Escape From New York: film retrospective (video).
Oliver Harper sits down to investigate the classic science fiction film, Escape From New York, the 1981 American science fiction movie co-written and directed by John Carpenter.
It stars Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Donald Pleasence, Ernest Borgnine, Isaac Hayes, Adrienne Barbeau, and Harry Dean Stanton.
The film’s storyline, set in the near-future world of 1997, concerns a crime-ridden United States, which has converted Manhattan Island in New York City into the country’s maximum-security prison. Air Force One is hijacked by insurgents and is purposely crashed in New York City. Ex-soldier and current federal prisoner Snake Plissken (Russell) is given just 24 hours to go in and rescue the president of the United States, after which, if successful, Snake will be pardoned.
Carpenter wrote the film in the mid-1970s in reaction to the Watergate scandal. After the success of Halloween (1978), he had enough influence to begin production and filmed it mainly in St. Louis, Missouri, on a small budget of $6 million.
