WUXIA FLICKS, THE WARRIORS & MORE: A Chat With Chris Poggiali

One of Schlockmania’s great pleasures in 2025 was covering the excellent expanded reissue of These Fists Break Bricks and Armies Of The Night, the absorbing history of the cult film The Warriors. Both books were co-written by Chris Poggiali, who recently took some time out of an action-packed schedule to answer a set of questions from yours truly about both books and a few related topics. Read on to learn a lot about martial arts cinema, the complex history of The Warriors and what it’s like to research and write about such topics. Grab a drink and some snacks because you’ll want to devote some time to reading these detailed responses.

1) The original version of These Fists Break Bricks was well-liked here at Schlockmania Headquarters and elsewhere. How did the reissue come about?

The first edition was published by Mondo, the merchandising subsidiary of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain. When the contract with them was signed in 2019, they wanted to get into the publishing field. By the time of the book’s launch at Fantastic Fest two years later, the Alamo Drafthouse theaters were just starting to reopen from the pandemic, the company had a new CEO and had undergone restructuring after going in and out of chapter 11 bankruptcy, and the book’s pub date was delayed until 2022 because of supply chain issues. Mondo was sold to Funko a short time later, but the book stayed with the Alamo Drafthouse because it was going to be a major component in the chain’s kung fu-themed Staten Island theater, which opened in July 2022. Grady and I wrote over 50 museum placards for the posters that are displayed on the walls of that theater and its Flying Guillotine bar, but a couple of months after its grand opening we were negotiating to get the rights to the book so we could take it to a different publisher. By February 2023 we had a new graphic designer, Kelli McAdams, doing a total overhaul on the layout for a smaller trim size and a year later we found a new home for it at Running Press. Most of the new writing was done in June-July 2024.

2) A selling point of this reissue is that it has been revised to include new material. Can you describe how the revision process worked for TFBB and how the new version differs from the first edition?

We were very fortunate to get a second chance with this book, so we seized that opportunity and really crammed this edition with a lot of new content. First of all, we reinstated material that had been cut from the first edition, like the section on martial arts novels and a sidebar about Tiger Yang and Abflex. Then we made a list of existing sections we felt could be expanded, like the Flyover Fighters section and the material pertaining to Jackie Chan and his attempts to break into the U.S. market. Some of the new content originated in different form. For example, there’s a caption about Warhawk Tanzania on page 230 that I wrote in 2022 for a placard that’s hanging next to a Devil’s Express poster in the kung fu-themed Alamo Drafthouse on Staten Island (I believe some of the info on Donnie Yen and Jet Li in the new edition came from placards that Grady wrote, also for that same theater). The Byong Yu material started out as a Facebook post I put together for Yu’s birthday a couple of years ago. The Dynamite Brothers grew from an interview I did with Sam Sherman while I was working on his autobiography, When Dracula Met Frankenstein, in 2017. And then there’s all the new writing we did in 2024, like the directory of ‘80s video companies and the chapter on Alexander Fu Sheng. When we finished, we realized that we had added so much new material that we didn't have any pages left for our source notes! So if you're wondering where all of the quotes came from, we've uploaded that information to our website, www.thesefistsbreakbricks.com, under “Sources Cited.”

3) Is there a topic you were particularly excited to be able to add or expand upon in the new edition?

I think Grady and I were most excited about the African Atto addition. Although that story has been reported in the press a number of times in the past 50 years, we wanted to get it out in the world again but within the context of the martial arts movement. Also, that magazine ad was nowhere to be found online before our book’s publication. We were also pleased with our expansion of Jackie Chan's first trip to the U.S., which includes more about writer-producer-distributor Neva Friedenn, who passed away in 2023. Speaking of distributors, I was also really jazzed about adding four entries to our Directory of Distributors, even though two of them (In-Frame Films and Rocket Pictures) had been excised from the first edition (Another one, Silverstein Films, still didn't make the cut, so we added that entry to our website). We were also thrilled to include William Lee's incredible Super 8mm feature Treasure of the Ninja in the Flyover Fighters section of this edition.

4) If you had to recommend a lesser-known martial arts star and a lesser-known director of these films to someone who knew the basics (Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, etc.), who would you pick and why?

It's easy for me to lose perspective regarding what constitutes “the basics,” especially when I see people logging three or more movies a day on Letterboxd (I'd be happy if I could just watch one movie a day!), but thanks to a couple of interactions I've had with movie fans in the past couple of weeks, I can answer this one pretty easily. The lesser-known martial arts star who immediately comes to mind is Pearl Chang Ling, a popular Taiwanese TV actress of the '70s who became an action heroine in wu xia films like Invincible Swordswoman (1977), My Blade, My Life (1978), Witty Hand, Witty Sword (1978), and Lonely Famous Sword (1980). She also wrote, produced, and/or directed several of her films, most notably Wolf Devil Woman (1982). I choose her because, about a month ago, I was talking about female martial arts stars with a friend of mine who's been a hardcore fan of the genre since 1973 and I was surprised to learn that he'd never heard of Pearl Chang Ling or any of her movies.

Shortly after that, I noticed on Facebook that a knowledgeable film buff had attended a screening of Shogun Assassin at the New Beverly the night before and mistakenly believed that Robert Houston was the actual director of the movie. A couple of people had to explain to him that Shogun Assassin was a re-edited U.S. release version of two different Japanese movies in the Lone Wolf & Cub series from the early '70s. When he asked who actually directed the movie, I stepped in to school him on Kenji Misumi, one of the great directors of Japanese genre film. In addition to helming two thirds of the Lone Wolf & Cub movies, Misumi directed a half dozen of the best Zatoichi movies, the Satan's Sword trilogy, several of the Sleepy Eyes of Death movies, the second and arguably the best of the Daimajin movies, the final movie in the long-running Woman Gambler series, and many more (Devil's Temple, Sword Devil, Homeless Drifter, Destiny's Son), plus episodes of Hideo Gosha's The Great Silence-inspired TV series, Mute Samurai, starring Tomisaburo Wakayama. Misumi was only 54 when he died of liver failure in 1975.

5) Along similar lines, are there any deep cuts of martial arts cinema that are your first-choice picks if someone asks you for an underappreciated film that deserves more notice?

Kung fu movie fans should be familiar with the Lau Brothers and Gordon Liu from Shaw Brothers productions like The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Heroes of the East, and The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter, but I think the low budget quickies they made on their own in the late '70s and early '80s are worth seeking out: He Has Nothing but Kung Fu (1977), Dirty Kung Fu (1978), Fists and Guts (1979), Carry On Wise Guy (1980), and Shaolin and Wu Tang (1983). Also, I recommend Outlaw Brothers (1990) as a great showcase for Yukari Oshima, especially if you've only seen her playing villains (Iron Angels, Riki-Oh). And finally, two big thumbs up for all of the Union Film Company productions that were made in Taiwan between King Hu's Dragon Inn in 1967 and A Touch of Zen in 1971, including Iron Mistress (1969), A City Called Dragon (1970), The Grand Passion (1970), Rider of Revenge (1971), The Brave and the Evil (1971), and the terrific Tsai Ying-jie trilogy: The Swordsman of All Swordsmen (1968), The Bravest Revenge (1970), and The Ghost Hill (1971).

6) Your latest book, Armies Of The Night, focuses on beloved Walter Hill film The Warriors. What’s your personal story with this film and how/when did it enter your life?

I was eight years old when The Warriors opened at my local shopping mall in Syracuse, New York. I was too young to see it, but I remember being creeped out by the newspaper ads and especially the TV commercials, as well as the news reports about how it was supposedly inciting violence in movie theaters. That certainly wasn't happening in Syracuse, where the movie played its first run without incident and then returned twice during the summer of '79 to play at drive-ins with Cheech & Chong's Up in Smoke. I used to go into Camelot Music and stare at the soundtrack albums of all the movies I couldn't see, and the Warriors LP was one of my obsessions for a couple of years (along with Cheech & Chong's Up in Smoke, which was filed with C&C's other albums in the comedy section, and Caddyshack, which featured John Solie artwork that was used for some newspaper ads but not the poster). I also used to flip through the movie tie-in paperback and try to find the scenes with the face-painted baseball players, ignorant of the fact that the movie is very different from Sol Yurick's source novel from a decade and a half earlier. I do remember a couple of high school kids in my neighborhood trick-or-treating as Baseball Furies that Halloween, and also when The Warriors premiered on HBO a year later – Halloween '80, which was a Friday – and a lot of my friends watched it and were talking about it at school on Monday.    I didn't see the movie until it ran on ABC in '83, heavily edited for network TV, which was around the time I saw 48 HRS. in subrun at a discount theater and really started to become interested in Walter Hill. When Paramount Home Video started pricing their videocassettes for retail rather than rentals a few years later, The Warriors and 48 HRS. were among the first tapes I bought.

7) The stories of gang fights in the audience echoing the action on the screen during the original theatrical release have become part of the legend of The Warriors. Do the real stories live up to the legend or is the historical record different?

It's undeniable that three people were killed and several others seriously injured during the movie's first week in general release, but the point of contention for many years was whether or not the movie incited violence in audiences. Several major critics came to its defense, including Roger Ebert, who didn't even like movie. The editor at ABC who was given the task of making The Warriors suitable for prime time TV called it “an incentive to riot.” Even magazines like Bananas, which was sold to kids in schools through Scholastic Books, and Circus, which appealed mostly to young rock music fans, covered the controversy in their pages. All of that press helped make The Warriors a very big cult film, and the cult is still growing all these years later.

8) I’ve read there are some significant differences between the Sol Yurick source novel and the film’s script. What are some of the big changes – and is there an omitted element of the novel that you wish they kept in the film?

The only way to do a faithful adaptation of Sol Yurick's novel in 1978 was to make all nine lead gangmembers Black or Hispanic, but when that idea was struck down by the studio brass, Hill decided to do a slick, stylized comic book version of the story instead. For the most part, his movie sticks to the basic outline of the novel, which even has a radio DJ who sends out coded messages to the gangs. All of the changes were for the better. Even though Yurick approached The Warriors as a high concept idea that was guaranteed to sell (after his first novel was rejected by every publisher that looked at it), his characters and their actions weren't palatable to movie producers and audiences a dozen years later. The only element from the novel that I wish Hill had kept was the mechanical quick-draw shooting game in the subway arcade. The game does appear in the movie – look for the cowboy in the background when Mercy tells Swan that he's being targeted by the Punks – but it would've been a nice way to introduce Swan's quick-draw and knife-throwing skill before the surprise Yojimbo-inspired disarming of Luther at the climax.

9) Reportedly, the production of The Warriors was a troubled one. Are those struggles reflected in the finished film – and is there an element of the film that was actually sharpened up by the behind-the-scenes turmoil?

The troubles behind the scenes are evident in the finished film, but only if you know where and when to look for them. The most obvious is the awkwardly staged scene in which the Fox (played by Thomas Waites) is killed by being thrown in front of a subway train. This was done using a stand-in and a stunt double after Waites was discreetly fired. The character's sudden exit from the movie required quick rewrites that expanded the relationship between Swan and Mercy and also saved the lives of Cochise and Vermin, who were originally supposed to be killed by the Baseball Furies and the Lizzies, respectively. Waites' firing also necessitated the removal of a whole sequence in which Swan is captured by a gay leather gang called the Dingos, who obviously intend to molest him before turning him over to the Gramercy Riffs for a reward, but he escapes and then shows up at the end for the confrontation with the Rogues. If Waites hadn't been dismissed, he would've had the scene with Mercy in the subway tunnel and ended up cuddling with her on the beach during the closing credits. I find Swan a more believable match for Mercy than the Fox, so the changes that had to be made were ultimately for the better, in my opinion.

10) Both These Fists Break Bricks and Armies Of The Night were collaborations with other writers (Grady Hendrix and Michael Gingold, respectively). How did you and your collaborators divide up the work and did they bring different styles to the writing process?

Armies of the Night was written first, back in the summer of 2018. It was originally going to be published by Arrow Films as the ninth book in their short-lived series of film monographs. Mike and I outlined it for four chapters so we could write two chapters each. I wrote chapters one and three, Mike wrote two and four. As we were approaching deadline, Mike realized we were going to need a shorter fifth chapter. As I recall, he banged that out the night before the manuscript was due. We were paid and we saw the layout and at least two rounds of proofs before the Arrow Books imprint was discontinued. We bought the book back from them a couple of years later and started expanding and revising it with interviews and further research. Only chapter one stayed the way it was originally written; I added a couple of things to chapter three, but chapters two, four and five were drastically rewritten by both of us to incorporate the new research and interviews we had done since 2022.

When Grady and I started working on These Fists Break Bricks, we started off with a timeline of events, then expanded that into a detailed outline and created a Google Docs folder for all of the research and graphics we had accumulated. Grady wanted to write the first draft, so we decided that he would send me each chapter upon completion and I would then do a second draft and send it back to him. There were also quite a few sections that I wrote while he was working on the first draft: comic books, men's adventure novels, 3D movies, music, samurai and Sonny Chiba movies, the Green Hornet movies, The Silent Flute, the Directory of Distributors, a handful of the Bruceploitation bios (Yasuaki Kurata, Johnny Yune, Evan Kim, Tadashi Yamashita), a lot of the captions, and other material that's sprinkled throughout (anything having to do with Roger Corman and New World Pictures, for example). The bulk of the writing was done in 2020 during the pandemic lockdown. I remember I started writing the section on Michael Thevis while I was recovering from COVID and my brain fog was so bad that Grady had to take over and finish it. Also, we ran into a problem with the way certain events and storylines were flowing from one chapter to the next, so Grady disappeared for a few days – he pretty much locked himself inside his office with a coffeemaker – and completely restructured the middle 150-plus pages of the book. He was right, too – the changes he made were all for the better. Working so closely with him on two editions of this book has been a valuable learning experience for me.

11) Between the TFBB reissue and the new book, it’s been a busy year. Are there any other projects on tap for this year – and what does the future beyond 2025 hold for you?

It’s been a busy year for me! I wrote an article for the latest issue of Shock Cinema (#66) about rare wuxia film prints that played on 42nd Street in 1987 and are now in the archive at UW Madison. I’m recording audio commentaries for two Toei ninja movies from the 1960s that will be released on Blu-ray sometime in 2026. I wrote a booklet essay for a legendary ‘70s oddball indie film that Grindhouse Releasing will be unleashing next year, and I’m being interviewed about another rare, long unseen ‘70s indie film recently acquired by Vinegar Syndrome for release in 2026; both of these movies have been on Temple of Schlock’s “Endangered List” for over 15 years, so it’s very exciting to see them coming out at long last.

12) Finally, can you tell us about any upcoming promotions for the books? Please feel free to include any relevant links or other information.

For information on upcoming screenings and book events, check out my Facebook page, Temple of Schlock, and thesefistsbreakbricks.com!