Though AVCO executives preferred to see an established star take the lead - Charles Bronson, Nick Nolte, and Tommy Lee Jones were suggested and rejected by the filmmakers - there was for John Carpenter only one man to play protagonist Snake Plissken, a WWIII veteran turned fugitive from justice cashiered by the United States Police Force into rescuing the abducted President from New York Prison (where terrorists have ditched Air Force One).
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Principal photography commenced there in August 1980, with filming of specific setpieces shifting throughout production to Georgia's Atlanta International Airport, to Los Angeles (Culver City Studios and the San Fernando Valley, where the prison exterior was mocked up at the Sepulveda Dam Flood Control Basin - backdrop as well for the closing credits of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension), to Pasadena's Art Center College of Design and CalArts (California Institute of the Arts), Long Beach, and even New York's Liberty Island, location of the Statue of Liberty, whose head featured prominently in Escape from New York's promotional artwork. Louis, Missouri, a former railway hub that had been devastated by deindustrialization of the Rust Belt and charred by a 1976 firestorm that had reduced several waterfront blocks to blackened shells. With Manhattan proving prohibitively expensive and the backlot lacking the requisite verisimilitude, Carpenter decamped instead to rundown St. (Five years earlier, George Lucas' unprepossessing space opera Star Wars had been made for half again as much.) Despite the uptake in spending money, Carpenter was faced with a daunting task: to create a dystopian version of New York City (transformed in 1988, so the story goes to a high-walled maximum security prison) in an apocalyptic vision of 1997.
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Early drafts had reflected a mounting national cynicism in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the resignation of disgraced President Richard Nixon while last minute rewrites (undertaken by Carpenter associate Nick Castle, who had played "The Shape" in Halloween) were banged out in the immediate aftermath of the 1979-1981 Iran Hostage Crisis.ĪVCO assigned Carpenter his highest budget - $6 million. ( The Philadelphia Experiment was passed to director Stuart Raffill and premiered in 1984.) Carpenter had been shopping Escape for years with no interest from the major studios. When Carpenter stalled on the adaptation, he pitched Escape from New York to Rehme, who gave the project the green light and got the production rolling in late summer 1980.
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Moore's controversial 1979 (allegedly non-fiction) book The Philadelphia Story: Project Invisibility set to follow.
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First out of the gate was the seaside ghost story The Fog (1980), with an adaptation of Charles Berlitz and William F. Two years earlier, the USC-schooled filmmaker and his producing partner Debra Hill had scored an unexpected hit with the proto-slasher Halloween (1978), prompting A-E president Robert Rehme to offer the team a two picture deal. "I have this script in my trunk" is how John Carpenter pitched Escape from New York (1981) to AVCO Embassy Pictures - at least that's how Carpenter tells the story.