Was 'The Warriors' the First Gang Movie?

An eighteen-year-old honors student was getting some refreshments during an intermission to Paramount's The Warriors at an Oxnard, California, movie theater when another youth demanded a quarter from him. He refused, and was stabbed to death. The Warriors, the first gang movie, had dropped into the the theater that night. It dropped out the very next day. It was winter 1979, and there were still intermissions during movies.

In Boston, a sixteen-year-old boy was fatally wounded with a hunting knife by a gang of kids who had just seen The Warriors. In New York, 12 kids went on a mugging spree in the subways after allegedly seeing the same film. And at a California drive-in, a nineteen-year-old was shot in the head while The Warriors played on the screen.

Whether or not all this violence can be directly attributed to The Warriors is a matter of perspective. Dr. Amitai Etzioni, professor of sociology at Columbia University, explained, "Until recently, sociologists felt that the media couldn't cause violence, that watching films was an emotional release for violent feelings in itself. But now there are numerous plausible beliefs that these films are a contributory factor that may provide a clue into the escalating immunity society has to the evolution of graphic violence in popular media. The abnormal level of comfort contemporary America has with with its own reflection manifests itself in violent imagery through out the media and the internet."

The Get Down

One can't say for sure that the stabbing in the theater wouldn't have happened if the movie had been The Sound of Music. Ironically, 30 years later, Baz Luhrmann would infuse his Netflix masterpiece The Get Down with scenes inspired by the Walter Hill cult classic, The Warriors.

Paramount Pictures adamantly denied that The Warriors can cause violence. “The movie doesn't portray the type of violence where you throw your hands in front of your face or bring your favorite coat to hide your eyes,” claimed John Gould, Paramount's director of marketing administration. “It’s not an exploitation film. We're not a small independent company doing a film about Guyana.” This was a time when PC didn't even mean personal computer yet.

Nevertheless, Paramount pulled all radio, television, and newspaper advertising for five days after the violent incidents occurred. Then they reinstated newspaper ads which simply gave the locations of theaters where the movie was playing. The original newspaper ad contained the line: “These are the armies of the night. They are 100,000 strong. They outnumber the cops five to one. They could run New York City.” This shocking thought would materialize on the big screen a few years later with John Carpenter's cult hit, Escape from New York, and Kurt Russel's iconic character Snake Plissken.

John Gould pointed out that it is standard procedure to change the ad campaign two weeks after every Paramount film is released. “The only time I can think of where we stayed with the same ad campaign was with Saturday Night Fever.” But the R-rating symbol has been enlarged in the newspapers, and Paramount offered to beef up security at any of the 670 movie houses where The Warriors appeared. The Warriors was a hit, grossed well over three times its original cost and jump started a brand new genre of inner city gang movies.

Don Baker, then vice-president of Lowes Theaters, said, “We haven't had any problems with violence yet and we anticipate a normal run with The Warriors. The only problem is with the press and broadcast media. They've created an unbelievable hysteria. Believe me, if the fire bombing of the subway booth in Queens a couple of weeks ago had taken place after The Warriors was released instead of before, the film would have been blamed.” It would not be the last time the media blamed movies for real life violence, but it was one of the first.

Baker refers to the kids who terrorized the New York subways in the theater district after seeing The Warriors as “thugs who rob old ladies and throw people down stairs anyways.” And the stabbing in the Oxnard movie house revolved around racial lines, while the gangs in The Warriors are racially integrated.

Real Life Warriors

The Warriors’ producer Larry Gordon explains, “The violence in this film isn't meant to scare people. That's not the point of the movie. I wanted it to be—and it is—a chase picture.” But real life warriors disagreed and gloriously wore their colors on the streets of urban america.

The Warriors was filmed in New York over 60 nights, largely in the subways with the permission of the transit authority. It is the story of a gang wrongly accused of murdering the chieftain of a Bronx gang, and the gang must then fight their way back to their own turf at Coney Island. Ironically, a Coney Island gang known as the Homicides wouldn't allow any members of the cast to wear the colors of the fictional Warriors off the set, so a special wardrobe associate made sure the actors had a quick clothing change handy.

Surprisingly, the film grossed $4.7 million its first week in release and was listed as the number-one grossing film in Variety. Boulevard Nights, followed up at theaters in May, was shot on location in East Los Angeles and depicted the struggle of young Latinos trying to escape the gang culture. Members of the Imperial Car Club actually had to approve the script before they agreed to appear in the film. Over the Edge, a year later, concentrated on a middle-class gang, while The Wanderers followed the career of a New York street gang. In 1980, Defiance, starringJan-Michael Vincent premiered glorifying a merchant seaman's fight with a Spanish Harlem gang.

The Guardian Angels

Curtis "Rock" Sliwa, the then founder of a group of volunteers called the Magnificent 13, who patrolled the New York subways at nights, admits that exposing the public to a realistic picture of gang life will discourage most kids from participating in violence, but he is worried that violence-oriented youths will be encouraged to instigate more trouble. “It’s a basic fact that the Bronx is where the gang syndrome began,” he says. “And I don't think the violence in The Warriors is overdone—except maybe toward the cops. It's a code of life, an everyday occurrence. It's West Side Story without the music. What I fear is the seed that's planted in a kid's head and the fertilization that follows. Just last night when we were going on patrol, a group of twelve-year-old kids were jumping up and down in front of a toll booth, terrorizing the clerk, yelling, "Warriors' Warriors! F*$k this subway!" Curtis Sliwa would go on to found the Guardian Angels, the largest civilian protection and patrol group ever formed in New York City history. As the years faded and the gang's life styles fell out of favor so to did the media's focus on it. Curtis Sliwa faded into pop culture history and was last signing photos at New York Comic Con.

Baz Luhrmann's The Get Down on Netflix is another cinematic masterpiece. One that has inspired a re-examination of the 1970s gang culture, exploring the artistic visions of graffiti artists and controversial words of poetic MCs. Certain films like The Warriors, few and far between, give us a glimpse into a world so foreign to our nature that the reality of it existence is a shocking thrill and a favorite pleasure. Beyond the film, The Warriors, written by Sol Yurick and the basis for the Walter Hill hit film, creates an epic narrative of a band of brothers simply looking to get home.

The basis for the cult-classic film The Warriors chronicles one New York City gang's nocturnal journey through the seedy, dangerous subways and city streets of the 1960s. Written by Sol Yurick, every gang in the city meets on a sweltering July 4 night in a Bronx park for a peace rally. The crowd of miscreants turns violent after a prominent gang leader is killed and chaos prevails over the attempt at order. The Warriors follows the Dominators making their way back to their home territory without being killed. The police are prowling the city in search of anyone involved in the mayhem. An exhilarating novel that examines New York City teenagers, left behind by society, who form identity and personal strength through their affiliation with their "family," The Warriors weaves together social commentary with ancient legends for a classic coming-of-age tale. This edition includes a new introduction by the author.