6 Game-Changing Original Plans You Didn't Know About The Warriors

6. All Principal Characters Were Supposed To Be A Different Race.

In the film, only Cleon, Cochise and Snow were African-American, and Rembrandt was mixed-race, whereas the majority of the gang were caucasian. Swan, Vermin, Cowboy, Ajax and Fox were originally intended to also be African-American, with Mercy intending to be of Puerto-Rican descent. This was to reflect the true “vision of the novel”, with Director Walter Hill adding that “it really only makes sense if you do it all black and hispanic”. He elaborates that “the studio was not very keen on that idea”.

In the true spirit of the conservative late 70s, Paramount Studios seemed to be illustrating it’s belief in ‘minority show ghetto’, which is an idea that “fiction centred on a minority cannot entertain or otherwise appeal to people outside of that race”. An idea as ludicrous as The Hi-Hats themselves. Hill was only staying true to form, as the basis of the film, a novel of the same name by Sol Yurick (1965), included an all black gang of protagonists.

There is a silver lining perhaps to this commercially-motivated ethnic cleansing by Paramount Studios, in that it allowed Hill to ultimately go all in on his comic book-inspired style of the film - “the studio forced me into the comic book idea, as it was about the only way I could make it all make sense to myself. You had to create a different kind of reality”.