Carpenter, Hill Plan 'Clue' After N.Y. 'Escape' [The Hollywood Reporter/Oct 23/1980/US] By Sharon Lee Dobuler


Principal photography was completed here yesterday a week ahead of schedule on the third and highest-budgeted feature thus far made by the team of horror master John Carpenter and producer Debra Hill.

Hill told The Hollywood Reporter that she hoped this production would lead both herself and Carpenter away from the horror genre. "Even The Fog was supposed to be simply a ghost story, but our critics wanted us to compete with Halloween," she said. Halloween, coauthored by the team, was shot in only 20 days on a $300,000 budget.

Hill said she would like to move on to the production of westerns and musicals in addition to terror films. To this end, she has bought the rights to Clue, a Parker Brothers game, and she plans to make a whodunit for Polygram and Universal.

"We are going to use the characters from the game and invent a new character, Detective Parker, who will solve the crime. I want it to go along the route of suspense with comic relief. I don't want to make another Neil Simon or Agatha Christie mystery," she said. Thus far, no director or screenwriter has been chosen.

Escape From New York, a $7 million motion picture to be released next summer by Avco-Embassy, shot for three months in futuristic locations scattered over five states: Georgia, Missouri, California, Nevada and New York.

The film, directed and coscripted by Carpenter, depicts a nightmarish New York City, in the year 1997, as a maximum security prison in which the U.S. President's plane crashes. Donald Pleasence plays the President and Kurt Russell is the "anti-hero" who must rescue him.

The movie, filled with special effects and innovative cinematic techniques, used Panavision ultraspeed lenses for the first time in an entire picture in order to film New York entirely by night. "There's no day in this picture. The whole thing takes place in 24 hours in complete darkness. The only lighting comes from fires in the streets. New York City's covered with burned-down buildings and overturned cars, and is completely walled in," Hill told The Hollywood Reporter.