smash success of Halloween, the small studio of Avco-Embassy signed him and producer Debra Hill to a two-picture deal. The first film from this contract was The Fog. Initially, the second film that he was going to make to finish the contract out was The Philadelphia Experiment but because of script-writing problems, Carpenter junked it for this project. However, Carpenter felt that something was missing and remembers, "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."[citation needed] He brought in Nick Castle, a friend from his film school days at University of Southern California. Castle invented the Cabbie character and came up with the film's ending. While many sources write that the film's production budget was $7 million, John Carpenter himself says the budget was more around $5.5 million. The film's setting proved to be a potential problem for Carpenter. How could he create a decaying, semi-destroyed version of New York City on only a budget of $7 million? The film’s production designer, Joe Alves was looking for an old bridge to double for one in New York and went with Carpenter to St. Louis to inspect a bridge and walk the streets. The bridge portrayed as the "59th St. Bridge" is actually the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge, famous for its 22 degree bend in the middle of the bridge (The bridge connects Missouri to Illinois and is now a bicycle-pedestrian bridge.). While there, they noticed all the old buildings "that exist in New York now, and have that seedy, run-down quality that we’re looking for," Alves said at the time.[3] East St. Louis, Illinois (essentially a large ghetto across the river from the decidedly more wealthy St. Louis proper) had been burned out in 1976 during a massive urban fire. Carpenter and his crew convinced the city to shut off the electricity to ten blocks at a time at night and shot most of the movie in the summer of 1979 and 1980. They even found an exact replica of New York's Grand Central Station that was deserted and unused. It was a tough, demanding shoot for the filmmaker as he told Starlog, "We'd finish shooting at about 6 am and I'd just be going to sleep at 7 when the Sun would be coming up. I'd wake up around 5 or 6 pm, depending on whether or not we had dailies, and by the time I got going, the Sun would be setting. So for about two and a half months I never saw daylight, which was really strange."[citation needed] In addition to shooting on location in St. Louis, Carpenter also shot parts of the film in Los Angeles (shooting interior scenes on a soundstage and the final scenes at the Sepulveda Dam, in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, California.), New York and Atlanta (to utilize their futuristic-looking rapid transit system). When it came to shooting in New York City, Carpenter managed to convince the city officials to gain access to Liberty Island. He said, "We were the first film company in history allowed to shoot on Liberty Island, at the Statue of Liberty, at night. They let us have the whole island to ourselves. We were lucky. It wasn’t easy to get that initial permission. They'd had a bombing three months earlier, and were worried about trouble."[4] Carpenter was interested in creating two distinct looks for the movie: "One is the police state, high tech, lots of neon, a United States dominated by underground computers; that was easy to shoot compared to the Manhattan Island prison sequences, which had few lights, mainly torch lights, like feudal England."[5] Avco-Embassy Pictures preferred either Charles Bronson or Tommy Lee Jones to play the role of "Snake" Plissken to director/co-writer John Carpenter's choice of Kurt Russell, who at the time was trying to overcome his "lightweight" screen image gained through his appearance in several Disney comedies. Carpenter refused to cast Bronson on the grounds that he was too old. 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."[6] All that matters to Snake, according to the actor, is "the next 60 seconds. Living for exactly that next minute is all there is."[citation needed] British actor Donald Pleasence plays the President of the United States without putting on an American accent. The United States Constitution requires that the President be a "natural-born citizen of the United States" (essentially, a citizen by birth and not naturalization). Pleasence came up with an explanation for how the character came to be both born in the United States and have an English accent, but Carpenter said that film audiences would not care and would just accept what was depicted. Image:Escape From New York Wireframe.jpg The simulated wire-frame effect. ReactionBox officeThe film grossed $25.2 million in American theaters in the summer of 1981, with same amount grossed in foreign markets, making an over $50 million mega box-office hit in ratio to John Carpenter's production budget of $5.5-7 million. DVD releasesEscape From New York has been released twice on DVD, both by MGM. One is the bare bones edition containing just the theatrical trailer. The other version is the Collector's Edition, a two-disc set features a newly remastered transfer with a new 5.1 audio track, two commentaries, one by John Carpenter and Kurt Russell and the other by Debra Hill and Joe Alves, a making-of featurette, a comic book, and a 10 minute deleted opening sequence. The cover art on the DVD release for Escape From New York features Snake Plissken in front of New York City engulfed in flames. Snake is holding a gun in his right hand, and his left biceps is exposed. On his arm is a snake tattoo, but in the movie, a different snake tattoo only appears on his stomach while his left arm is conspicuously blank. He also holds a much different gun; a rifle as opposed to a silenced Ingram MAC-10. RemakeAccording to a March 12, 2007 article in Variety magazine, Gerard Butler is close to signing a deal where he will play Snake Plissken in a remake of Carpenter's movie.[7] Neal Moritz will produce and Ken Nolan will write the screenplay which will combine an origin story for Plissken with the story from the 1981 movie, although Carpenter has hinted that the film might be a prequel.[8] An article in the Hollywood Reporter revealed that New Line Cinema has acquired the rights to the film from co-rights holder StudioCanal who will control the European rights and Carpenter who will serve as an executive producer and is quoted as saying, "Snake is one of my fondest creations. Kurt Russell did an incredible job, and it would be fun to see someone else try."[9] Russell has recently commented on the remake and his thoughts on the casting of Butler as Plissken: "I will say that when I was told who was going to play Snake Plissken, my initial reaction was 'Oh, man!' [Russell winces]. I do think that character was quintessentially one thing. And that is, American."[10] Trivia
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