Production
The film co-starred Debbie Harry of Blondie fame. At the time she was cast the group were relatively unknown in their home country but this changed when "Heart of Glass" hit US #1 midway through filming. As director Marcus Reichert would later recall this considerably complicated filming. She was forbidden to sing in the film or on its' soundtrack for contractual reasons but her experiences reputedly led to the recording of the Blondie song "Union City Blue". The film also featured a small role for Pat Benatar, a friend of Harry's also soon to make a mainstream breakthrough in the pop charts. Harry's partner and fellow Blondie member Chris Stein performed the film's original score.
The short story written by Woolrich had been set in the 1930s but Reichert relocated it to 1953 as he felt the period fit the material better. He wrote the screenplay in eight days. The move was filmed on location in New York from March 1979. The film was cut by distributors Movielab to get a PG rating; the excised material is believed by Reichert to have been destroyed when the building it was housed in was sold to Ariflex. The film has been released on DVD by Tartan Video.
Read more about this topic: Union City (film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“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)
“... if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but it can not do without that life.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)