The film's producer, Gill Champion, remembers things a little differently. Shattering porcelain from six or seven stories is a pretty exciting event.'Įxciting enough to make it into the film - the same thing happens in the movie, when rioters throw a toilet off the roof at cops. 'We had a couple of incidents where got on the rooftops and threw things down at the crew,' he says. Nowak says the producers would deliberately try to keep the shooting locations secret to avoid clashes with demonstrators and other angry residents. And the police presence made it even more difficult. 'They started demonstrating and wanting to obstruct shooting.

'It got tense,' says Christopher Nowak, the art director for the film. 'And yes, there were security concerns on their part.' 'Some of the protesters did go a little too far,' Borrero says.

The committee demanded changes to the script, and threatened to sue. But film something that was not totally true.'īorrero and his fellow activists got a copy of the script before shooting started, and they complained that most of the black and Puerto Rican characters portrayed in the film were pimps or drug addicts or worse. This was our territory, and they were an invading force,' says Gerson Borrero, who in 1980 was part of a group of local activists who called themselves the Committee Against Fort Apache. Community activists who had remained in the South Bronx were not happy to see a high-profile Hollywood production arrive. Hundreds of landlords resorted to setting buildings on fire to collect insurance money.

By 1980, two-thirds of the people who lived in the precinct had fled. The 41st Precinct earned another - not unrelated - nickname, too: Little House on the Prairie. Played by Newman, Murphy is a tough but honest cop who cheerfully keeps order on his beat, delivers the occasional baby and flirts with a nurse at the local hospital. 'Our lockers were on the third floor, and somebody from across the street shot arrows through the window,' Tessitore says.įort Apache, The Bronx is loosely based on the experiences of Tessitore and another former officer, who were the inspiration for the main character, a cop named Murphy. cavalry outpost located on Native American land and the John Ford film that depicted the conflict between the Army and the Apaches.įormer cop Peter Tessitore, who worked at the 41st Precinct in the 1960s, remembers how the building got its name. That's how the station house in the 41st Precinct earned the nickname 'Fort Apache,' after the 19th century U.S. Credit: By permission, Producers Circle CompanyĪt the time, New York City cops really did talk about the neighborhood as hostile territory.

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