14 Epic Facts About ‘Streets of Fire’

Four decades ago, director Walter Hill released a strange, genre-hopping film that would go on to be one of the great cult classics of the 1980s. It might not have succeeded at the box office, but in the years since, Streets of Fire has become a kind of secret handshake for movie lovers, an action-romance-Western-musical that was both ahead of its time and a singular time capsule of a particular time and place in cinema history.

Below are 14 facts about the making of Streets of Fire, from its thrilling beginnings to its casting process to the decision to reshoot the entire finale.

1. Streets of Fire started because of 48 Hrs.
2. Paramount Pictures didn’t want Streets of Fire (and Walter Hill didn’t want Paramount).
3. The film was intended to be part of a trilogy.
4. The title was inspired by a Bruce Springsteen song (sort of).
5. The Universal backlot was covered with a tarp for night scenes.
6. Several up-and-coming stars were in contention for the part of Tom Cody.
7. Amy Madigan’s role was originally written for a man.
8. Diane Lane was up against one other major ‘80s star for the Ellen Aim role.
9. Elizabeth Daily asked for (and got) more material for her character.
10. Diane Lane’s singing was dubbed by two different vocalists.
11. The ending was originally much darker.
12. The final song had to be reshot. 
13. Streets of Fire was initially a flop.
14. There's an unofficial sequel that Michael Paré was duped into starring in.

Streets of Fire started because of 48 Hrs.

The real story behind the making of Streets of Fire began two years before the film was released in 1984, and it was on the set of a very different movie. Writer/director Walter Hill and screenwriter Larry Gross were working together at the time on the buddy-cop film 48 Hrs., and executives at Paramount Pictures were impressed with what they were seeing. 

Sensing an opportunity to capitalize on the Eddie Murphy star vehicle, Hill pitched Gross on the idea that they write another movie together. He came to the set of 48 Hrs. one day with pages of notes, which would eventually form the basis of Streets of Fire.

“Walter and I talked about it and he said, ‘I’ve always wanted to do a movie about the hero of a comic book. But I don’t like any of the comic books I read, so I want it to be an original character,” Gross recalled to Slashfilm in 2016. “He wanted to create his own ‘comic book movie,’ without the source material actually being a comic book.”

Paramount Pictures didn’t want Streets of Fire (and Walter Hill didn’t want Paramount).

After the success of 48 Hrs., Streets of Fire producers Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver just assumed the project would stick with Paramount Pictures (the same studio), where Gordon had an overall deal already, and studio heads were excited by the success of the buddy-cop movie.

But certain major players had other ideas. According to Gross, Paramount’s then-head of production, Michael Eisner, rejected the film because Tom Cody, the film’s Western-inspired action hero, seemed a lot like Indiana Jones, another Paramount hero (among other reasons).

For his part, Hill made it clear that he didn’t want to make another movie at Paramount, citing “hard feelings” over his previous gang movie, The Warriors. He had “hard feelings” over the production of 48 Hrs., too. Silver and Gordon took the project to Universal Pictures, where Streets of Fire was promptly greenlit. 

The film was intended to be part of a trilogy.

To help sell Streets of Fire to studio executives and to build on the comic book-like concept that helped launch the whole story, Hill actually subtitled early drafts of the film The Adventures of Tom Cody, Book One. Not only that, but he envisioned the movie as the first in a trilogy of films that would follow Cody on more adventures.

According to script pages from the time, the second film would have been called The Far City and the working title for the third was Cody's Return. The lack of commercial success from Streets of Fire meant the sequels never materialized, but Hill later noted, “I don’t think it would have been a problem” to write them. 

The title was inspired by a Bruce Springsteen song (sort of).

Before there was a film version of Streets of Fire, there was “Streets of Fire” the song, a track from Bruce Springsteen’s 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town. Hill claims he didn’t initially think of the song when he came up with the film’s title, despite the clear link in wording.

Over time, though, as more and more people read the script Hill co-wrote with Larry Gross, they kept mentioning Springsteen’s tune in conjunction with the movie. Finally, Hill relented and put lyrics from “Streets of Fire” on one of the title pages for the script in the hope that it would help sell the film. 

The Universal backlot was covered with a tarp for night scenes.

To create the “another time, another place” feel of Streets of Fire, Hill shot most of the movie on the Universal Studios backlot, making use of sets that were somewhat augmented to add grit and a sort of retro-future vibe to the film. Hill liked the “artificiality” provided by the backlot, and the set designs absolutely worked for the vaguely dystopian setting, but there was one problem. 

The Universal backlot was right next door to Los Angeles’s Toluca Lake neighborhood, which meant that night shoots featuring gun battles and explosions were out. The production opted to tent the entire lot with a massive black tarp to get around this and to simulate the look of nighttime during the day. It worked, but not before several members of the crew had to wrestle against LA winds to clamp the tarp in place.

Several up-and-coming stars were in contention for the part of Tom Cody.

For the role of Tom Cody, the production looked at a couple of big emerging names in Hollywood at the time. According to Gross, Tom Cruise rejected an offer to play the character. At the same time, Eric Roberts was locked into the role before suddenly pulling out. Finally, after a viewing of Eddie and the Cruisers, Walter Hill found his man in Michael Paré. 

Amy Madigan’s role was originally written for a man.

Amy Madigan initially auditioned for the role of Reva, Tom Cody's sister—a part that eventually went to Deborah Van Valkenburgh. But Madigan had other ideas. In the original script, there was a sidekick character named Mendez, described as a large man of Mexican descent who’d serve as Cody’s right-hand man throughout the flick.

Madigan immediately saw something in the character that she liked, so she pitched the filmmakers the idea of changing the character’s gender. Hill and Gross agreed because they liked Madigan’s energy and performance, then after casting her, they changed the character’s name to McCoy.

Diane Lane was up against one other major ‘80s star for the Ellen Aim role.

When it came time to cast Ellen Aim, the rising rock star who also happens to be Tom Cody’s ex-lover, two rising ’80s stars were up for the part. On the one hand, there was Diane Lane, fresh off making both The Outsiders and Rumble Fish for Francis Ford Coppola. On the other, there was Daryl Hannah, who’d just appeared in Blade Runner and Summer Lovers, among other roles.

According to Michael Paré, he met with Hannah in pre-production of the film, and he believed she was the top choice. In the end, though, Hannah went off to make Splash with Ron Howard, so the role went to Lane, who turned 18 during production on Streets of Fire. 

Elizabeth Daily asked for (and got) more material for her character.

For the role of Baby Doll—a fan of Ellen’s who helps Tom, Ellen, McCoy, and Ellen’s boyfriend and manager, Billy Fish (Rick Moranis), get across the city and avoid a rival biker gang—the production turned to Elizabeth Daily. The actress had already appeared in films like Valley Girl but later became best known as the voice of Tommy Pickles on Rugrats.

According to Daily, she could see why she was offered the role, but she saw Baby Doll as just a “little body” who moved around the screen, not a fully formed character. Frustrated by the character’s limitations, she asked Hill to add more dialogue, and Hill obliged. Daily claimed that the scene in which Baby Doll and Ellen talk about Ellen’s emotional resonance as a singer was added at Daily’s request.

“He was very sweet and actually wrote a scene into the movie,” Daily later said of Hill. 

Diane Lane’s singing was dubbed by two different vocalists.

Soundtrack producer Jimmy Iovine and songwriter Jim Steinman turned to not one but two different vocalists to create Ellen Aim’s singing voice within the film. Iovine and Steinman recruited singers Laurie Sargent and Holly Sherwood, then combined their voices under the band name Fire Inc.

Sargent was best known at the time for her work in the band Face To Face, and her bandmates actually appear in the film as Ellen’s backing band, The Attackers. Meanwhile, Sherwood had worked as a backup vocalist for acts like Bonnie Tyler and Air Supply. Both added their voices to Steinman’s songs “Nowhere Fast” and “Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young,” as well as other soundtrack titles like “Sorcerer” and “Never Be You.”

The ending was originally much darker.

Streets of Fire’s climactic scene features a now-legendary sledgehammer duel between Tom Cody and biker-gang leader Raven (Willem Dafoe), which ends when—spoiler—Cody gets the upper hand, knocks Raven over, and allows Raven’s fellow gang members to haul him away in disgrace. It’s a victory for the good guys, but according to Michael Paré, it was almost a much darker one.

“In the original script, Willem is kicking my ass. Well, Raven is kicking my ass. And I pull a knife out of my boot and I stab him and kill him,” Paré told IndieWire. “That was in the original script. When we got to Hollywood, they said, ‘Wait a minute, there’s a much bigger audience who would appreciate it if you don’t kill him.’ In Walter Hill’s draft, it’s ‘don’t lose at all costs.’ That was the undercurrent. When they took that knife out where I kill him, it changed the whole story and the whole character. It added honor and nobility to Tom Cody instead of just a guy who will not fucking lose.”

The final song had to be reshot. 

After all the talk about Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Fire,” Universal and soundtrack producer Jimmy Iovine were eager to get the rights to the song for use in the film’s big closing number. Iovine, who’d worked with Springsteen on Born To Run, was sure that he could make it happen, and Hill and company went ahead with shooting “Streets of Fire” as the final song. 

Cut to the end of production, and Springsteen’s camp ultimately denied rights to the song despite the hopes of the Streets of Fire team. That left the filmmakers in a pickle because they not only needed a new song but a whole new set. The musical numbers had been shot in the Wiltern Theatre in LA while it was mid-restoration, but by the reshoot, the theater had been restored and thus wouldn’t look the same. On top of all that, Lane had already moved on to other films and cut her Ellen Aim hair, plus there was no final song left to close the film. 

Hill claimed that editor Freeman Davies had been able to cut together a suitable ending, using the Sorrels’ performance of “I Can Dream About You” as the new closing song. Still, Universal wanted an original for the finale. That meant Jim Steinman had to write one and it had to happen fast.

Steinman would later recall writing “Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young” in just two days, while producers rebuilt the theater interior on a soundstage. Lane was also called back in and fitted with a wig. The final number was reshot, and audiences got another epic rock classic from Steinman in the process. 

Streets of Fire was initially a flop.

Universal Pictures didn’t really know what to make of Streets of Fire as it barreled toward its 1984 release. According to filmmakers, the action-romance-musical-comic book hybrid was tough to market, and it seemed to the crew that the studio had basically thrown up their hands.

By the time the film hit theaters, the writing was on the wall. Gross claimed he found out the film flopped while on the set of another Walter Hill production (which he had no part in making).

“Well, Walter and Joel (Silver), as was their wont, set up another movie. This one I was not involved in: a comedy called Brewster’s Millions with Richard Pryor,” Gross told Slashfilm. “And they were shooting, and I came down to set. And Joel got off the phone with Universal and said, ‘We’re dead.’ We sat down, I remember, in a little park. In downtown LA. And we started giggling, in that way people do when things are terrible.”

There's an unofficial sequel that Michael Paré was duped into starring in.

Hill planned Streets of Fire as the first film in a trilogy of movies starring Tom Cody. Sadly, Hill never got to make those movies, but that doesn’t mean no one ever tried to resurrect the character.

In 2008, director Albert Pyun (The Sword and the Sorcerer) released Road to Hell, an unofficial sequel to Streets of Fire. Paré reprised his role as Tom Cody for it, with Deborah Van Valkenburgh returning as his sister Reva. To say it was not well-received would be putting it lightly (it doesn’t even have a rating on Rotten Tomatoes); according to Paré, he was basically tricked into making it in the first place.

“{Pyun} called me up, “Mike, we have this girl who’s going to do a Diane Lane imitation,” Paré told IndieWire. “And I’m like, ‘And this is alright with Walter and Universal?’ He said, ‘Yeah yeah yeah.’ And he was just lying and lying and lying. I think I was on it for five days. And it was a complete fuck up. I’m kind of ashamed I didn’t call Walter and say, ‘Walter, is this OK?’ But Deborah Van Valkenburgh was there also. So, I thought, Alright, it must be on the up and up. Deborah is a very honorable and noble person also.”

Additional Sources: Shotguns and Six Strings: The Making of a Rock 'n' Roll Fable (Shout! Studios, 2017)

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