To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) on Netflix
Secret Service agent Richard Chance works counterfeiting cases in Los Angeles. His partner, Jimmy Hart, is killed days before retirement, and Chance vows to catch the counterfeiter Eric Masters.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb7.3/1050,570 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes89%
Trailer
Plot summary
Richard Chance and Jimmy Hart are Secret Service agents assigned to counterfeiting in Los Angeles. Hart is a few days from retirement when he keeps watch on a desert warehouse belonging to Eric Masters, an artist who now makes fake currency, and is killed there. Chance has a name for acting on impulse, and he tells the agent newly paired with him, John Vukovich, that he means to bring Masters in. Vukovich goes by the book and is uneasy with his partner's methods. Chance draws information from Ruth, a woman on parole, by threatening to have her sent back to prison. Masters' mule, Carl Cody, delivers money to the attorney Max Waxman.
Cast
- Debra Feueras Bianca Torres
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Friedkin came up with the idea of staging the chase against the flow of traffic on February 25, 1963, when he was driving home from a wedding in Chicago, fell asleep at the wheel and woke in the wrong lane with oncoming traffic heading straight for him; he wondered for 20 years how to use it in a film.
- The airport had prohibited the shot of Petersen running along the top of the dividers between the moving sidewalks at Los Angeles International, fearing its insurance would not cover him; Petersen told Friedkin to do it anyway, so the director treated it as a rehearsal with the cameras rolling, angering airport officials.
- Three FBI agents from Washington, D.C. interviewed 12 to 15 crew members including Friedkin, who screened the workprint for them and offered to show the film to the Secretary of the Treasury and take out anything that was a danger to national security; that was the last he heard from the government.
- Over one million dollars of counterfeit money was produced for the film, but with three deliberate errors so that it could not be used outside the film.
SPOILER
The climactic scene in which Chance is killed was not well received by MGM executives, who considered it overly negative, so to satisfy the studio heads Friedkin shot a second ending in which Chance survives the shotgun blast.- Friedkin chose Wang Chung to compose the soundtrack because the band "stands out from the rest of contemporary music", after hearing their studio album Points on the Curve; he took one song straight off that record, "Wait", which plays over the film's end credits.
- Gerald Petievich, author of the source novel and at the time in his final weeks as a Secret Service agent, was cast in a brief cameo as an agent, along with his brother, then with the LAPD, and their father, by then a retired LAPD officer.
- Three weekends were spent on sections of the Terminal Island Freeway near Wilmington, California, closed for four hours at a time so the crew could stage the chaotic chase, and with delays the film ran a reported $1 million over budget.
