Walter Hill and The Warriors

The Warriors director Walter Hill (right) on location with the cast.

I was coming off of a very big year. It was 1979 when my old friend producer Frank Marshall called about Walter Hill’s movie The Warriors to design the titles for his New York Street gang styled action drama.

The first meeting with Walter at the studio had Executive Producer Larry Gordon coming in to see what I was doing along with his new assistant, a young kid tagging along behind him, who Larry later ordered to get me a cup of coffee. Neophyte Joel scurried out and returned with cups of hot coffee for all of us.

Of course that was several years before little chubby Joel Silver became one of the most powerful and successful producers in all of Hollywood.

Walter’s films were very graphic with lots of primary colors. Much of the film was either at night or underground in these high contrast, dark subway tunnels and other dark locations, so a rich, solid black was a thematic visual thread in the film.

Well, I seized on this and began developing a graffiti styled title treatment that had the urgency, anarchy and energy of these young gang toughs.

The title card from The Warriors (1979)

It was easy to run some hand lettered paint dripping style of letters but not so easy to maintain readability to satisfy the intricate contractual requirements for the actors, technicians and producers that drive this part of the film business.

I mean, getting screen credit is a big deal and everybody cares about how their name appears on the screen. Fortunately, not everyone has a say so about the final result, but, those that do are the ones who I have to satisfy.

Because of the freestyle nature of the graffiti styled titles all the letters were not the same uniform size, so it became difficult to determine accurate percentages to meet contract requirements.

Within contracts are clauses written by actors, directors and producers agents and lawyers dictating size, position, placement and all relative to other titles, their order, prominence, parity and any other form of comparison and detailing that an agent or lawyer can dream up.

I wanted to integrate the titles within the live action shots of the underground tunnels of the New York City subway systems where the various rival gangs hung out and practically lived in during their travels around the city.

I converted all of the POV shots to a very stark super black black with saturated colors to punch up the violent and dangerous atmosphere of the gangs playground.

There were also several ‘whip pans’ – shots of the train traveling across camera from left to right or right to left that served as transitions from one shot or location to the next.

As passengers on the train and traveling in these POV shots I had the titles coming at camera as if they were moving in the air, in the tunnel gliding towards the train cars.  

But as the title got close and large in the screen I used a whip pan to push the shot off the screen along with the title that was moving at us. With the right sound effect is created a mini collision that was a violent reaction to the ‘attack’ of the title coming at us. This heightened the danger and violence that permeated the story. It was powerful.

The film was a big hit. Walter was very happy.

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