ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK Screens at Schlafly Bottleworks January 3rd – ‘Strange Brew’

“You wanna see him sprayed all over that map, baby? Now where’s the President?”

John Carpenter’s St. Louis-lensed ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981) screens Wednesday, December 6th at 8pm at Schlafly Bottleworks Restaurant and Bar (7260 Southwest Ave.- at Manchester – Maplewood, MO 63143) as part of Webster University’s Award-Winning Strange Brew Film Series. Admission is $5

For those of you who don’t know, the ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK’s production designer, the Oscar-nominated Joe Alves, couldn’t work out the logistics of shooting the film’s night-time exterior shots in New York City.   It was too difficult to make the New York city streets seem like a devastated, prison city as depicted in the film.   Alves was sent on a cross-country expense trip where he was to find a city that could stand in for a demolished, downtown NYC.   Enter East St. Louis, IL in the late ’70s.   In ’76, a massive fire broke out, and entire blocks were left burned up and in rubble.   Production moved to Illinois.   Scenes were even shot across the river in St. Louis, MO proper at Union Station and the Fox Theater.

Here’s some interesting ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK facts about shooting in St. Louis:

• The final credit is a reference to a strip club and the dancers across the river from St Louis
• The President’s downed plane was an old DC-10 bought from an airplane graveyard in Tucson, Arizona. The plane was carved up into 3 separate pieces and trucked into the film’s St Louis locations in the dead of night as they didn’t have the requisite paperwork
• John Carpenter and his crew convinced St. Louis authorities to shut off the electricity for ten blocks at night
• John Carpenter purchased the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge in St Louis for $1 from the government and then returned it to them for the same amount after filming was completed
• the scene shot at the Union Station is the gladiator-style wrestling match where Snake Plissken fights Slag, played by Ox Baker.   The scene was filmed in Union Station’s grand hall before it was renovated.   If you look closely in the scene, you will see the stained glass window that still hangs above the entryway into the grand hall on Market Street.

A Facebook invite for the screening can be found HERE
https://www.facebook.com/events/911026755741025/