Boulevard Nights (1979) on Netflix
Raymond Avila has left gang life behind for a job and is engaged to Shady. His kid brother Chuco, a sullen low-rider, is still in the gang, and rivals have challenged it.
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- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb6.4/10964 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
Raymond Avila is an ex-gang member in East Los Angeles who holds a job and is engaged to Shady. His younger brother Chuco is a gang member and a drug user, a sullen low-rider in the neighborhood of Varrio Grande Vista. The brothers differ, yet their family bond remains strong. Raymond fills the place of the father Chuco lacks. Rivals have challenged Chuco's gang, and a neighborhood war is brewing.
Cast
- James Victoras Gil Moreno
- Jerado Carmonaas Wolf
- Jesse Aragonas Casper
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Boulevard Nights (1979)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- After the film came out, cruising on Whittier Boulevard, where the film is set, grew so out of control that law enforcement outlawed it for a time, according to actor Danny De La Paz, who played Chuco.
- Boulevard Nights began as a script written in 1977 by Desmond Nakano in Paul Schrader's screenwriting class at UCLA. Schrader had assigned students to find a Los Angeles Times article that would make a good film subject; Nakano picked one about East Los Angeles car clubs and gangs.
- Boulevard Nights was pulled from San Francisco's Alhambra Theatre and an Ontario, California drive-in after gang-related violence broke out at showings, and was picketed by protesters who said it negatively stereotyped Mexican Americans as gang members.
- Fearing a repeat of the gang violence around The Warriors, Warner Bros. and the filmmakers insisted Boulevard Nights was not a gang film but a "family story" of two brothers, and offered theater owners security at the studio's expense a week before release; fewer than half a dozen added it.
- In 2017 the Library of Congress selected Boulevard Nights for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
