before filming on that movie started: Walter presents me with a page of notes he's prepared for a new script. It will be the first in a series of adventures of an action hero he's had it in his mind to create for a long time. The character's name is Tom Cody. And Walter has it in his head to create a franchise about him...introducing him as The Stranger. He asks me if I'm interested in writing the script with him...I ask him is the Pope Catholic? Larry [Gordon] and Joel [Silver] would be along on this ride. Suits me. During 48 Hours Gross said he thought that Hill had received "a bum rap on the woman question" over the years. "People think that he doesn't like women and he knows that's not true. I think that's going to be demonstrated even more clearly in his next films. He told me he's going to do this new thing: he's going to put a female character right in the centre of the narrative." Larry Gross later said they were affected "as everyone was at the time" by the success of Flashdance and they decided during writing that the film would be a musical: We said this movie is a stylized movie, it's not so different from the world of a musical. And there were a few other things that contributed to that direction. One was the decision on Universal's part, a crazy decision, to shoot the movie almost entirely in the studio under a tarpaulin. They built this gigantic tarpaulin, and the Battery and all these other places were built as real places. The Richlands. And just so you know, this is the early ’80s and you had stylized films—like New York City—that were all done on set and that idea was in the air. That idea of a totally artificial universe. The point is that we had in mind one sentence inspired by George Lucas: "in a galaxy long ago", a futuristic past. That was in our heads...there's the past and there's the future, sort of. Walter Hill thought "the audience will go with you when you set up an abstract world with teenage values and play out a drama within this. It was kind of real but it wasn't really. I always said whenever someone says fantasy they immediately think of more Disney--esque. The idea of a hard hitting