THE WARRIORS
SHOT IN NEW YORK’S DEADLIEST DISTRICTS AND PULLED FROM CINEMAS BY WORRIED EXHIBITORS, ’70S GANG EPIC THE WARRIORS REMAINS ONE OF THE BEST-LOVED CULT MOVIES OF ALL TIME. EXCLUSIVELY FOR EMPIRE, ITS CAST AND CREW UNPACK THE WHOLE WILD RIDE
The cast and crew of Walter Hill’s iconic ’70s cult hit come out to play, for our oral history of the eventful shoot.
TODAY, THAT LINE is quoted on rap records (from Ice Cube to the Wu-tang Clan), chanted in sports stadiums and used as an answerphone message by rock icons (more on which later). But back in 1978, it was merely an ad-libbed taunt tossed out during the final scene of an extremely turbulent movie shoot.
The epic tale of one Coney Island gang scrapping their way across a dystopian New York, The Warriors was a riot of face paint and flick knives, shot at night in the city’s genuine nogo zones. Basing it loosely on Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel (itself inspired by an Ancient Greek saga about a band of mercenaries’ blood-spattered journey), director Walter Hill stripped away the book’s gritty realism, replacing it with an absurdist comic-book aesthetic powered by gloriously OTT props and costumes (how many real-life street gangs would do battle in dungarees and rollerskates, we wonder?)
On its release in February 1979, the film was an instant hit, netting $3.5 million on its opening weekend, before being removed from cinemas due to violence at screenings. However, its legend has lived on — partly due to its enthusiastic embrace by the hip-hop community, but also because, as its creators detail here, the movie was just as chaotic off screen as it was on. Drugs, broken bones and mid-shoot sackings: it seems nothing was off-limits during the Warriors’ play-time.
“CAN YOU DIG IT?”
Larry Gordon (producer): My first job in movies was with a producer named Aaron Spelling. Aaron taught me to think in ‘concepts’ — in TV Guide, your film gets one line [of description], so you’d better be able to explain the concept concisely. In the mid-’70s I’m in a bookstore and I pick up a novel called The Warriors by Sol Yurick. It’s about a Coney Island gang that has to make it across New York with every other gang in the city looking for them. Holy shit, what a concept! I optioned it straight away.
Walter Hill (director/co-writer): In 1978, I had just finished making The Driver with Larry. We were getting ready to shoot a Western [‘The Last Gun’], when the financing was cancelled. Within a week, Larry got The Warriors going instead.
Frank Marshall (executive producer): How Larry got this movie made, I do not know.
Gordon: I’d already set The Warriors up at Paramount with a writer named David Shaber. His script was good, but not good enough, so when ‘The Last Gun’ fell through, I convinced Paramount it was their good fortune that Walter was suddenly available to rewrite and direct. You have to cajole the studio. Tell them, “If you don’t make this movie right now, you’ll regret it forever!”
Hill: Shaber’s script was closer to Yurick’s novel, which is a realistic, leftist drama. I didn’t want [to make] some serious, Marxian exercise. There’s a scene in the book where the kids read a comic, and I thought, “That’s how to do [the movie].” So I rewrote the script in a larger-thanlife, comic-book style. I remember sitting in a hotel with Frank, coming up with the most outlandish gangs we could think of.
Marshall: While Walter was writing, I was scouting locations. There was no VFX back then, so we had to use the real places: Coney Island, the Bronx, the Subway. The transit authority found us a disused station in Brooklyn. I liaised with the police’s gang units, who told me which areas we could and couldn’t go into.
Gordon: When you think of ’70s New York, you think of Studio 54: this was not that. This was grimy, gritty and shitty.
Michael Beck (Swan): I lived on the Upper
West Side at the time, next to a gang HQ. New York back then was very different: if you strayed a couple of blocks off Times Square, you were in trouble.
Thomas G. Waites (Fox): I was in a gang growing up: the Bristol Terrace Gang. We had some rumbles. I got hit in the face with a pipe, got my tooth knocked out. I was headed the wrong way until Shakespeare saved me. In 1978, I did a movie called On The Yard, and I was kind of flavour of the month.
Gordon: Getting [Waites] was a coup — he was being talked about as the next big star.
Marshall: Waites was hot, so was Michael Beck. The Warriors was the big movie casting in New York.
Beck: Every young actor in the city was being put forward.
David Patrick Kelly (Luther): Walter had seen me on Broadway, playing a hippie who wanted to kill everyone. He cast me as [the villain] Luther based on that.
Hill: We had reading after reading for Mercy, until we found Deborah Van Valkenburgh. She was great — tough yet vulnerable. Sounds easy, but it’s not.
Deborah Van Valkenburgh (Mercy): I loved Mercy’s texture and moxie. The script was fantastic — very spare. Your imagination went wild filling in the gaps.
Hill: We cast a genuine gang member as Cyrus [the gang leader whose death the Warriors are framed for]. But a week before shooting, no-one could find him. He just disappeared.
Marshall: We used a lot of real gang members as extras. The opening scene at the conclave had a thousand kids in it — mostly real gangs. We’d tell them, “You have to behave, you can’t bring weapons.” It’s crazy there was no trouble. You could never do that today.
“I’LL SHOVE THAT BAT UP YOUR ASS AND TURN YOU INTO A POPSICLE”
Hill: We fell behind schedule straight away. The entire movie is shot outdoors and it was the rainiest summer in New York in decades. Plus, we hadn’t accounted for how short the nights were.
Kelly: Shooting was meant to be a few weeks. It ended up nearly four months.
Marshall: We shot 69 nights. Insane.
Waites: Show up at 6pm, have lunch at midnight, shoot until the sun comes up. Every. Fucking. Night.
Marshall: I always carried cash in case anyone needing paying off. I remember shooting in Harlem one night, and this 13-year-old kid comes up. He says, “Are those your trucks?”
I say, “Yeah.” He says: “Do you want to see them here tomorrow? Because they need protection.” He told me which gang he was from, and I called my police contact. He said, “Pay him! You’re getting a bargain!”
Waites: Frank was constantly fending off nefarious characters.
Marshall: We had security with us at all times. One night, a guy pulled a knife because we were on his territory. We were like, “We’re not real! We’re a movie!”
Beck: In Coney Island, the gangs were ticked off about us wearing our colours on their turf. They told Frank we had to take our vests off when we weren’t shooting.
Hill: Sometimes, the cast would want to have a run at the gangs. They’d get very into character: “We’re the Warriors — we don’t have to take this shit!”
Beck: I was always the peacemaker. I’d say, “Come on, boys: we’re actors. These kids are for real.”
Van Valkenburgh: It was thrilling, hanging out in the city at midnight, in neighbourhoods you could never normally frequent. I’d turn up on nights I wasn’t working because it was such an exciting place to be.
Gordon: It wasn’t like any other movie. Which is why we went over budget and behind schedule. A week in, Paramount were threatening to pull the plug.
Marshall: The studio sent their head of production from LA to check on us. This guy shows up in a suit at 1am in Brooklyn. We were shooting on a subway platform and we hear rain on the roof. But I look out, and it’s not rain: there’s a guy in the tower block above, pissing out of his window directly onto the Paramount executive. We didn’t see him on set much after that.
Hill: We were pissed on by several gangs. New York in the ’70s was an interesting place.
Beck: Cocaine was the drug du jour, and it was certainly present on set. “Hey, we’re working nights — this will keep us awake!”
Waites: I didn’t know at the time, but I was an alcoholic. I was doing cocaine, fucking my life up. I was also a big pain in the ass, complaining about the conditions and the overtime. My timing was off during takes because I was stoned out of my mind. I’m surprised Walter didn’t deck me.
Gordon: Tom Waites wasn’t behaving with Walter, and his manager wasn’t behaving with me — giving me shit and acting arrogant. A few weeks into shooting, I said to Walter, “Can we get rid of him?”
Hill: It’s a sensitive thing for me because there’s this idea that if you fire an actor it makes you look “tough”. I never saw it that way. I just thought, “This isn’t working, we’re in flames here, I have to pull this movie together.” So, over one weekend, I wrote [Waites] out of the script. Desperation produces strong results.
Marshall: We called it the ‘Red Script’. Fox [Waites] had previously been the romantic lead, but it was clear Swan [Beck] had better chemistry with Mercy [Van Valkenburgh]. So, Walter gave Swan the romantic scenes and had Fox pushed in front of a train.
Gordon: We used a camera assistant who looked like [Waites] from behind, and shot him falling on the tracks. I called Tom’s manager and said, “Your client’s out of the fucking movie.”
Waites: You might as well have pushed me off the Empire State Building. I knew things were bad, but I didn’t know they were that bad.
Van Valkenburgh: It was very emotionally unstable. We showed up one evening and they said, “Tom’s gone.” I broke my arm that same night, running in the Subway with his double. I was still trying to process what had happened.
Gordon: Years later, I went to see Pacino in a play. Turned out Tom Waites was in the show, too — and he spotted me. As I left, I heard, “Larry! Larry!” I thought, “This kid’s gonna beat the shit out of me!” But Tom ran up and said, “I’m so sorry.” He’s a wonderful guy. He just made a mistake.
Waites: I don’t regret much in my life, but I regret what happened on The Warriors.
Marshall: It was just one thing after another on this movie. After Tom left, Deborah broke her arm. Then, during one fight scene, Michael Beck accidentally grazed her with a baseball bat.
Van Valkenburgh: My forehead split open, blood everywhere. Horrible.
Marshall: Our DP knew a plastic surgeon on Long Island who stitched up his kids’ hockey injuries. We woke this guy at 2am and sent Deborah over.
Van Valkenburgh: He did an amazing job. He kept his fingers nimble by building tiny ships out of toothpicks, so I knew I was in good hands.
Billy Weber (editor): Walter wanted the fight scenes to be outlandish — violent but fun. For the Baseball Furies fight, he told me, “Make it like Kurosawa!”
Marshall: I loved the Furies. A cross between the New York Yankees and KISS.
Kelly: For my character, Walter talked a lot about Richard III: a guy trying to steal the crown by any means necessary.
Hill: We were shooting the final scene on Coney Island boardwalk, and I told [Kelly] to improvise a line. I said, “Make something up. Taunt the Warriors. Sing to them.”
Kelly: I lived in a gang-controlled area in Soho and I had a neighbour called Rich, who I believe
“WHEN WE GET TO CONEY ISLAND... THEN WE’RE HOME”
was instrumental in robbing my apartment. He would greet me in this weird voice: [adopts sinister, high-pitched tone] “Dave! Daaaaave!” So I came up with, “Warriors... Come out to plaaaaay!” based on that.
Hill: It’s proof of what a good director I am, because when David showed me, I said, “Don’t change a thing!”
Kelly: It’s very rewarding seeing how popular that line’s become. Adam Sandler told me Eddie Vedder had it as his answerphone message.
Weber: Once filming finished, post-production was intense. There was another gang movie coming out (The Wanderers), and our release was shifted so we’d come first.
Barry De Vorzon (composer): My background is in pop music, and since The Warriors was about young gangs, I wanted the entire score to be rock ’n’ roll. No strings or orchestra. We were one of the first movies to do that — it was courageous at the time. The drums had that driving energy of the Subway; the synthesisers added the spacey, surreal quality.
Hill: Paramount hated the movie. They’d had a huge hit with Saturday Night Fever, and they thought this would be a similar thing. What I delivered was closer to The Martian Chronicles. During the edit, Orson Welles agreed to do a brief narrated intro for us. I thought that was a great coup. Orson Welles! But Paramount refused. They said, “Absolutely not. This movie is weird enough already.”
Gordon: I was at the first Ali-frazier fight in New York. The opening screening of The Warriors was just as electrifying. The audience went fucking apeshit.
Marshall: Lines around the block, 1,200 people screaming. Fantastic.
Gordon: I broke up a fight in the lobby. Two gangs facing off, and I stepped in: “I’m the producer of this movie! You can’t fight here!” We sold out every screening around the country. On Monday, I said to the studio, “I bet you guys are happy.” They said, “No, we’re not.
A kid got killed.”
Hill: There were two incidents that first weekend: two people killed at different screenings. Nothing to do with the movie — gang people went to see it, and they ran into other gangs. Harsh things were said, fisticuffs followed.
Gordon: There were other incidents. It was national news, so Paramount pulled the movie. I was devastated.
Hill: It was perceived to be unleashing violence everywhere, but if you look at it today it looks like a musical. It connected with young people, though. They felt it was theirs, and through word of mouth it lived on.
Gordon: Dr. Dre, Jay-z, Lebron James: all these guys have told me they grew up loving The Warriors. There’s talk of a remake every few years, but I don’t want to remake it. Neither does Walter. We caught lightning in a jar! Don’t ask me how. It played two weekends and we’re still talking about it, 42 years later!
Beck: In the early ’80s, I got a call from the White House. It was a press secretary, saying, “President Reagan wants you to know how much he enjoyed The Warriors.” Pretty crazy. But on many levels The Warriors is a Western, and Reagan was in a lot of Westerns.
Hill: My most surprising Warriors fan is Salman Rushdie. I was introduced to him once, and he said: “Walter needs no introduction — he made The Warriors!”
Van Valkenburgh: I still get people of all ages talking to me about it — moms, dads, kids. The movie has lived on because it’s a ride. In that opening shot, you see the [Coney Island] Wonder Wheel and you get on the ride. You scream, you laugh, you cry. It’s a rollercoaster. It’s a ride you want to take again and again.
Waites: It’s still hard for me to say I like the film, but I’m in awe of Walter’s cinematic vision. A while back, I was at a Warriors autograph signing in Birmingham, UK, and I met this fantastic woman. Four years later, we’re engaged to be married. So, in the end, I owe this movie a lot.
“YOU WARRIORS ARE GOOD. REAL GOOD”
THE WARRIORS IS OUT NOW ON BLU-RAY, DVD AND DIGITAL