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Streets of Fire is a film that was directed by Walter Hill, and co-written by Hill and Larry Gross in the fall and winter of 1983. It was described in the previews, trailers, and posters as "A Rock & Roll Fable." It's an unusual mix of part musical, part drama and part comedy with a setting that is both retro 1950's and the 1980's. The film stars Michael Paré, Diane Lane, Rick Moranis, Amy Madigan, E.G. Daily, and Willem Dafoe, and includes cameos by many then unknown stars of stage and screen. The film was produced by Universal Pictures for a summer release but financially was a box office flop.
PlotlineSpoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The film begins with a concert being given by Ellen Aim (Diane Lane), a "girl from the neighborhood" known as "The Richmond" in a fictional city. She is now a famous singer of the band Ellen Aim and The Attackers, and has come back home to give a concert there. Just as they end the song "Nowhere Fast" she is attacked onstage and is kidnapped by Raven Shaddock (Willem Dafoe), the leader of the biker gang The Bombers, who had entered the auditorium during the song. Some of the people in the crowd try to keep Ellen from getting assaulted onstage (one of them being Bill Paxton), but to no avail. Witnessing all of this is Reva Cody (Deborah Van Valkenburgh), who runs the local diner, and immediately wires her kid brother Tom Cody (Michael Pare), an ex-solider and Ellen's ex-boyfriend to help her.
Tom drives Reva home then goes to the local bar The Blackhawk that is bartended by Clyde (Bill Paxton). After they say hello and chat a bit, Clyde gets annoyed by a tomboyish looking McCoy (Amy Madigan), who is sitting at the bar. She is another ex-soldier whose "spec" was a mechanic and "could drive anything," as well as being good with her fists, as she decks Clyde for being "an asshole" and grabs a bottle of Tequila from the bar. They leave the bar and McCoy asks for a place to stay for the night. He takes her home and she gets the couch. During the night Tom and Reva have another conversation about rescuing Ellen and tells her to contact Billy Fish (Rick Moranis), who is not only Ellen's manager but her current boyfriend to meet at the diner in the morning. While Reva and McCoy go to the diner to find Billy, Tom goes to Richmond Auto and yells out for Pete. Pete works at the garage but has a trunk full of "specialty items," which is weapons. Pete shows Tom the items and says, "A fella came through here a couple months ago, tapped out - had to part with this outfit after a card game - real unhappy about it too 'cause it was all custom stuff." He gets a chrome-plated quick-pump action shotgun, a .50 caliber chromed six-shot handgun and a Winchester lever action rifle. Later on at the diner, Tom and Billy meet. Tom agrees to the rescue on the condition that he pays him $10,000 - and that he goes with him to go back into the neighborhood known as "the Battery" (which in Billy's words, "is the shits.") to get Ellen. Billy finally agrees and as they leave, McCoy wants to join and frankly "needs the job." Tom hires her on for 10% and tells her "you drive." He tells Reva before he leaves "Don't worry, they always hire bums like me to for jobs like this." She drives with Billy and Tom in the passenger side. Image:Streetsoffireellenaim.jpg Ellen Aim As they drive Billy tells them that once they get into the Battery to go to Torchie's, which is "a real dive," and he used to book bands back there in the day. They decide to wait down the block under an overpass and Tom tells them that they are going to wait until nightfall to rescue her. Tom gets some sleep as Billy and McCoy lookout. They observe a lot of bikers going in and out. We switch to inside Torchie's later that night, and the band The Blasters play "One Bad Stud" while a very skimpily dressed dancer (in a dancing cameo by Marine Jahan) and is gyrating on a small stage while chewing gum. Raven walks around in the second floor wearing a floorlength jet-black patent slaughterhouse outfit. He goes to where Ellen is tied up to a bed, tries to kiss her and he says to her, "You're making things real hard on yourself - you act nice, you and me fall in love for a week or two, and then I let you go. Nobody gets hurt." As the three begin to creep around, they are confronted by a slimy bum named Benn Gunn (in a cameo by Ed Begley, Jr.) who knows who they are and what they're up to. After a quick exchange, Tom tells Billy to give him hush money. After he leaves, Tom then tells Billy to go back to the car and be out front 15 minutes. Tom is going to go in topside while he tells McCoy to try to go in through the front door. The Blasters are now playing "Blue Shadows" as McCoy gets in and is stopped by one of the Bombers and takes her to his special "party room" down the hall from where Raven is playing a poker game on the second floor. She goes up pretending to want to go with him but when they get up there she pulls a Colt .45 handgun on him and tells him that she wants to play a new game called "lights out" and knocks him out with the butt of the gun. Tom creeps around from the building across from the bar and is directly across from Ellen's window and waits. At exactly 15 minutes, McCoy bursts into the card game and pulls her gun on Raven and the rest of the room and holds them there. Tom then starts to shoot the bikes out and blowing up their gas tanks. Tom then slides down and runs into the front door up to Ellen's room. He uses the switchblade to cut her free and with McCoy's help make it out just as Billy gets to the front door. As Billy, McCoy and Ellen jump in the convertible, Tom tells them to take off as he makes a diversion and tells them he'll meet up with them at the Grant Street Overpass. He blows up the gas pumps outside the bar and as he grabs a bike to run off, Raven slowly walks through all of the flames and chaos to confront Tom. He says "Well - looks like I finally ran into someone who likes to play as rough as I do." Tom replies "Yeah, this looks like your lucky night." After Tom says who he is, Raven says he'll be coming back for her - and for him, too. Tom takes off on the bike. Meanwhile, Billy tells Ellen to wise up and that the only reason why Tom is rescuing her is that he hired her. Tom arrives and says that they're moving again. As they jump into the car, McCoy has some fun egging Billy on about Tom used to be Ellen's old flame. Billy doesn't know about it and then McCoy tells him about how it used to be "real hot and heavy." Tom drives with billy up front and McCoy and Ellen in the back. Billy says that they are home free but Tom says they have to ditch the car, because the car is no good because they'll be looking for it. They ditch it in a dim underground parking lot. Ellen goes up the stairs with Tom and Billy and McCoy goes up in the elevator. Ellen and Tom fight as Billy and McCoy go back and forth once again about how about Tom and Ellen's love affair was "real major." When they all meet up on the ground floor, they come out onto a part of the Battery populated by a large mix of retro 50's, 70's, and 80's types, with neon on every wall and bar everywhere, with also street people, and 40's and 50's cars, but with a 80's type video jukebox in a bar playing a video by Ellen titled, "Sorcerer" (actually written by Stevie Nicks). (More to be added later - October 9th, 2006.) ProductionStreets of Fire reunited Walter Hill with producers Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver and screenwriter Larry Gross who all worked together on 48 Hrs.. The four men began planning Streets of Fire while completing 48 Hrs. After it was completed, Gross and Hill worked on the screenplay, writing ten pages a day. Hill said in the production notes, "When we finished, we submitted it to Universal on a Friday (in January of 1983) and by the end of the weekend, they gave us the go-ahead." The film's title came from a song written and recorded by Bruce Springsteen on his album "Darkness On The Edge Of Town." Originally, plans were made for the song to be featured on the film's soundtrack, but when he was told that the song would be re-recorded by other vocalists, he withdrew permission for the song to be used. As far as casting, Hill wanted to go with a young cast of relative unknowns. He heard about Michael Pare from the same agent who recommended Eddie Murphy to him for 48 Hrs. At the time he was cast, the actor had two films, Eddie and the Cruisers and Undercover, which hadn’t even been released. For Hill, Pare "had the right quality. He was the only actor I found who was right for the part...a striking combination of toughness and innocence." Diane Lane had made more than ten films by the time she did Streets of Fire. Hill was so impressed with her work on the film that he wrote additional scenes for her during the shoot. Amy Madigan originally read for one of the other parts and told Hill and Silver that she wanted to play the role of McCoy which, she remembers, "was written to be played by an overweight male who was a good soldier and really needed a job. It could still be tough and strong and have a woman do it without rewriting the part." Hill liked the idea and cast her. Image:Streets of fire02.jpg McCoy and Cody All ten days of filming in Chicago were exteriors at night on locations that included platforms of elevated subway lines and the depths of Lower Wacker Drive. For Hill, the subways and their look was crucial to the world of the film and represented one of three modes of transportation (the other two being cars and motorcycles). While shooting in Chicago, the production was plagued by inclement weather that included rain, hail and snow and a combination of all three. Production designer John Vallone and his team constructed an elevated train line on the backlot of Universal Studios that perfectly matched the ones in Chicago. The film crew tarped-in the New Street and Brownstone street sets to double for the Richmond District setting and completely covering them so that night scenes could be filmed during the day. This tarp measured 1,240 feet long by 220 feet wide over both sets. However, this presented unusual problems. The sound of the tarp flapping in the wind interfered with the actors’ dialogue. Birds who had nested in the tarp provided their own noisy interruptions. Streets of Fire was intended to be the first in a trilogy of action films starring Michael Pare as Tom Cody. When the film was released in the summer of 1984 (after some delays), the science-fiction film magazine Starlog magazine stated a rumor that the proposed titles of the two sequels would be The Return of Tom Cody and The Far City. However, the film's eventual failure at the box office[citation needed] put an end to the project. Spoilers end here.
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