Escape from New York deleted opening scene with commentary by Carpenter & Russell

I adore Escape from New York. I watched it roughly a million times when I was a kid and hoped to one day grow up and be even slightly as cool as Snake Plissken. That mission has since been accomplished, but I have always craved more Plissken.

Also when I was a kid, I read the book by Mike McQuay. Which I remember being brilliant. For years I had thought that maybe I had dreamt the book but it is now listed on Amazon. Here is a link. It is out of print, so while I assure you it is a superb book, I wouldn’t recommend buying it at the ludicrous prices they are charging.

Here is the cover:

There have been numerous talks of bringing Plissken back but the original ideas were all scuppered when Escape from New York was followed by the less than admired Escape from LA. There have been numerous attempts to reboot the series, one with Gerard Butler – I quite like the guy but he is no Plissken, and another with Josh Brolin – which would be fucking cool.

It is hard to imagine a version of Plissken movies without the astoundingly awesome combo of Kurt Russell and John Carpenter. (See also: The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China. See them!) Anyway, you can read more about all that on the Wikipedia page.

I mention all this because as a kid having watched Escape from New York and then reading the book, I remembered the novel starting with Snake committing some kind of crime. I can’t remember much, to be honest, but I remember there being corridors and chases.

Recently, I was looking at Quora for some reason and there was a discussion about the film and a link to the opening scene of Escape from New York – the 12 minutes that was cut. I didn’t know this existed until today. As an added bonus, it has commentary by John Carpenter AND Kurt Russell. It’s brilliant and they sound like mates having worked together so successfully on multiple occasions.

So, without further ado, here is the opening scene.