Trivia / Lock Up

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $24 million. Box office, $22,099,847 (domestic).
• Cast the Expert:
  • The majority of the guards acting as extras, actors and background artists in the movie were real-life guards from Rahway State Prison used for the film which is now known as the East Jersey State Prison (EJSP). The guards were paid the standard Screen Actors Guild (SAG) daily rate at the time of 93 dollars per day for playing their profession.
  • The cast includes real inmates of Rahway State Prison, which is also known as East Jersey State Prison, and is located in Rahway, New Jersey. Some of the prisoners appear as extras and background artists in the movie.
• The Cast Showoff: Frank McRae, who participates in the football game sequence, had played as an NFL defensive tackle during the 1967 season, playing six games for the Chicago Bears.
• Completely Different Title:
  • The movie's title in Hungarian is: In the Prison of Revenge.
  • In Turkey, the film was released under the name "Hür Kan" (meaning Free Blood) to fool audiences into thinking that this was another Rambo film.
• Creator Killer: Because of the movie's commercial failure, this would be the last and only production made by Stallone's company White Eagle.
• The Danza: Robert Vazquez portrayed Officer Vazquez, who has the same last name as his own. Vazquez was also a technical consultant to the production, being also billed in the closing credits as a prison advisor.
• No Stunt Double: No body doubles or stunt doubles were used during the filming of the football game sequence.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Director John Flynn has said of this movie, in a 2005 interview with Harvey F. Chartrand for Shock Cinema:
  Lock Up is a strange lesson in how Hollywood movies are made. Stallone had a 'window' which means the guy was available for a certain window of time. Larry Gordon had a terrible script set in a prison. Stallone calls James Woods and asks if I'm any good as a director. Woods says yeah, he's a good director and you ought to work with him. So we have a director and a star, but no script. All we have is a theme - a guy escaping from prison. So we hire Jeb Stuart, who was then one of the hottest writers in Hollywood, to rewrite the script and we go off looking for prison locations. Now we have a star, a theme, a shooting date, a budget, a studio, but we still have no script. So we all go back to New York City, and move into a hotel where Larry 'tortures' Jeb and Henry Rosenbaum into writing a script in record time. Meanwhile, I'm going around scouting prisons. We finally found one in Rahway, New Jersey. Jeb and Henry were writing the script as we were making the movie. New pages would come in every day. There was one day when I was on the third tier of a cell-block in Rahway Penitentiary and I had nothing to shoot. I had my movie star, all these extras and a great location - and the pages were on their way. So we sat around and bullshitted with the prisoners. Stallone is a smart guy and a very underrated actor. If I ever needed a better line, he'd come up with one. Stallone is a really hard worker. I had no problem whatsoever with him.

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