Escape from New York - Definition and Overview

Escape from New York is a 1981 science fiction action film directed and scored by John Carpenter. He also co-wrote it with Nick Castle. The film was made on a total budget of around $8 million, which is sometimes apparent in the night scenes lit by fires in trash cans. It played upon the recent highly-public fiscal and social eclipse of New York and fearful suburban prejudices concerning failed inner cities in general.

The film stars Kurt Russell as the anti-hero 'Snake' Plissken. Set in a dystopian future of 1997, the island of Manhattan is serving as a maximum security prison. When the aircraft carrying the US president crashes on the island, convicted criminal and one-eyed one-time hero Plissken is charged with rescuing the president (played by Donald Pleasence) and a vital tape he carries from the hands of the leader of the inmates, the "Duke of New York" (Isaac Hayes). Plissken has only 24 hours in which to accomplish his task and is encouraged by the insertion of explosive charges into arteries in his neck.

Also in the film are Lee van Cleef as the prison chief, Ernest Borgnine and Harry Dean Stanton as erratically helpful inhabitants of Manhattan and also Adrienne Barbeau, at that time wife of the director.

Carpenter and Russell teamed up again for the belated sequel, Escape from L.A. (1996) set in 2013. Another sequel has also been proposed, but will not likely materialize due to the poor box office performance of ...L.A.

Trivia

• Certain matte paintings were rendered by James Cameron, who was at that time a special effects artist with Roger Corman's New World Pictures.
• Most of the movie was filmed in St. Louis, Missouri.
• Avco-Embassy Pictures, the studio behind the film, 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.
• 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 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.
• After the smash success of Halloween, the small studio of Avco-Embassy signed filmmaker John Carpenter and producer Debra Hill to a two-picture deal. The first film from this contract was 1980's The Fog and this film finished out the contract.
• Initially, the second film that Carpenter 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, which its initial script-draft he had penned back in the 1970s, and the studio greenlighted it.
• The final scenes were filmed at the Sepulveda Dam, in Encino, Los Angeles, California.
• The Duke's Cadillac Fleetwood with the fender-mounted chandeliers is a direct influence in the art car community.

External link

• IMDb entry on Escape from New York (http://us.imdb.com/Title?0082340)
• Escape from New York at theofficialjohncarpenter.com (http://www.theofficialjohncarpenter.com/pages/themovies/ny/ny.html)