A firsthand account of an original warriors screening
Posted: Wed Jul 12, 2006 7:34 pm
This is cinematographer Andrew Laszlo's experience of seeing the Warriors in a theater:
"I went to see it with my family the day after it opened in one of the theaters on Long Island. I was terribly disappointed as we sat among sixty people in an almost empty theater. All of us, my wife and children and I, wore Warriors jackets, similar to the gang jackets the actors wore in the film, but the dismal attendance dampened my enthusiasm.
This mood changed, however, as the six o' clock showing was over and we came out. The lobby was filled with people, and the line went around the block in the severe cold. I decided to go back into the theater to see the film again with a large audience. It was a totally different experience with a theater full of people reacting to the film.
In fact, some time before the film was over, some of the teenage and younger members of the audience started to tear up the seats and trash the theater. People flocked to this movie, even though this scenario--and worse--was repeated all over the country. Nobody could figure out why. I don't know how much of this reaction was due to copycatting other violent reactions to the movie, but I do know that when I witnessed it, it had to be spontaneous, as the film was only in its second day of release.
During the production phase, neither I nor anyone else who worked on the film could have predicted the extreme reactions the film generated. In fact, most us thought that the choreographed fights in the film were too mild and weren't as spectacular as we thought they should have been. Besides Cyrus and Cleon, no one is killed or maimed. In fact, there is only one sequence in the entire film that shows blood, and then the blood is just a trickle on the lips of Ajax, one of the gang members, as he is arrested by a woman decoy police officer.
I most certainly would not have done the film had I known for sure the extent of the reactions. But none of us working on the film had any idea that it would generate even mild disturbances."
"I went to see it with my family the day after it opened in one of the theaters on Long Island. I was terribly disappointed as we sat among sixty people in an almost empty theater. All of us, my wife and children and I, wore Warriors jackets, similar to the gang jackets the actors wore in the film, but the dismal attendance dampened my enthusiasm.
This mood changed, however, as the six o' clock showing was over and we came out. The lobby was filled with people, and the line went around the block in the severe cold. I decided to go back into the theater to see the film again with a large audience. It was a totally different experience with a theater full of people reacting to the film.
In fact, some time before the film was over, some of the teenage and younger members of the audience started to tear up the seats and trash the theater. People flocked to this movie, even though this scenario--and worse--was repeated all over the country. Nobody could figure out why. I don't know how much of this reaction was due to copycatting other violent reactions to the movie, but I do know that when I witnessed it, it had to be spontaneous, as the film was only in its second day of release.
During the production phase, neither I nor anyone else who worked on the film could have predicted the extreme reactions the film generated. In fact, most us thought that the choreographed fights in the film were too mild and weren't as spectacular as we thought they should have been. Besides Cyrus and Cleon, no one is killed or maimed. In fact, there is only one sequence in the entire film that shows blood, and then the blood is just a trickle on the lips of Ajax, one of the gang members, as he is arrested by a woman decoy police officer.
I most certainly would not have done the film had I known for sure the extent of the reactions. But none of us working on the film had any idea that it would generate even mild disturbances."