In the film, two firemen decide to search an abandoned building for a hidden treasure, but wind up being targeted by a street gang.
Following the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the film was retitled and its original release date of July 3, 1992 was pushed back.
Two Fort Smith, Arkansas firemen, Vince and Don, meet a hysterical old man in a burning building.
He forces them to take the envelope and leave at gunpoint, prays for forgiveness, then commits suicide by allowing himself to be engulfed in flames.
Outside the fire and away from everyone else, Vince uncovers what was in the envelope and turns out to contain a newspaper article, the old man's ID, a map, and a gold cross.
Vince and Don research the man, discovering that he was a thief who, in 1940, stole a large amount of gold valuables from a church that were on loan from Greece and hid them in a building in East St. Louis, Illinois.
While searching the building, Vince then Don are spotted by a gang, led by King James, who is there to execute an enemy.
Vince and Don witness the murder, but give themselves away and only manage to force a stalemate when they grab Lucky, King James' half-brother.
While doing some reconnaissance, Raymond, the man who supplies guns to King James, finds Don and Vince's car and the news of the gold, and figures out why "two white boys" would be in their neighborhood.
Meanwhile Bradlee accidentally makes a noise, drawing the attention of one of James' men, Wickey, who grabs an axe and breaks down the door.
In addition, Hal Landon Jr. appears as Eugene DeLong, while James Pickens Jr. and L. Warren Young portray police officers Reese and Foley, respectively.
The script was originally called The Looters and Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale wrote it in 1977.
It was totally dependent upon the narrative circumstances to reveal character and of course it took place in a time compression—both are things I'm very fond of.
The only thing that is significantly different from the script is that the film gives a lot more screen time to King James and his gang and the ending is quite a bit different from the original.
And what makes that striking, is that it is so much more real than what we presume action adventure movies to be—what they have evolved to be in the last 20 years.
This movie is very much a throwback in that sense—with the permanently strained relations between blacks and whites and browns and orientals in our ghettos, our inner cities...
He read an article in The Washington Post about street gangs who would film a lot of their own activities.
"[2] A musical score had been written by John Zorn - the resulting recordings were released as volume two (Music for an untitled film by Walter Hill) of Zorn's series of Filmworks CDs - but Hill was dissatisfied with it and he brought in Ry Cooder to do a new score.
Hill fired Zorn because he was unhappy with his score and hired his old friend Ry Cooder to rescore the whole film.
[13] "Somehow, the riots tainted the movie", said Hill, and when the picture's release was pushed back, "inevitably, a lot of people came to the conclusion that you have something to hide, something to be ashamed of...
Hill did not like Trespass because it reminded him of a title of a 1950s-era RKO movie starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell.
[4] The film was also affected by controversy when Ice T asked Warner Bros. to remove the song "Cop Killer" from his album Body Count.
The consensus summarizes: "Trespass pits public servants against gangsters in a race for stolen loot -- and thanks to a killer cast and Walter Hill's assured direction, the audience wins.
[20] 101 Films reissued Trespass on DVD and Blu-ray in 2018, with extras including a commentary with Ice Cube biographer Joel McIver and journalist Angus Batey, a second commentary with Nathaniel Thompson and Howard S. Berger, and interviews with Sadler, producer Neil Canton and co-writer Bob Gale.