The producer of Star Wars. The director of Tron. Despite its pedigree, Slipstream came and went in 1989 – but now it’s back and better-looking than ever… On paper, 1989’s Slipstream should have been a hit. It was a sci-fi adventure produced by Gary Kurtz, who’d previously worked with George Lucas on Star Wars. It ... Slipstream | How a 1989 failure became a post-apocalyptic cult classic
The producer of Star Wars. The director of Tron. Despite its pedigree, Slipstream came and went in 1989 – but now it’s back and better-looking than ever…
On paper, 1989’s Slipstream should have been a hit. It was a sci-fi adventure produced by Gary Kurtz, who’d previously worked with George Lucas on Star Wars. It was directed by Steven Lisberger, who made the groundbreaking Tron. Finally, there was the cast, which included Bill Paxton, Robbie Coltrane, Ben Kingsley, F Murray Abraham – and, returning to the screen after years working on stage, Mark Hamill as the antagonist.
Instead, Slipstream was a financial failure, and spent decades languishing on poor quality VHS and bargain-basement DVD releases. So what happened?
As Lisberger told the Talking Pictures podcast in October 2025, Slipstream was a script that had been circulating around Hollywood for several years before he was attached as director; RKO Pictures had tried to get the film into production several years earlier, and even toyed with the idea of getting him to direct.
The script later reached Lisberger via Gary Kurtz, who’d worked with Lucas on American Graffiti, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. Kurtz had a falling out with Lucas, left the Lucasfilm stable, and went on to produce The Dark Crystal and Return To Oz. By 1985, Kurtz was broke and in need of a hit.
The original Slipstream script was written by Bill Bauer, who’d worked for RKO, MGM and Universal over the course of his long career. That script was then rewritten by Charles Pogue, who’d previously written Psycho III, The Fly, and later, Dragonheart. (Pogue’s name doesn’t appear in the credits – seemingly at the writer’s own request.)
Kurtz had read the Slipstream script after a recommendation from a friend. As he told Cinefantastique magazine at the time, “The original script was written several years ago by Pogue and was intended to be something of a Mad Max rip-off set in the Australian desert. I thought the basic idea was intriguing but far too violent and heavily exploitation oriented.”
“I felt it needed a lot of work,” he continued. “Our script is completely different from the Pogue original, which was based on an outline from another producer’s ramblings back in the early 80s. Pogue worked from a Huckleberry Finn travelogue base – a 14 year-old’s encounter with an android as he journeyed in the future, a coming of age saga mixed with sci-fi. But Mark Twain’s brand of narrative sarcasm was missing.”
As writer Tony Kayden told the podcast Emerging From The River Of Wind: Remembering Slipstream in 2018, he was soon brought on by Lisberger to reshape the script. He felt that Pogue’s script was a low budget Star Wars rip-off, so he started with a new idea: a bounty hunter taking a captured criminal back up the river. On that journey, the men talk and learn something from each other.
The story of Slipstream, as it appears in the film, is set in a post-apocalyptic future. An event known as the Harmonic Convergence has wiped away the majority of humanity, and only small pockets of survivors remain. The event has left a powerful wind current, known as the slipstream, encircling the Earth, which is used by survivors to travel around in various air-based vehicles.
Tasker (Hamill) and Belitski (Kitty Aldridge) are two officers, remnants of the law, trying to keep order in what remains of society. They have captured a man called Byron (Bob Peck) and are bringing him in. They stop off at a busy airfield for something to eat.
It’s here they meet Matt Owens (Bill Paxton), a small-time arms dealer. He decides to steal Byron and claim the bounty for himself. The adventure begins, and along the way it’s revealed there’s more to Byron than meets the eye.
Slipstream had been in extensive preparation and pre-production for 16 months. Filming commenced on the 14th March 1988 at Pinewood Studios for a planned ten weeks of shooting, with a reported budget of $15m. Other filming locations, such as Turkey and Yorkshire, were used for some of the post-apocalyptic backdrops.
The talent both in front and behind the camera was really quite impressive. Lisberger had his eye on Bill Paxton for some time, and was keen to cast him in a major role. That they’d be shooting in England for several months pleased Paxton’s English wife, which was an added incentive for him to sign up.
Paxton said of Slipstream at the time, “I liked its nice moralities about friendship, and the Old West odyssey feeling. It was a chance for me to play more of an anti-hero protagonist, hopefully enabling me to cross over from character parts to leading roles.” He added that he felt at home on the Pinewood stages, which was where he’d filmed the iconic role of Hudson, for James Cameron’s Aliens, a few years earlier.
The role of Tasker was offered to Hamill after a suggestion by Kurtz. “I saw a great opportunity for Mark to break the curse of being identified with one role,” he said. “I told him I would love to see him play the antagonist.”
Hamill, who hadn’t been seen on the big screen since Return Of the Jedi, told Cinefantastique: “If anyone has a preconceived notion about me in Slipstream, and I surprise them, that may be a good thing. It has been great working with Gary again and I hope the film shakes things up for me as far as film work goes, as I do have some bills to pay!”
He continued, “I play a vanishing breed of lawman taking his job dead seriously, like a legendary Wyatt Earp bounty hunter-type. I’m the law, but I could also be the villain! My kids didn’t want me to take this role as it plays so unsympathetically.”
Before principal photography had begun, Tony Kayden was busy rewriting the film, sitting alone at a table in a busy area of Pinewood Studios. He was approached by Ben Kingsley, who was looking for somewhere to sit. They started a conversation, with Kayden describing Slipstream to him. After Kayden had returned home, his agent informed him that Kingsley was now a part of the cast.
Slipstream’s various flying vehicles were realised with both full-size aircraft and miniature effects. Lisberger later told Talking Pictures that the pilots of the full-size aircraft performed more daring stunts than those in control of the miniatures. Also, the quality of the miniature work was so good, when reviewing dailies, it wasn’t always possible to distinguish between the real and model aircraft.
The person in charge of the miniatures and other visual effects was VFX supervisor Bryan Johnson, who’d previously worked on Alien, Aliens, The Neverending Story and The Empire Strikes Back. Before Kurtz was attached as producer, Slipstream was going to be Johnson’s directorial debut, but for reasons unknown, this never came to pass.
Editing the film was the legendary Terry Rawlings, who’d previously cut Alien, Blade Runner and Chariots Of Fire. Finally, a grand score was composed by Elmer Bernstein whose film music career was having a second resurgence having created music for Ghostbusters, Stripes, Airplane! and The Blues Brothers.
Unfortunately, Slipstream wasn’t an entirely smooth production. Kayden said that this was the first film he had worked on where the script was still being written during principal photography. In this case, scenes of flying vehicles were already being captured in Turkey.
Everyone involved seemed to have a different idea of what they wanted from the film. Kayden described how he would have dinner with Lisberger, who’d become a father at that point, and this influenced his ideas for the film but didn’t mesh with Kayden’s.
Over other dinners, Slipstream’s executive producers suggested that the film should contain more action and violence. Over a separate dinner, Kurtz asked for the violence to be toned down (“He was a Quaker – he didn’t want violence…”). Kayden was only supposed to work on Slipstream for about a month; he ended up staying for four.
Eventually, Kayden decided to gather everyone involved in one office and finally agree on what the film was going to be about. Kayden later admitted that he “blew up;” everyone, he said, had a different take on Slipstream. “I’m gonna step out of this office for half an hour,” Kayden recalls saying, “I want all you guys to decide on what you want. What is this movie gonna be? Because every time I have dinner with somebody, I get a different take.”
Sadly, it seems this tactic didn’t quite work. The final script came together with an equivalent running time of ninety minutes, apparently, a lot of story was removed in order to achieve this. Ironically, after production, Kayden had to come back to write a new introduction that was to use a voice-over to help explain the story because of the removed material.
Slipstream opened to the British public on the 10th February 1989. In hindsight, the film didn’t stand a chance: it opened alongside The Naked Gun; Die Hard was on its second weekend of release, and sat at number one at the box office.
Presumably, the draw of Mark Hamill, plus the film being advertised as a “science fiction spectacular” on the poster, helped pull in crowds, at least for a while: Slipstream debuted at number three. But the reviews weren’t great; Barry Norman commented on his show Film 89 that, “The message is not clear, and neither, at times, is the narrative.”
Slipstream slid out of the UK top ten within a month, hovering around for a further nine weeks before dropping out of cinemas altogether. The final box office tally was just over £736,000.
In a 2002 interview, Kurtz said that Slipstream was his worst time on a film production.
“Slipstream is one of those things that actually has a lot of good elements in it, but ultimately doesn’t quite work, because the energy of the film changes dramatically,” he said. “The script was very hard-edged, heavy R, rough, and gritty …a rougher than Blade Runner kind of look at the future.
“Then a week before shooting, the financiers – which were an English company – decided that it had to be a family film, so all of the rough stuff had to be taken out. And, frantically, we worked on rewriting various bits – even after shooting started – and the film ends up a bit of a mess…”
Kurtz didn’t dwell on Slipstream for long, merely adding, “It’s very disjointed – big chunks of story that disappear completely, that were never even shot. I begged them to let us postpone shooting for six weeks so that we could restructure the thing, and they wouldn’t do it, so it was a very, very annoying and frustrating experience for me. I hated it.”
On the positive side, Kurtz was a big flying fanatic and enjoyed the month he spent hurtling around in the microlight aircraft used in the production.
Slipstream had a limited release in a few European countries, but fared no better financially in those territories. An Australian release garnered a poor response with a final tally of $70k. Because of this poor performance, Slipstream never received a North American theatrical release.
In the following years, especially outside the UK, the film was released on VHS and cheap DVD compilations of low budget films you’ve never heard of. In the UK, a 25 minute “making of” documentary was also released on VHS.
A small fan community tried to preserve the film, however, and began the hunt for the best quality version they could find. Ever since its first release, even on DVD, the picture had been cropped to a 4:3 image. The group new that a widescreen version existed somewhere, though, because the opening credits are letterboxed to reveal the film’s correct aspect ratio.
A widescreen version was found on Japanese laserdisc, but sadly the picture had a strong yellow wash. Also, unlike DVDs, the Japanese subtitles were baked into the image.
Boutique home entertainment companies, such as Arrow Video, had apparently looked into acquiring the film for a modern release, but finding who owned the rights proved difficult.
Due to Slipstream being dumped on multiple low quality releases over time, the story was that the copyright only existed in the UK, and was therefore free to distribute throughout the rest of the world. Whether this was true or not, the film has been uploaded to YouTube multiple times over the years without a rights holder demanding they be taken down.
In December 2023, however, Slipstream reappeared on Amazon Prime, iTunes and YouTube streaming in a very nice scan of a widescreen print in full high definition. (Sadly, for reasons unknown, the audio is mono.)
Two years later, Dragon’s Domain released Elmer Bernstein’s score on CD. (The same score previously got a limited release in 2011, but was quickly withdrawn when it transpired that the rights hadn’t been cleared.)
A film barely seen by cinema-goers in 1989, Slipstream is finally being reassessed almost 40 years later. Irrespective of whether you’re among its cult following or not, it’s undeniable that Slipstream now looks better than it ever has. And another thing’s for sure: you’ll never see Mark Hamill looking quite this badass in a film again:
