‘Assault on Precinct 13’ Was the Siege Thriller Done to Perfection

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Two years before writer, director and composer John Carpenter reshaped horror films with “Halloween,” he made “7Assault on Precinct 13,” a lean, violent film made on a shoestring budget and owing a debt to predecessors like Howard Hawks’ “Rio Bravo” and George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.”

Released in 1976, “Assault” is an influential but little-seen thriller. It’s possible that siege thrillers like “Die Hard” would have been made without Carpenter’s original film but they almost certainly would have felt different. The original “Assault” has been a favorite of critics and film industry types for going on 50 years. 

And “Assault” has its own off-the-screen mystery centered on the fate of its female lead: The character Leigh, a stoic and steely-eyed secretary in the police precinct house, walks off into the night at the end of the movie, ignoring a paramedic’s suggestion he treat the gunshot wound to her arm.

Laurie Zimmer, the actress who played Leigh, likewise walked away from the film industry. It wasn’t until a 2003 documentary film, made by a French filmmaker, that her life after “Assault on Precinct 13” was revealed.

Zimmer’s life post-Hollywood fits with the quiet dignity of her character, Leigh: She survives, then she walks away. And it fits with the ending of “Assault.” The characters who survive walk away with little fanfare.

From aliens to ‘The Anderson Alamo’

Carpenter had only one film to his credit, “Dark Star,” before he made “Assault.” “Dark Star” was a science fiction comedy that was as famous for the films its crew went on to make as it was for its humorous take on movies like “IT! The Terror from Beyond Space,” a thriller about an alien menacing a spaceship crew. In “Dark Star,” the alien looks like a beachball with claws and the mostly incompetent crew reacted less than heroically. 

Besides Carpenter, “Dark Star” was made by filmmakers like Carpenter’s co-writer, Dan O’Bannon, who within a couple of years wrote “Alien,” a much more serious thriller about an alien on a spaceship, as well as designers and spaceship builders, respectively, Ron Cobb and Greg Jein. 

Carpenter went on, of course, to make “Halloween,” released in 1978 and progenitor of a couple of generations of slasher horror films. There’d be no “Scream” without “Halloween,” or it would be dramatically different.

Before Carpenter made “Halloween,” though, he made “Assault on Precinct 13,” with a reported budget of less than $100,000, shot in 20 days in an old film studio as well as a former police precinct in Venice, California.

The plot is simple and its siege theme is familiar to those who’ve seen “Rio Bravo,” director Howard Hawks’ 1959 Western starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, Walter Brennan and Ricky Nelson as lawmen, washed-up or green, who occupy a sheriff’s office surrounded by outlaws. An early, working title for “Assault” was “The Anderson Alamo,” named after the L.A. neighborhood where it takes place and the John Wayne-led siege movie.

Austin Stoker, who had played the human lead in “Battle for the Planet of the Apes” in 1973, plays Bishop, a police lieutenant assigned to oversee the closing of a police precinct in a crime-riddled L.A. neighborhood. There’s no significant police presence left at the station and two administrative staffers – Leigh, played by Laurie Zimmer, and Julie, played by Nancy Loomis – are among the handful of those left. The phones are due to be shut off soon and the electricity will follow.

But those utilities are gone even before they’re supposed to be cut off, thanks to a violent street gang that had been ambushed by police the night before and is seeking revenge. The remaining gang members – scores of them, seemingly, moving silently through the darkness like zombies from a Romero movie – cut off the station and plan to avenge their gang brothers who were gunned down by police. The gang also wants to kill a man (Martin West) who fled to the station after he killed the gang member who brutally killed his daughter, played by Kim Richards.

It is Richards’ brutal and bloody shooting by the gang that made some moviegoers take “Assault” seriously and others reject it as too harsh. Richards, a pigtailed TV and film actress, barely in her teens in the mid-1970s, had in 1975 starred in the Disney flick “Escape to Witch Mountain.” She is such a smiling, likable presence in her scenes in “Assault” that you expect Carpenter will use her as a frightened but courageous character in the police station siege. Nope. Richards is shot as she eats an ice cream cone. Her death emphasizes that Carpenter is not effing around.

Key to the way the siege plays out are two convicts, Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston) and Wells (Tony Burton, formerly Apollo Creed’s manager in the “Rocky” movies) who are being transported to prison when their bus ends up at the nearly deserted precinct. 

Wilson and Wells join forces with Bishop and Leigh in trying to fend off the gang members who have them surrounded. Burton is just letter perfect as Wells, a type of character in every stress-filled movie. usually played by Bill Paxton. You need a guy like Wells who curses his bad luck and has borderline panic attacks. 

Joston is revelatory as Wilson, who off-handedly asks anyone in sight for a cigarette and knows his way around a shotgun. He’s a good guy to have on hand for a siege and he and Leigh exchange meaningful looks but nothing more, not even a brief clinch.

Joston is an actor who should have had a long career in high-profile films, much like Stoker should have. Joston did have a couple of other good roles, in David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” and Carpenter’s “The Fog,” as Dr. Phibes. (Not that Dr. Phibes.)

But it’s Zimmer who gives so little and yet so much with her quiet and underplayed performance in “Assault.” 

That, along with her exit from Hollywood, has made her a focus of Hollywood curiosity.

 

‘She just disappeared’

Zimmer was like a lot of actresses in the 1970s – or any decade – working in low-budget or exploitation films and hoping for their big break. 

She got good reviews for her turn as Leigh, a character reportedly named after screenwriter Leigh Brackett, who wrote or co-wrote not only “Rio Bravo” and “The Big Sleep” but “The Empire Strikes Back.” The Los Angeles Times wrote in November 1976, “Most impressive is a trio of excellent performances from Stoker as the unflappable cop, Joston as the heroic convict and Zimmer as a brittle and sexy secretary.”

After making the film, Zimmer performed in Los Angeles theater and by 1979 had changed her professional name to Laura Fanning. By that time, she had appeared in a few films, including two made in France, as well as a 1979 TV movie, “The Survival of Dana,” which starred former “Little House on the Prairie” star Melissa Sue Anderson.

It was, apparently, Zimmer’s last movie role.

Fast forward to 2003 and the release of “Do You Remember Laurie Zimmer,” a documentary film by French filmmaker Charlotte Szlovak. Zimmer had starred in “Slow City, Moving Fast,” a film that Szlovak had made in Los Angeles in 1977. In the film – clips of which are used in the documentary – Zimmer played an actress looking for work.

Szlovak and Zimmer fell out of contact after “Slow City, Moving Fast,” and more than 20 years later, the French filmmaker wanted to re-establish contact with her friend – and make a movie about it.

Szlovak retraced, as well as she could, Zimmer’s steps in Los Angeles, going to places where she once had lived and interviewing director Carpenter and co-star Stoker. “She just disappeared off the face of the Earth,” Carpenter recalls.

Szlovak hires a truck-mounted billboard featuring Zimmer’s picture, the question “Do you remember Laurie Zimmer, also known as Laura Fanning?” and a phone number to call. It’s an arresting publicity stunt and tool.

Szlovak finally gets a call from Zimmer, who is living a few hours away in San Francisco and heard Szlovak was looking for her. The film ends with the implication that Szlovak is going to San Francisco to see her old friend. There’s no on-camera reunion, however, leaving some unresolved questions and a noirish gray sky over the highway between L.A. and San Francisco.

The ripples of the original film continued into the 21st Century, and not just with Szlovak’s documentary. “Assault” was remade, to little result, in 2005, in a version starring Ethan Hawke and Laurence Fishburne. The remake wasn’t a hit and has none of the goodwill earned by the original.

Carpenter himself had made several films that rework the siege theme from “Assault,” including his 1982 classic “The Thing,” 1987’s “Prince of Darkness” and scenes of the final attack of Michael Myers in “Halloween.” None of his films following “Assault on Precinct 13” have been as fully realized in terms of a great story of people trapped somewhere while violent, opposing forces surround them.

For Carpenter, after he had made “Assault on Precinct 13,” it was perhaps a case of “been there, done it to perfection.”

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