Some inside info
Posted: Mon Jul 10, 2006 9:49 pm
I just got my hands on Andrew Laszlo's book "Every frame a Rembrandt." He talks about the films he's worked as a cinematographer on, and he donates about 30-40 pages to the warriors. Unfortunately, it didn't really have any good behind the scenes photos, just some that this site already has. But, it did have some pretty cool stories about the production. Here's one:
"A thousand extras are not easy to work with, particularly when a large portion of the thousand extras are non-professionals, as was the case when filming the large-scale gang meeting in the Bronx. In the case of The Warriors, we used hundreds of extras, of which quite a few were actual New York gang members. On the first night of shooting the level of excitement was very high among both the professional and nonprofessional members of this crowd. Most of them thought it was going to be fun to be in a movie, especially if they were in a real gang and the movie was about gangs.
But the excitement was short-lived. Very few of the nonprofessionals knew that filmmaking was hard work. The crew and cast slept all day, coming to work in the evening and working till daybreak the following day. The nonprofessional actors had been up all day before the shooting, and by midnight most of them started to fade. Some just dozed off where they were, or found a nice grassy spot and went to sleep. Others decided that Hollywood wasn't for them and went home. Night after night this scene was repeated, and we had to change our shot order in order to shoot the shots requiring the largest crowd scenes early in the night and concentrating the remaining extras into smaller and smaller shots as the night wore on and the crowd diminished. This meant lots of repositioning of the cameras and relighting of the shots, which wouldn't have been necessary if the extras had stayed and we could have proceeded with shooting the sequence as planned.
There were other problems, too, which affected the production. When some of the extras decided to go home, some took their costumes with them. In some cases the clothes were better than their own, or looked more like gang-fashion. Paramount had to keep replenishing the wardrobe. To ensure the return of hard to replace items of clothing, all extras were given a ticket when they changed into wardrobe. When they returned the wardrobe the following morning, there was a raffle, giving away a color tv set to the lucky extra holding the winning ticket. This system worked well until the third or fourth morning, when the winner, happily carrying his new color tv, was mugged within eyesight of the location. Incidents like these are fond memories now but weren't quite as amusing then."
"A thousand extras are not easy to work with, particularly when a large portion of the thousand extras are non-professionals, as was the case when filming the large-scale gang meeting in the Bronx. In the case of The Warriors, we used hundreds of extras, of which quite a few were actual New York gang members. On the first night of shooting the level of excitement was very high among both the professional and nonprofessional members of this crowd. Most of them thought it was going to be fun to be in a movie, especially if they were in a real gang and the movie was about gangs.
But the excitement was short-lived. Very few of the nonprofessionals knew that filmmaking was hard work. The crew and cast slept all day, coming to work in the evening and working till daybreak the following day. The nonprofessional actors had been up all day before the shooting, and by midnight most of them started to fade. Some just dozed off where they were, or found a nice grassy spot and went to sleep. Others decided that Hollywood wasn't for them and went home. Night after night this scene was repeated, and we had to change our shot order in order to shoot the shots requiring the largest crowd scenes early in the night and concentrating the remaining extras into smaller and smaller shots as the night wore on and the crowd diminished. This meant lots of repositioning of the cameras and relighting of the shots, which wouldn't have been necessary if the extras had stayed and we could have proceeded with shooting the sequence as planned.
There were other problems, too, which affected the production. When some of the extras decided to go home, some took their costumes with them. In some cases the clothes were better than their own, or looked more like gang-fashion. Paramount had to keep replenishing the wardrobe. To ensure the return of hard to replace items of clothing, all extras were given a ticket when they changed into wardrobe. When they returned the wardrobe the following morning, there was a raffle, giving away a color tv set to the lucky extra holding the winning ticket. This system worked well until the third or fourth morning, when the winner, happily carrying his new color tv, was mugged within eyesight of the location. Incidents like these are fond memories now but weren't quite as amusing then."
Especially in New York and especially during the '70s