Trivia / Death Wish 4: The Crackdown

• B-Team Sequel: Michael Winner showed no interest in directing this one because he had heard that Charles Bronson had a terrible experience filming Death Wish 3. He was also pre-occupied with filming Appointment with Death.
• What Could Have Been:
  • One of the original drafted scripts for the film was based around a plot involving Kersey playing two rival gangs against each other. Another one involved Kersey being secretly hired by the government to assassinate an international warlord.
  • An earlier draft had Paul living in LA with a new girlfriend. She was subsequently murdered by crooks. Paul, fighting the urge to return to his vigilante ways, captures the crooks and hands them over to the police, but when the crooks walk on a technicality, Paul becomes the vigilante once more, and hunts them down one by one. Cannon felt this take on the series was too cerebral and didn't feature enough action. Ultimately, a more conventional storyline was chosen.
  • Gail Morgan Hickman wrote three different scripts for the film. The first featured Paul Kersey struggling with a crisis of conscience and trying to reconnect with Geri Nichols from Death Wish II. It was rejected because Jill Ireland faced her own struggle with breast cancer and was unwilling to reprise her role. The second had Kersey going after an international terrorist, and was rejected due to another upcoming film, Wanted Dead Or Alive. The final script had the premise of Kersey playing two gangs against each other.
  • Gail Morgan Hickman toyed with the idea of giving Kersey a surrogate son called Eric, to avoid repetition in having the character lose another daughter. He changed his mind and turned Eric to Erica, because he felt that the death of a girl would be a stronger echo to the original loss in Kersey's life. Hickman was also the father of a daughter and could better understand the trauma of losing a girl.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Gail Morgan Hickman re-wrote the entire script while filming. Charles Bronson constantly had problems with the dialog and he requested further rewrites of certain items of dialogue and action scenes. Hickman recalled going through several rewrites on a daily basis.

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