Indeed, this is the frontage of what is now the Fabulous Fox Theatre, 527 North Grand Boulevard. When Plissken follows the President’s tracking device to a rundown ‘Broadway’ theatre, you can make out the lettering on the frontage, where it announces that The Velvettes are performing ‘Olde Manhattan Melodies’, which reads Fox Theatre. A decommission DC8 was bought from a wreckage yard in Tucson, Arizona, cut into three sections and quietly transported to St Louis (it seems that not all of the timewasting paperwork was completed), where the sections were dressed by production designer Joe Alves as a scene of urban devastation. The plane crash site is the corner of North Broadway and St Charles Street, downtown St Louis – now unrecognisable after complete redevelopment. The city sportingly cooperated by turning off lights for several blocks during filming. The darkened streets were filmed in downtown St Louis, an area which had been severely damaged during a massive urban fire in 1976. This once popular 200-acre movie and television location, just north of Six Flags Magic Mountain, was closed in 1990 (the last scenes to be filmed here were for Joe Johnston’s The Rocketeer).Īs Plissken makes his way down through the ‘Trade Center’ building, the graffiti-covered interiors are the upstairs rooms and corridors of the Wiltern Theatre, 3790 Wilshire Boulevard, midtown Los Angeles – but more of this venue later.Įverything changes once Plissken gets to the darkened streets of ’Manhattan’, and the location becomes St Louis, Missouri. The advantage of the Dunes’ airstrip (apart from being within a convenient distance of Hollywood) was the ability to film nighttime scenes without city lights showing in the background. Incidentally, the ‘Chock Full O’Nuts’ store seen a little later on was also built at Indian Dunes. With a good sense of the practicalities, the roof of the ‘World Trade Center’ was also recreated here so that the glider didn’t have to travel from the location. When Plissken reluctantly accepts the mission, the glider in which he’s sent to the island takes off from a tiny airstrip at Indian Dunes, near Valencia, California. It’s famous from the final scene of cult classic, The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension, among other appearances.Īs the manacled Plissken is taken for his briefing, the glum institutional corridors are those of the Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida Street in LA’s eastern neighbour, Pasadena. You may recognise Sepulveda Dam from another futuristic fantasy. Although they’ve proved great for chase scenes. A legacy of Sepulveda Dam is the flood control basin, a large, undeveloped area in the centre of the Valley, now used mostly as a wildlife refuge and recreation spot, as well as the channelisation of all the dry washes, which left the Valley with those hot, concrete-lined river bottoms instead of crystal streams. The futuristic-looking concrete bridge is actually the Sepulveda Dam, 15758 Burbank Boulevard, Lake Balboa, in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles.ĭespite its modern appearance, the dam was completed in 1941 to hold back the waters of the Los Angeles River after the disastrous floods of 1938, which killed 144 people. Notice the smooth pan past the ‘Liberty Island Security Control Building’, which imperceptibly transitions to the ‘air control centre’, some two and a half thousand miles away. Most of the ‘Manhattan’ skylines are matte paintings, as in the opening scene of the raft of potential escapers being destroyed, which was filmed not in the East or the Hudson Rivers but just off the coast of Long Beach, California.Īpart from one misty morning shot of the Manhattan skyline seen towards the end of the film, the only glimpse of New York is the brief scene on Liberty Island, at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. The filmed was made almost entirely in St Louis, Missouri, and around Los Angeles. When Air Force One is downed on the island, hardened criminal Snake Plissken ( Kurt Russell) is offered a deal by Police Commissioner Hauk ( Lee Van Cleef) if he’ll enter the lawless island and rescue the President ( Donald Pleasence), who’s being held hostage.ĭespite the setting, and the title, there’s very little of New York here. It’s the distant future of ‘1997’ and the island of Manhattan is sealed off to become ‘New York Maximum Security Penitentiary’. John Carpenter works wonders making a modest $5 million production look like a widescreen epic, using old school matte paintings, traditional animation and plenty of imagination.
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