Charlie Ahearn's "Wild Style" Era New York

"Because I'm the guy that did Wild Style, people burden me with way too much," Charlie Ahearn says. All too frequently, representatives from today's emerging scenes ask Ahearn to pioneer their movement. It's no suprise that after writing and directing a film that encapsulates a culture as well as Wild Style did, Ahearn would be in such high demand.

30 years after his humble hip-hop film debuted (and subsequently sold out) in a seedy Times Square theater, the director is still very entrenched in the culture he helped to thrust into the spotlight. Ahearn travels the world to participate in the street art scene throughout Europe, a phenomena he likens to the subway car era of graffiti. Only, you know, slightly more legal. And, back in New York City, Ahearn still regularly attends Zulu Nation events and Rock Steady anniversaries.

Last month, the former castmembers of Wild Style reunited for an anniversary celebration at East River Amphitheater, the site of the film's iconic final jam, a gathering Ahearn likened to "a big giant family clambake. It felt very personal."

To celebrate the film's milestone, Ahearn shared his personal photos, many of which are unreleased. The images act a time capsule, offering a view of a time and place Ahearn himself injected into our imaginations three decades ago.

Lest you get nostalgic, Ahearn urges us to appreciate the culture at present as it evolves. “Just because it’s happening," he says, "we shouldn’t take it for granted."

Words by Shanté Cosme
Photos by Charlie Ahearn

RELATED: Wild Style Then and Now: A Photographic Retrospective
RELATED: The Players Behind Wild Style Speak to Complex

"It was seeing Lee's murals in 1977 that really turned me onto Lee as a great artist and really made me feel like I'd really like to make something with Lee. And you know, I wasn't looking at his subway trains; I was looking at his handball courts."

"Obviously, I rode the subway, so I was very aware of what was happening on the subways, but it was his handball courts that really knocked me out because I didn't necessarily connect the trains he had running with these murals. It was beyond me, it was way too complicated of a thing to really straighten out. It was Lee's handball courts that really first inspired me."

"It was Lee's idea because he has this silver surfer in the middle of it, and I think he wanted to be futuristic. So,[Lee] had originally painted it in 1979, and then he came and repainted it in 1979 to write 1990. 1990 was written there when the movie was shot in 1981. It was more like the way Futura called himself Futura 2000."

"That was only a backdrop of the chase scene when we shot in '81, but I always remembered what that looked like at night when it was lit and that inspired me to reshoot the opening of the scene to have Lee's character come down over the edge of that wall with a rope because I like the idea that he was kind of like Spiderman. It created a kind of superhero effect to his character and a narrative dramatic opening, which the film had lacked."

"It's also adjacent to his studio nearby in the second floor of an abandoned building. He would open up the door and sneak in there. There was no electricity in there and the roof had a huge hole in it. You could see the Manhattan Bridge through the roof."

"Fort Apache, The Bronx was a movie that was released in 1979. It was melodramatic, it was racist, and it created an image for the rest of the world of the South Bronx as teaming with drug addicts and violent, mindless people. And in the middle of this was this police force and they called their police station Fort Apache, the Bronx. You can get the racial significance. Like, referring to a cowboy movie of white settlers surrounded by Indians."

"There's just so many wrong ideas in the movie that I think when I came to make my film, I really didn't feel like I had to do anything to really underline to people that Bronx was a place of tragedy or a place of poverty. I really felt like in my movie, because the Fort Apache movie was so ingrained in peoples brains in 1980, my job was more to deflate those things. Like, when the kids surround the car and Pattie's inside and they're outside with baseball bats. In Fort Apache, they would've attacked her with the baseball bats. Or when Pattie comes out with Lee, and they're outside the Dixie Club and those guys roll up on her with the shotgun. In Fort Apache, they would've blown her head off. It would've been a really bloody melodrama. So, I was reacting to that. I chose to deflate it with a sense of humor."

"There was a people's convention in the Bronx the Summer of 1980 where political groups were meeting to protest economic inequality. The state of the world. The state of the Bronx. Government, and the government not helping. So, I went up there at that time and was looking at all the John Fekner stencils that he had done on the walls and one of the stencils he did was the word 'decay.' The 'last hope' is also his stencil and I thought that was really beautiful the way it was positioned there."

"Ronald Reagan came and he was campaigning for presidency. And he was talking about the Democrats and how there needed to be a change and how the Democrats had ignored the poor. And it was really funny because he positioned himself in front of the wall that Fekner had painted the stencil words that had said, 'Broken Promises'. And, and I had always thought that was a comment on Reagan, but the truth is, Reagan positioned himself in front of that on purpose. And the broken promises he was referring to were [those of] the Democrats, not the Republicans."

"Crash painted that, and Crash was very involved in the movie. Crash was cast was cast as one of the central characters. He was sort of the leader of the union outside of Lady Pink. Remember Lady Pink says, 'You are painting on Crash's canvas.' In the movie, Crash doesn't have much of a role. But he was always designed as one of the leading graffiti writers outside of Lee. Because he really was in real life."

"He painted that mural and I liked the fact that he painted that mural because later when we go to the Dixie Club they're all painting that mural. And Pattie Astor says to Pink, 'Can you explain what you're doing?' and she says, 'We're painting store signs.' so that sort of set it in motion before you see The Dixie. It's a real document that they were creating. They were all getting money to paint people's signs."

"Dondi and Zephyr were close, and they painted trains. And Dondi was sort of considered, besides Lee, the greatest subway writer at that time. I had always considered Dondi for the lead role of Zorro because Lee basically never said he wanted to do the role; he never really agreed to it the whole year I was working on the movie. So I had to have some back up ideas and my backup idea was to shoot the movie with Dondi. Which would've been great. Dondi is, he's really...he's no longer with us, but he was very handsome and very intelligent and very great to work with. So when I mentioned to Zephyr and Dondi that I was interested in going into a subway yard, Dondi agreeded to do that. So we went into the subway yard and they had designs for a train that was going to say 'Heroin Kills' because one of their close friends had just died from a heroin overdose."

"I was starting to go out for fun and for my scientific approach to the movie, which meant that I wanted to experience everything first hand. So, I did, I did go to yards occasionally. I had some designs of my own that I wanted to paint on the train. I painted the little hot stuff character, Zephyr painted the word 'Heroin,' and Dondi painted the word 'Kills.'"

"Over the winter [of 1981] when I was editing I was really bothered by the fact that Lee had painted this elaborate mural in the back of the Amphitheatre of himself as the Zorro character. I shot a whole scene of him painting that backdrop and then when I came that afternoon to shoot the amphitheatre scene, overnight Lee had gone in by himself and painted over the entire thing and replaced it with a star. It created an enormous problem for me as a filmmaker of some narrative sensibility. It made no sense; it was like I had set this whole thing in motion and he just cut it and changed it without talking to me."

"It disturbed me for months and as I was trying to edit the film. I was thinking, 'This ending makes no sense. I have to do something with the ending.' And, I must have been muttering a lot about this because one night late at night my wife had just had enough and she said, 'Zorro, Zorro, Zorro, all you talk about is Zorro. The rappers are going to be coming down to the amphitheatre; they're the real stars of this movie.' And then I looked at her and gave her a hug, and she said, "What did I say?" And I said, you just gave me the ending of my movie."