Streets of Fire is a 1984 film directed by Walter Hill and co-written by Hill and Larry Gross. It was described in previews, trailers, and posters as "A Rock & Roll Fable". It is an unusual mix of musical, action, drama, and comedy with elements both of retro-1950s and 1980s. The film stars Michael Paré as a soldier of fortune who returns home to rescue his ex-girlfriend (Diane Lane) who has been kidnapped by Raven, (Willem Dafoe) the leader of a biker gang.
Some of the film was shot on the backlot of Universal Studios in California on two large sets covered in a tarp 1,240 feet long by 220 feet wide so that night scenes could be filmed during the day.
The film was promoted as a summer blockbuster but failed critically and commercially, grossing only US$8 million in North America, compared to a production budget of $14.5 million. However, its musical score by Jim Steinman, Ry Cooder, and others, as well as the hit Dan Hartman song "I Can Dream About You", has helped it attain a cult following.
The concept for Streets of Fire came together during the making of 48 Hrs. and reunited director Walter Hill with producers Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver, and screenwriter Larry Gross, all of whom worked together on that production.
According to Hill, the film's origins came out of a desire to make what he thought was a perfect film when he was a teenager and put in all of the things that he thought were "great then and which I still have great affection for: custom cars, kissing in the rain, neon, trains in the night, high-speed pursuit, rumbles, rock stars, motorcycles, jokes in tough situations, leather jackets and questions of honor".
The four men began planning Streets of Fire while completing 48 Hrs. Afterwards, Gross and Hill worked on the screenplay, writing ten pages a day. When they were finished, they submitted the script to Universal executive Bob Rehme on a Friday (in January 1983) and by the end of the weekend, the studio had given them the go-ahead to make the film. This was the fastest ever greenlight Hill had received and he put it down to the box office success of 48 Hours.
Production began on location in Chicago in April 1983, then moved to Los Angeles for 45 days and finally two weeks at a soap factory in Wilmington, California, with additional filming taking place at Universal Studios. Shooting wrapped on August 18, 1983. 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, snow, and a combination of all three. The subway scenes were filmed on location in Chicago at many locations, including: La Salle Street (Blue line), Lake Street (Green line), Sheridan Road (Red, Purple lines), and Belmont Avenue (Red, Brown, and Purple lines). The Damen Avenue stop (Blue Line, at Damen, North, and Milwaukee Avenues) was also used.
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, 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 and cost $1.2 million to construct. 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.
The exterior of the Richmond Theater where Ellen Aim sings at the beginning of the film was shot on the backlot with the interior done in the Wiltern Theater in L.A. for two weeks. The factory scenes that take place in the Battery were filmed at a rotting soap factory in Wilmington, California, for ten nights. The Ardmore Police roadblock was filmed near 6th street in East Los Angeles near the flood basin. Though only three districts are seen, the city has a total of five districts: the Richmond, the Strip, the Battery, the Cliffside, and the Bayside.
In the 1970s and 80s, Walter Hill established his reputation as one the most distinctive action-movie directors Hollywood has produced, an exponent of lyrical violence in the class of Sam Peckinpah, for whom he scripted The Getaway. His first six movies – Hard Times, The Driver, The Warriors, The Long Riders, Southern Comfort, 48 Hrs – all terse, lean, unsentimental, were commercial and critical successes and are now classics. His seventh, Streets of Fire, lost money and went down badly with US critics, possibly because many of them thought it resembled The Warriors too closely and because there were no stars apart from former child actress Diane Lane. It's now something of a cult classic that anticipated the current fashion for films based on graphic novels.
The film, Hill has said, is "by design, comic strip in orientation, mock-epic in structure, movie-heroic in acting style, operatic in visual style, and cowboy-cliche in dialogue". Its subtitle, "A Rock & Roll Fable", contains all the elements Hill looked for in a movie as a teenager in the late 50s, and in 94 minutes it manages to be an urban western, a backstage rock musical and a biker flick set in an unidentified, run-down rust-belt inner city that might be yesterday or tomorrow. A gang of authentic Hells Angels (led by Willem Dafoe in his first Hollywood movie) kidnaps a rock singer (the 18-year-old Diane Lane), and her former, roughneck boyfriend (the cool Michael Paré) is brought in to effect a rescue. The striking Amy Madigan (who worked as a rock musician before studying at the Lee Strasberg Institute) auditioned for the role of Paré's sister but suggested she play his tough male sidekick instead. Hill, an admirer of Howard Hawks, gave her the part but didn't rewrite it. She was the perfect Hawksian woman and the hit of the film.
Hill is working with regular collaborators – among them cinematographer Andrew Lazslo, co-author Larry Gross, composer Ry Cooder, designer John Vallone – and they serve him well in a carefully stylised movie that's something like pure cinema. It begins and ends with choreographed fights, features sets that crackle with garish neon in a hellish nocturnal world. The elegantly tattered clothes are designed by Giorgio Armani.
The Blu-ray disc is accompanied by an excellent documentary about the film's production by German director Robert Fischer.
"Streets of Fire" begins by telling us it's a "rock & roll fable ... from another time, another place." The movie is right on the rock & roll, but the alternative time and place are mysteriously convincing -- especially if, like me, you believe the most beautiful post-war American cars were Studebakers. In this world, Studebakers made it. All the cops in this movie drive circa 1950 Studebakers, and all the people in the movie live in the shadow of oppressive elevated tracks, in a shabby, nighttime city inhabited mostly by cops, street gangs, rock fans, and soda jerks.
The movie begins with the kidnapping of a rock singer (Diane Lane), who is muscled off the stage by some Hell's Angels types. But first we get one of the few original approaches to rock concert photography: Full-stage photography of the singers is combined with black foreground silhouettes of the audience, waving their hands and clapping. The effect is a little like a Roger Brown painting, and it works: This looks like it's going to be a new approach to the basic street and rock images. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't live up to its opening. It turns into your basic fable about warring street gangs, with a superman (Michael Pare) and his tough female accomplice (Amy Madigan) breaking into the headquarters of the rival gang and bringing Diane Lane back alive. This ground has been covered before, most obviously in Hill's "The Warriors", a controversial 1978 thriller that was credited with inspiring more fights in its audience than on the screen.
Hill likes characters who are broadly symbolic. He occasionally gives us people who are individuals (as in his most successful film, "48 Hrs.," with Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte). But mostly he likes characters who stand tall and represent good or evil and settle the matters of the universe with unlimited violence. That's what we get this time.
What we also get is some interesting atmosphere, which owes a lot to the art direction and the background musical score by Ry Cooder. Hill came to Chicago to shoot some of his blasted landscapes of barren warehouses under ominous L tracks, and matched them with back lot sets at Universal that suggest a city where gentrification never caught on.
The cops are corrupt in this fictional city, the gangs rule the streets, and there are districts where you've got to be armed.
Side-by-side with this paramilitary society is a world of art nouveau heater marquees, corny soda fountains, and the rock singer's manager (Rick Moranis), who wears checked sport coats and bow ties and looks like the creep of the class of '57. The language is strange, too: It's tough, but not with 1984 toughness. It sounds like the way really mean guys would have talked in the late 1950s, only with a few words differentÑas if this world evolved a slightly different language. The performances fit this world nicely. The most engaging character is Amy Madigan's McCoy, an Army veteran who smokes cigars, blast bikers to smithereens, and tells Pare he ain't her type. Pare is your basic taciturn, implacable Hill hero, and Diane Lane has so much of the right energy in the opening concert scene that we wonder why there wasn't a lot more rock & roll in the movie. Also more Studebakers, please.
Possible sequels and Road to Hell
Streets of Fire was intended to be the first in a projected trilogy called "The Adventures of Tom Cody" with Hill tentatively titling the two sequels The Far City and Cody's Return.
They told me that it was going to be a trilogy. What happened was that all of the people that made Streets of Fire left Universal Studios and went to 20th Century Fox. It was made at Universal, so they owned the rights to the story.
So it was left behind. I was told by Joel Silver that the sequel was going to be set in the snow, and the following film would be set in the desert.
However, the film's eventual failure at the box office put an end to the project. In an interview, shortly after the film's release, Paré said, "Everyone liked it, and then all of a sudden they didn't like it. I was already worried about whether I should do the sequel or not.
Road to Hell is an action-fantasy film directed by Albert Pyun. It was inspired by Walter Hill's Streets of Fire and began shooting in June 2008 in Los Angeles. Final shooting took place in Las Vegas in early 2014. The film was created and developed by Curnan Pictures.[citation needed] Pyun states that the genesis of Road to Hell began when he and Paré attended a film festival in Spain.
Rick Moranis as Billy Fish
Willem Dafoe as Raven Shaddock
Elizabeth Daily as Baby Doll
Deborah Van Valkenburgh as Reva Cody
Richard Lawson as Officer Ed Price
Rick Rossovich as Officer Cooley
Bill Paxton as Clyde the Bartender
Stoney Jackson as Bird, of The Sorels
Grand L. Bush as Reggie, of The Sorels
Robert Townsend as Lester, of The Sorels
Mykelti Williamson as B.J., of The Sorels
Lynne Thigpen as a Subway Motorwoman
Marine Jahan as a Dancer at Torchie's
Ed Begley, Jr. as Ben Gunn
John Dennis Johnston as Pete the Mechanic
Peter Jason as Ardmore Cop #1
Matthew Laurance as Ardmore Cop #2
The stripper in the bor is Marine Jahan, who was one of Jennifer Beals dancing doubles in "Flashdance".
The club name "Torches" is also seen in 48 Hrs. (1982) and The Driver (1978).
Streets of Fire was the inspiration for Capcoms legendary 1989 arcade beat'em up FINAL FIGHT which featured, among other things, a kidnapped Girlfriend and a Character called 'Cody'. Strangely enough Final Fight was in turn an inspiration for the even more closely named STREETS OF RAGE For the Sega Megadrive, itself borrowing many elements from the film.
Deborah Van Valkenburgh was also featured in Walter Hill's 1979 film "The Warriors".
Lynne Thigpen Who was the Subway Operator women that informed Cody that the Bombers have gone Crazy and set fire to the subway system, Is also from another Walter Hill film "The Warriors", as the DJ narrating the Warriors way back to
Cony Island, where she also speaks of a gang called the Bombers and the Boppers.
The fight scene between Michael Pare and Willem DaFoe was with 'Spike Mauls' which were normally used to drive railroad spikes into the cross ties hence the long hammer heads. They could drive a spike from the opposite side of the rail without hitting the handle on the top of the rail.
The Sorrells singing group never gets much attention but all four actors continued to work.
Stoney Jackson and Grand Bush might not be household names, but Robert Townsend and Mykelti Williamson seemed to find plenty of work after "Streets."
Raven's main sidekick (the one not wearing a hat, who punches out that guy from Twister and Rick Moranis and throws a garbage can through a window and screams) is famous punk rocker Lee Vina, from the 80's LA punk band FEAR. He got into movies because FEAR was the dead Belushi's favorite band.
Deborah Van Valken who potrays the baby sis, played Jackie on 'Too Close for Comfort' in the mid 80's.
The name of Diane Lane's character and band name is Ellen Aim and the Attackers, that band name also makes an appearence in a Renny Harlin Film, "The adventures of Ford Fairlane". The name "Ellen Aim and the Attackers" appears on a computerscreen amongst a list of other band names at the top of the list.
Bill Paxton (of Aliens, Twister, and Titanic fame) is in Streets of Fire! He plays Clyde, the annoying bartender friend of Cody's (the one Amy Madigan insults). If you watch closely, you can see him get punched & thrown off the stage at the begining of the film.
Rick Rossovich who played Office Cooley in "Streets of Fire" also played the Lt. (j.g.) Ron'Slider' Kerner in "Too Gun".
When Amy Madigan read for the film, she read for the part of the lead character's sister. Madigan told Walter Hill that the best part in the script was the lead character's sidekick. That part called for a man and the character's name was Mendez. The part was rewritten for Madigan and was renamed McCoy.
Much of the movie's night scenes were shot under huge tarps during the day, because a lot of the extras were young enough to still be subject to the US Child Labor laws.
I've noticed on Youtvbe.com thot certoin scenes from the lost song "Tonight is Whot it Means to Be Young" were not shown in the movie (DVD version, not sure about the VHS). There are flashes of Ellen Aim standing with her back to the audience and towards the band. In one flash, she has her eyes closed. In the next flash, she looks at the drummer and then in the final flash, she looks up at the ceiling. This can be seen in a video compilation put together with clips from the movie under"anthrversion" on Youtube. Another part that was shown in for the trailer of the movie, but for some reason deleted in the movie itself, was when Ellen told Tom "You should stay and see the show, it's really good". Anotherscene which was a different version in the trailer compared to the one the movie was when Raven said "I want Tom Cody".
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