Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken in 1981’s Escape from New York—co-written, co-scored, and, yep, directed by John Carpenter—shared the screen with some seriously cool cats: Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasence, Isaac Hayes, and Harry Dean Stanton, for starters.
Carpenter first penned the script back in 1976, taking cues from real-life shenanigans—like everyone’s post-Watergate distrust of the President—and from the gritty vibes and vigilante swagger of Charles Bronson in Death Wish.
Production ran from August to November 1980, and—plot twist—it all went down in East St. Louis, Illinois. Why there? Because rebuilding a crumbling New York in the Midwest was way cheaper, and the local landscape already had that perfect “urban decay” look.
When Escape from New York hit theaters in the summer of ’81, it raked in over $50 million on a lean $6 million budget. It’s still one of the coolest flicks ever, marking Kurt Russell’s full-blown emergence as a Hollywood leading man—a mantle he’s totally crushing to this day.
