Production
Like the novel, the film was set in Stockton, California and shot mostly on location there. All of the original skid row area depicted in the novel was demolished (West End Redevelopment) from 1965-69. Most of the skid row scenes were filmed in the outer fringe of the original skid row area which was torn down a year after Fat City was filmed, in order to make way for the construction of the Crosstown Freeway, aka "Ort Lofthus Freeway".
The drama is featured in the documentary Visions Of Light: The Art Of Cinematography (1992) for Conrad L. Hall's use of lighting.
The melancholy "Help Me Make It Through the Night" is sung by Kris Kristofferson at the beginning and end of the movie.
Read more about this topic: Fat City (film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“Constant revolutionizing of production ... distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The growing of food and the growing of children are both vital to the family’s survival.... Who would dare make the judgment that holding your youngest baby on your lap is less important than weeding a few more yards in the maize field? Yet this is the judgment our society makes constantly. Production of autos, canned soup, advertising copy is important. Housework—cleaning, feeding, and caring—is unimportant.”
—Debbie Taylor (20th century)