The Warriors is a 1979 American action thriller film directed by Walter Hill and based on Sol Yurick's 1965 novel of the same name. This novel was, in turn, based on Xenophon's Anabasis. The story centers on a New York City gang who must make an urban journey of 30 miles (48 km), from the north end of The Bronx to their home turf in Coney Island in southern Brooklyn, after they are framed for the murder of a respected gang leader. It was released in the United States on February 9, 1979.
The Warriors | |
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Theatrical release poster | |
Directed by | Walter Hill |
Produced by | Lawrence Gordon |
Screenplay by |
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Based on | The Warriors by Sol Yurick |
Music by | Barry De Vorzon |
Cinematography | Andrew Laszlo |
Edited by |
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Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
Release date |
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Running time | 92 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $4 million |
Box office | $22.5 million |
After reports of vandalism and violence, Paramount temporarily halted their advertising campaign and released theater owners from their obligation to show the film. Despite its initially negative reception, The Warriors has since become a cult film, and it has spawned multiple spinoffs, including video games and a comic book series.
Screenplay
Cyrus, leader of the Gramercy Riffs, the most powerful gang in New York City, calls a midnight summit of all the city's gangs, requesting them to send nine unarmed delegates to Van Cortlandt Park. The Warriors, from Coney Island, attend the summit. Cyrus proposes to the assembled crowd a permanent citywide truce and alliance that would allow the gangs to control the city since they outnumber the police by three to one. Most of the gangs applaud his idea, but Luther, leader of the Rogues, shoots Cyrus dead. In the resulting chaos, Luther frames the Warriors' leader Cleon for the murder, and Cleon is beaten down and most likely killed by the Riffs. Meanwhile, the other Warriors have escaped, unaware that they've been implicated in Cyrus' murder. The Riffs put out a hit on the Warriors through a radio DJ. Swan, the Warriors' "war chief", takes charge of the group as they try to make it back home.
Almost immediately the Warriors are spotted by the Turnbull ACs who attempt to run them down with their bus, but the Warriors manage to escape and board the subway. On the ride to Coney Island, the train is stopped by a fire on the tracks, stranding the Warriors in Tremont, in the Bronx. Setting out on foot, they come across a group called the Orphans who were not invited to Cyrus' meeting and who are insecure and belligerent about their low status in the city gang hierarchy. Swan makes peace with the Orphans' leader, Sully, who agrees to let the Warriors pass through their territory unharmed. However, a young woman named Mercy mocks Sully as a "chicken" and instigates a confrontation. Mercy's goading convinces Sully to demand that the Warriors take off their colors and go as civilians before walking through their neighborhood. Swan and the Warriors flatly refuse Sully's demand, and the Orphans challenge them to a fight. Outnumbered and unarmed, Swan and the Warriors throw a Molotov cocktail at a car, blowing it up and using the opportunity to escape to the subway station. Impressed, and desperate to escape her depressed neighborhood, Mercy follows the Warriors.
When they arrive at the 96th Street and Broadway station in Manhattan, they are chased by police and separated. Three of them, Vermin, Cochise, and Rembrandt, make the train to Union Square, while Fox, struggling with a police officer, falls onto the tracks and is run over by a train as Mercy escapes. Swan and the remaining three Warriors, Ajax, Snow, and Cowboy, are chased by the Baseball Furies into Riverside Park, where a brawl ensues in which the Warriors easily defeat the Baseball Furies. After the fight, Ajax notices a lone woman in the park, becomes sexually aggressive and is arrested when the woman turns out to be an undercover police officer. Arriving at Union Square, Vermin, Cochise, and Rembrandt are seduced by an all-female gang called the Lizzies and invited into their hideout. The trio manages to escape the Lizzies' subsequent attack, learning in the process that everyone believes they murdered Cyrus.
Having scouted ahead on his own, Swan returns to the 96th Street station and finds Mercy there. More police show up and Swan and Mercy flee into the tunnel. They have an argument and Swan continues to Union Square where he reunites with the other Warriors. A fistfight ensues with the Punks in a public restroom which the Warriors win. Meanwhile, the Riffs are visited by a gang member who attended the earlier gathering and saw Luther shoot Cyrus.
The Warriors finally arrive at Coney Island at dawn, only to find the Rogues are waiting for them. When asked, Luther tells Swan he shot Cyrus for no reason, because he gets a thrill out of things like that. Swan challenges Luther to a one-on-one fight, but Luther pulls his gun instead. Swan throws a knife into Luther's wrist, disarming him. The Riffs arrive and apprehend the Rogues. The Riffs acknowledge the Warriors' courage and skill. As the Warriors leave, Luther screams in anguish as the Riffs descend upon the Rogues.
The radio DJ announces that the big alert has been called off and salutes the Warriors with a song, "In the City". Swan, Mercy, and the rest of the gang walk down the beach, illuminated by the rising sun.
- Michael Beck as Swan, Warlord of The Warriors
- Deborah Van Valkenburgh as Mercy
- James Remar as Ajax
- Brian Tyler as Snow
- David Harris as Cochise
- Tom McKitterick as Cowboy
- Marcelino Sánchez as Rembrandt
- Terry Michos as Vermin
- Thomas G. Waites as Fox (uncredited)
- Dorsey Wright as Cleon
- Roger Hill as Cyrus
- David Patrick Kelly as Luther
- Lynne Thigpen as D.J.
Development
Film rights to Sol Yurick's novel The Warriors were bought in 1969 by American International Pictures but no film resulted.
Rights were then obtained by producer Lawrence Gordon who commissioned David Shaber to write a script. Gordon had made Hard Times (1975) and The Driver (1978) with Walter Hill; he sent the script to Hill with a copy of Sol Yurick's novel. Hill recalls, "I said 'Larry, I would love to do this, but nobody will let us do it.' It was going to be too extreme and too weird."
Gordon and Hill were originally going to make a western but when the financing on the project failed to materialize, they took The Warriors to Paramount Pictures because they were interested in youth films at the time and succeeded in getting the project financed. Hill remembers "it came together very quickly. Larry had a special relationship with Paramount and we promised to make the movie very cheaply, which we did. So it came together within a matter of weeks. I think we got the green light in April or May of 1978 and we were in theaters in February of 1979. So it was a very accelerated process."
Hill was drawn to the "extreme narrative simplicity and stripped down quality of the script". The script, as written, was a realistic take on street gangs but the director was a huge fan of comic books and wanted to divide the film into chapters and then have each chapter "come to life starting with a splash panel". The director was finally able to include this type of scene transition in the Ultimate Director's Cut released for home video in 2005.
Casting
The filmmakers did extensive casting in New York City. Hill had screened an independent film called Madman for Sigourney Weaver to cast her in Alien and it also featured Michael Beck as the male lead. The director was impressed with Beck's performance and cast him in The Warriors. Hill initially wanted a Puerto Rican actress for the role of Mercy, but Deborah Van Valkenburgh's agent convinced the film's casting directors to see her and she was eventually cast. The filmmakers wanted to cast Tony Danza in the role of Vermin but he was cast in the sitcom Taxi and Terry Michos was cast instead. While there were white characters in Yurick's book, none of the central characters or protagonists were white: according to Hill, Paramount did not want an all-black cast for "commercial reasons".
Thomas G. Waites was cast as director Walter Hill's James Dean, and the director "invited the young actor to the Gulf and Western to watch movies like Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden for inspiration." During the screening, Hill offered Waites a drink, which Waites refused, resulting in a rift between the two that grew worse during the grueling summer shoot. At one point, Waites threatened to report the working conditions to the Screen Actors Guild, forcing Paramount to provide a second trailer for the eight Warriors to share.
Finally, when the tension on set between Waites and Hill reached the breaking point, Hill demanded that stunt coordinator Craig Baxley improvise a stunt scene in which Waites' character would be killed. "Stunned, Baxley demurred. Such a critical scene would take careful planning. But Hill was insistent. 'I don’t give a shit how you kill him,' Baxley recalls the director saying. 'Kill him.'" Baxley found a crew member who resembled Waites and staged a scene in which the character is thrown off a subway platform in front of an approaching train. “It was like someone cut my soul out and left a shell,” Waites remembers. He would later demand that his name be removed from the cast altogether; he remains uncredited to this day.
Shooting
Stunt coordinator Craig R. Baxley put the cast through stunt school because Hill wanted realistic fights depicted in the film. In preparation for his role, James Remar hung out at Coney Island to find a model for his character. The entire film was shot on the streets in New York City with some interior scenes done at Astoria Studios. They would shoot from sundown to sunrise. The film quickly fell behind schedule and went over budget. While they shot in the Bronx, bricks were tossed at the crew. Actor Joel Weiss remembers that filming of his scene at Avenue A was canceled because there was a double homicide nearby. For the big meeting at the beginning of the film, Hill wanted real gang members in the scene with off duty police officers also in the crowd so that there would be no trouble.
The studio would not allow Baxley to bring any stunt men from Hollywood and he needed someone to double for the character of Cyrus so he did the stunt himself dressed as the character. Actual gang members wanted to challenge some of the cast members but were dealt with by production security. The actors playing The Warriors bonded early in the shoot, on and off the set. Originally, the character of Fox was supposed to end up with Mercy, while Swan was captured by a rival, homosexual gang known as the Dingos, only to escape later: however, Hill watched the dailies and realized that Beck and Van Valkenburgh had great chemistry; the script was rewritten so that their characters ended up together. This resulted in actor Thomas G. Waites arguing with Hill and being difficult on the set, and so Waites was fired eight weeks into principal photography.
The Rogues' car in the Coney Island confrontation was a 1955 Cadillac hearse. Originally, at the Coney Island confrontation at the end of the film, actor David Patrick Kelly wanted to use two dead pigeons but Hill did not think that would work. Instead, Kelly improvised by clinking three bottles in his right hand and ad-libbing his famous line, "Waaaaarriors, come out to plaaaay". Kelly was influenced by a man he knew in downtown New York who would make fun of him. Hill wanted Orson Welles to do a narrated introduction about Greek themes but the studio did not like this idea and refused to pay for it. However, this sequence was finally included in the 2005 Ultimate Director's Cut, with Hill providing the narration himself.
Hill was working on a low budget and a tight post-production schedule because of a fixed release date as the studio wanted to release The Warriors before a rival gang picture called The Wanderers. As a result, Hill was unable to realize this comic book look until the making of the Ultimate Director's Cut in 2005.
"I wanted to take it into a fantasy element, but at the same time add some contemporary flash," said Hill. "Those were some of the hard ideas we had to get the studio to understand. But we did not get along very well with our parent company. After the movie came out and it did well, everybody was sort of friends. But up until then there was a lot of misunderstanding. They thought it was going to be Saturday Night Fever or something."
Theatrical run
The Warriors opened on February 9, 1979, in 670 theatres without advance screenings or a decent promotional campaign and grossed USD $3.5 million on its opening weekend.
Violence at screenings
The following weekend the film was linked to sporadic outbreaks of vandalism and three killings — two in Southern California and one in Boston — involving moviegoers on their way to or from showings.
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