Latest news with #TheWarriors
Car and Driver
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Car and Driver
These LA-Based Artists Re-Created the Graffiti-Covered 1955 Cadillac Hearse from 'The Warriors'
The cult favorite movie The Warriors was notable in part for the 1955 Cadillac hearse driven by a gang called the Rogues. At Dave Shuten's Los Angeles hot-rod shop, graffiti artist Risk and Shuten gave a Cadillac hearse a fresh paint treatment in front of a live audience. It's not the movie car—they found a similar '55 Cadillac with the Meteor-built hearse body for sale at a museum—but the graffiti is a faithful reproduction. When The Warriors came out in 1979, moviegoers complained it incited violence, glorified gangs, and encouraged vandalism. In the parking lot outside of Dave Shuten's Los Angeles hot rod shop in 2025, only the last complaint would be valid. On a warm Monday evening, Shuten and famed graffiti artist Kelly Graval, better known as Risk, proceeded to tag up a 1955 Cadillac while the movie played on a projector screen to a rapt party of cinema fans. Does it still count as vandalism if the spray cans aimed at Andy Bollas' Caddy hearse were by request of the owner? "I've wanted this car since I was, like, seven," Bollas told me while we watched Risk and Shuten spray red over a quarter-window. "I'm 50 now, so I've waited a long time for this." Elana Scherr | Car and Driver The Warriors is a cult classic, one of those low-budget films that failed to be a commercial success but left an outsize mark on the culture. It's been referenced in The Simpsons, has a video game variant and a board game, and it has inspired countless references to the villain's creepy clinking beer bottles and well-delivered line, "Warriors, come out to plaaaay." Directed by Walter Hill (who also directed one of my personal favorite car films, The Driver, and perhaps more famously, 48 Hours), The Warriors is set in a gritty futuristic New York—which at the time of its release in 1979 was perhaps not that much more grubby than the real city. It begins with a gang conclave that results in the death of the main gang's leader. Wrongly accused, the titular Warriors must run a gauntlet across New York to get safely to their territory. Elana Scherr | Car and Driver It's a chaotic and often nonsensical film, but the costumes are fantastic, the city looks incredible, and one of the rival gangs—the Rogues—drives a menacing primer-black Cadillac hearse covered in early-style spray-can graffiti. It was this car that caught a young Andy B's imagination so much that when he saw a similar '55 Cadillac with the Meteor-built hearse body for sale at a museum in central California, he stalked the listing until it came down in price and then lowballed the seller. "I offered him half," he says. "I was like, 'It's in a million pieces. You're never gonna do anything with it. It takes up so much space. It's huge.'" All of these negatives were also true once Bollas owned the car. Our mutual friend Shuten was kind enough to store the body, while Bollas kept the trim and interior parts in a van in his back yard. Things might have continued that way for a long time, but Shuten hired a new assistant at his shop and wanted to give him a project to work on before setting him loose on the rare car restorations that Shuten heads up for Galpin Motorsports' Beau Boeckmann. It's not that the Cadillac was a sacrificial lamb, but its rat-rod styling in the movie made it a good car to test the skills of a new hire without risking damage to an irreplaceable Roth custom or chopped Mercury. "Andy brought down this Sprinter van with all the shit that had been sitting in it for two years, and we just dumped it all over the parking lot, dug through it, and just started throwing parts at it." Elana Scherr | Car and Driver Once it started looking like a car, it seemed like they might as well paint it, and once they planned to paint it, why not make a movie-night party out of it? It was Shuten's idea to invite Risk to help out. Both are artists who cross over between outsider and gallery, and they'd worked together on other projects, including a Polestar painted with galaxies that turned heads at the Los Angeles auto show in 2021. "We'd worked together in the past on some stuff. He's a fantastic artist. I think he's probably the most famous graffiti artist right now. And he's a good friend, so I shot him a picture and said, 'Hey, are you down to help me wreck this hearse?'" Risk was so down. It helped that he's a fan of the movie too. "Huge fan," he said when I asked him. "I dressed as characters from the different gangs on Halloween when I was a kid. Most memorably, some friends and I dressed like the Baseball Furies." The Baseball Furies were not main players in the film but inarguably had the coolest look, so much so that musician Jesse Hughes showed up to the party on roller skates, bat in hand. Elana Scherr | Car and Driver Shuten jokingly referred to the paint job as wrecking the hearse, but it took a surprising amount of planning to re-create the swirling chaos of the movie car. "All the trim had to go back on because we had to paint it in reverse of what I normally would do," said Shuten. "We had to assemble a car, tape it off shitty, paint it black, untape it, and then spray all the graffiti after it was assembled. Windows in, trim on like somebody tagged a real finished car." All of that was done before the guests arrived, but there was still the process of figuring out what the graffiti on the car said. The party goers were a mix of custom car folks, artists, and musicians, so everyone was on board with the idea and eager to help. Elana Scherr | Car and Driver A whole group of us pored over printed stills from the movie, arguing over whether a fender said "Love" or "Louie," "66" or "GG." Deciphering the blurry scrawls in the still images proved a bit of a Rorschach test, with one person seeing a stylized name and another swearing it was a dick drawing. (It was me. I thought it was a dick, and I still do.) Because the car belonged to the bad guys, many of the tags were rude, but some were coded references to the actors, or just gibberish that looked good on film. After all, it was just a prop. The tags weren't even done by period artists, but by the art department on set, themselves trying to copy an emerging graffiti style. "It was unexpectedly a challenge," said Risk. "I've spent my whole life developing hand style and can control, but with this project we had to throw all that out the window and travel back to the '70s when it was just in its infant stages. It's hard going in reverse!" Elana Scherr | Car and Driver Shuten laughed when he told me that Risk's wife came up during the painting and asked why he was doing "such a shit job." The guys were having fun, but they still took it seriously. "Risk showed up with a book of '70s graffiti style so he could see how the tags were in the day," said Shuten. "It was really fun to watch him do shit really shitty on purpose, knowing how really great he is." Elana Scherr | Car and Driver From the audience's viewpoint, both Shuten and Risk looked confident and practiced as they circled the big car, adding flourishes and the occasional artistic license to a particularly abstruse layering. "Once the ice was broken with the first spray," Shuten said, "Everyone's like, all right, it's on." The movie played on the screen, and everyone clinked bottles when the Rogues came into view. As for what Bollas is going to do with the Cadillac now, well, it's only a few months till Halloween, and then it's "Warriors, come out to plaaaay." Elana Scherr Senior Editor, Features Like a sleeper agent activated late in the game, Elana Scherr didn't know her calling at a young age. Like many girls, she planned to be a vet-astronaut-artist, and came closest to that last one by attending UCLA art school. She painted images of cars, but did not own one. Elana reluctantly got a driver's license at age 21 and discovered that she not only loved cars and wanted to drive them, but that other people loved cars and wanted to read about them, which meant somebody had to write about them. Since receiving activation codes, Elana has written for numerous car magazines and websites, covering classics, car culture, technology, motorsports, and new-car reviews. In 2020, she received a Best Feature award from the Motor Press Guild for the C/D story "A Drive through Classic Americana in a Polestar 2." In 2023, her Car and Driver feature story "In Washington, D.C.'s Secret Carpool Cabal, It's a Daily Slug Fest" was awarded 1st place in the 16th Annual National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards by the Los Angeles Press Club. Read full bio
Winnipeg Free Press
26-06-2025
- Business
- Winnipeg Free Press
It's been a long time coming — Portage and Main
Opinion It's been a while. Forty-six years, to be precise, since the last time a pedestrian (legally) traversed the corner of Portage and Main at street level. That will change on Friday — to the great relief of many, and undoubtedly to the consternation of no small number, as well — when the city's most iconic intersection is reopened to foot traffic for the first time since 1979. How long has it been? Well, consider this: when the opening of the below-ground concourse (formally known at the Portage and Main Circus) forced pedestrians off the street in February 1979, the Happy Days spinoff sitcom Laverne and Shirley was the top-rated show on U.S. television, the low-budget street-gang thriller The Warriors was the No. 1 box-office movie and Rod Stewart's Do Ya Think I'm Sexy sat atop the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Ruth Bonneville / Free Press files Vehicles more through Portage and Main. Yes, it's been that long. Ironically, the decision to bar pedestrian traffic from the intersection — after more than a half-decade of city council debate and deliberation — was defended at the time as a move to revitalize Winnipeg's downtown by streamlining vehicle traffic through one of its busiest interchanges. The prevailing mindset favoured cars over people, presumably in reaction to Winnipeg's continuing outward spread. The city's primary business and shopping stretch, from Main Street west along Portage Avenue, had begun to lose its lustre; suburban sprawl was drawing residential population to the fringes and the creation of major shopping malls in St. Vital and Transcona redefined the retail experience for most Winnipeggers. Downtown was struggling. Mega-project ideas for restoring its vitality were plentiful, including the addition of office towers at Portage and Main, creation of the aforementioned subterranean shopping concourse and construction of the massive Portage Place mall, but most — as visitors to the current version of downtown can readily attest — have proved fruitless. The idea of reopening Portage and Main has been part of the public conversation for at least a couple of decades; in 2014, then-mayoral candidate Brian Bowman pledged to re-introduce foot traffic if elected, but once in office he opted to abide by the result of a 2018 plebiscite on the issue, in which two-thirds of voters (most of whom were from the city's far-flung suburbs and likely seldom visited the intersection) rejected the notion of reopening. Weekday Mornings A quick glance at the news for the upcoming day. Those who thought the issue was laid to rest received a rude awakening when a subsequent city report revealed it would cost $73 million to repair the leaky membrane underpinning the intersection, and that the work would disrupt above-ground traffic for up to five years. A massive rethinking of Portage and Main became a practical necessity rather than just a political-points opportunity. Afforded the latitude to reconsider the question, current Mayor Scott Gillingham wisely chose to take things in another direction. With a complete overhaul of public transit routing about to launch, and a major reimagining of Graham Avenue poised to reset the attitude of a major downtown component, the reopening of Portage and Main to pedestrian traffic now feels like the right move at the right (albeit long overdue) time. Over the past several months, the familiar and decidedly unwelcoming brutalist barriers have been removed from the corners at Portage and Main. More traditional curbsides have been established, crosswalks have been painted and the necessary electronic signals have been installed. And on Friday, a rather bold political step will result in the illumination of a 'Walk' signal welcoming the return of actual steps — by people, who have once again, finally, been granted access to the city's most famous intersection. Portage and Main. It's about time.
The Guardian
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Gangs charged us $200 a night to shoot on their turf': Walter Hill on making cult film The Warriors
I thought Sol Yurik's 1965 novel, The Warriors, would work well as a film but I told Larry Gordon [the producer]: 'Nobody will ever let us make it. We'd have to shoot at night in New York, and it doesn't lend itself to star casting.' I turned it down and went to do a western but the finance fell apart. Larry came back and asked if I was still interested. I didn't get along with the people who ran Paramount and we got off to a poor start. They saw it as some kind of sequel to Saturday Night Fever. It's pretty hard to imagine more disparate storylines. The Warriors operates in a dystopian, slightly futuristic, fantasy dream world. The studio never understood that but audiences got it instantly. I wanted Orson Welles to narrate an introduction. His speech was going to last 30 seconds and set up what we were about to see. He agreed to do it – he was broke. However, the studio didn't want him. They felt an artistic frame would hurt the film's commercial potential. I thought the audience wouldn't get the movie without some explanation, but I was completely wrong. Originally, I proposed casting only racial minorities, like in the book, but the studio didn't think that was a commercial idea. And, now, I think the fact that all of the gangs are interracial makes the movie more universal – it did well all over the world, much to everybody's surprise. We shot at night in New York areas where gangs ran things. They'd say: 'You're on our turf and your trucks are fucking up our streets – so pay us.' They were always bribeable. It was $200 a night. The Baseball Furies were inspired by the Furies in Greek mythology. Bobbie [Mannix, costume designer] did some drawings and they were wearing the New York Yankees uniform. I thought it wasn't quite enough. Somebody said, 'Why don't we paint their faces?' and I thought, 'Now that'll make it really different.' We had a scene where a car was looking for the Warriors who were hiding under a boardwalk. Luther [David Patrick Kelly, playing a rival gang leader] knows this, but there wasn't anything in the script for him to say. I said: 'This is too dull. Do something!' He ran under the boardwalk and got some beer bottles. When we were ready to shoot, he clinked the bottles and said: 'Warriors … come out to play.' I said: 'Don't change anything!' That and 'You dig it?' are probably the two lines everybody remembers. The film was attractive to gangs. They'd show up at the cinema, see a rival gang they had age-old animosity with and violence would ensue. There were several deaths and that's always tragic, but it's hard to blame the movie. We got a lot of criticism from political and religious leaders – almost none of them had seen it. I'm proud of the movie. I read the script and the story jumped off the page, like an action-packed matinee movie that takes you on a rollercoaster ride from bright daylight into a neon cityscape at midnight. Mercy resonated with me and I wanted to play her with all my heart. For my first audition, I remember wearing a pair of black, raw silk trousers and a pumpkin-coloured knit top that my Italian friend Pamela gave me. I thought wearing her garment would lend me some spice but I don't think it particularly impressed Walter. Something I was doing did attract his attention though – he described me as the 'unobvious choice'. As a kid, my brother had taught me to cluck like a chicken so when I saw Mercy's first line was a cluck, it felt like destiny. I liked her sense of independence and adventure with an undercurrent of discontent. Her world was seemingly limited and she was perhaps at a crossroads when the Warriors arrived in front of her stoop. She taunted and challenged the Orphans and the Warriors gangs. Her vibe got under my skin. My connection to all the guys was pretty instantaneous and my fondness for everyone immediate. Michael [Beck, played Swan] and I already had a trusting connection before our characters hooked up and Walter assured us we had on-screen chemistry. I fractured my wrist during the shoot on the subway platform. It was harrowing, and the schedule got turned upside down. The scene where I'm suddenly wearing a blue jacket was just to conceal my broken wrist. It gave me more moxie to get the job done, come hell or high water. But it was a tough shoot and physically there were challenges all along the way. We embraced our collective 'warrior' in that regard. When it opened, I recall being with Marcelino [Sánchez, who played Rembrandt] at someone's apartment and hearing about queues wrapping around city blocks. It was so exciting. I took my friends to see it in Times Square and clucked for the theatre employees. Audiences would clack bottles together in time to Luther's ominous call to 'come out and play'. Sadly, violence cut our momentum short. It was on its way to becoming a smash hit when gangs in various parts of the country clashed outside theatres and cinemas began pulling the film. We found ourselves defending it in interviews: these altercations weren't perpetrated by the film but by the energy collecting outside in long lines – the film attracted volatile people. But thinking about the graphic violence in films today, The Warriors is a cinematic dance in comparison, epic and romantic. Whenever I see The Warriors, it's like watching a home movie. There are throngs of people who watch it routinely like The Wizard of Oz. I'm profoundly grateful.
