07/23/2026
Tomorrow night, Friday July 23, 8pm at the Hi-Pointe. Come see Kurt Russell & Ox Baker brawl in Union Station, and all the other St Louis spots in 1981's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK!
Kurt Russell entered the Grand Hall of St. Louis Union Station in 1980 expecting to film a staged fight, then discovered that professional wrestler Ox Baker did not fully understand the word “staged.”
The scene belonged to Escape from New York. Russell’s Snake Plissken, already injured and trapped inside a prison version of Manhattan, must fight Baker’s enormous gladiator, Slag, before a screaming crowd. On screen, Snake looks cold and controlled. Behind the camera, Russell was trying to avoid a real trip to the hospital.
Baker stood about 6 feet 6 inches tall, nearly nine inches taller than Russell. He had spent years wrestling men trained to absorb physical contact. Movie actors worked differently, but Baker kept swinging clubs, fists and metal props with the force he understood from the ring.
Russell’s stunt double, Dick Warlock, took much of the early punishment. Baker struck him so hard that Warlock’s face became too bruised for John Carpenter to keep using him in the scene. Russell then had to step into the ring and perform more of the dangerous action himself.
“That day was a nightmare,” Russell later said.
Baker repeatedly threw a metal trash-can lid into Russell’s face. When Baker swung his weapon, some of Russell’s last-second blocks were genuine reactions rather than carefully timed choreography. Russell later admitted that he could have ended the sequence in “pretty bad shape.”
Russell asked Baker to reduce the force. The wrestler kept making contact.
Finally, Russell walked over and lightly struck Baker in a particularly sensitive part of his body. The message required no speech. Russell reportedly warned that if Baker hit him again, the next contact would not be so gentle. Carpenter later said Baker had taken parts of the fight too seriously, while Russell described him as a sweet man who simply understood real contact better than movie contact.
The pressure did not end there.
For the final blow, Snake had to swing a club fitted with large nails into the back of Slag’s head. The production attached a protective block of wood behind Baker’s skull, but Russell still had to hit one small target. A few inches in the wrong direction could have driven the prop directly into Baker’s head. Baker, suddenly aware of the danger, became nervous. Russell swung and hit the wooden block correctly.
The fight took roughly two days to complete. Under the lights, Russell sweated so heavily that the fake cobra tattoo painted across Snake’s stomach began rubbing away. Carpenter watched his former Disney star fight exhaustion, flying props and a wrestler Russell called “half-crazed.”
That contrast mattered.
Only a few years earlier, audiences associated Kurt Russell with clean-cut Disney productions. The financial backers behind Escape from New York reportedly preferred established tough actors such as Charles Bronson, Chuck Norris or Tommy Lee Jones. Carpenter chose Russell, who built Snake’s rasping voice, suggested the eyepatch and remained in character between takes because he wanted to destroy his lightweight image.
The eyepatch even damaged Russell’s depth perception when he wore it too long. During the fight, he had to judge Baker’s movements, block real contact and strike a hidden wooden target while seeing the set through only one eye.
One year later, audiences watched Snake Plissken move through the film as though nothing could frighten him. In 1982, Russell reunited with Carpenter for The Thing, playing another isolated man forced to survive through instinct, suspicion and controlled panic.
Kurt Russell did not escape his Disney image by pretending to look dangerous.
He escaped it inside a wrestling ring, while a real wrestler kept trying to hit him.
