City in Fear

Cast

Production

The film was inspired by a conversation between two friends, William Goldman and Pete Masterson. Goldman admitted he had his daughter's hair cut short and dyed back because the Son of Sam, in his letters to Jimmy Breslin of the New York Daily News, said he liked to shoot women with long, auburn hair. "That's how pervasive women's fear became," said director Jud Taylor. Goldman told Masterson "this would make a terrific TV movie" and they hired another writer to write it up. Taylor cast Mickey Rourke as the killer. "It was one of Mickey's first big parts, and he was extraordinary, and conveyed just the sense of casual menace -- he was a bag boy in a Los Angeles supermarket, for God's sake -- that we wanted.".

Director Jud Taylor later made Out of the Darkness based on the policeman who investigated the Son of Sam case,

Taylor had his name removed from the film. "After I left, the producers filmed four more point-blank murders without asking me, and I was offended," he said.