Fortress

Loosely based on the 1972 Faraday School kidnapping of a teacher and her class by Edwin John Eastwood and Robert Clyde Boland. Eastwood later escaped from prison and repeated the crime with another teacher and his class in 1977. The Faraday kidnapping was in turn a real-life copycat crime based on a scene in the Clint Eastwood film Dirty Harry (1971) where the Scorpio Killer holds a bus driver and several schoolchildren hostage.

A TV movie made for the HBO network.

Vernon Wells would later go on to star in the 1992 science fiction action film "Fortress".

Casting the lead role of Sally Jones proved troublesome; HBO agreed to put up half the film's budget if the role was played by a well-known actress. At the time, Actors Equity, the Australian actors' union, was known for challenging or blocking Australian film productions that cast foreign actors in leading roles instead of Australians, and they refused to allow production to proceed with Crawford and HBO's original choice for the role, Bess Armstrong. Eventually, all three parties settled on casting Sigrid Thornton, but Thornton was dropped two months prior to the scheduled start of shooting due to pregnancy, and pre-production was cancelled entirely when Equity refused Crawford's ultimatum to allow them to cast Armstrong. However, the film re-entered pre-production three months later following the casting of Rachel Ward. Although Equity supported her casting, Ward, who is English by birth, had mostly appeared in American films, and had only recently migrated to Australia with her husband and The Thorn Birds (1983) co-star Bryan Brown.

The film was originally going to be produced by Robert Stigwood and Rupert Murdoch's production company, Associated R&R Films - which had previously made Gallipoli (1981) - with Bruce Beresford as director. None of these three men would remain on board when the production transferred to Crawford Productions, although actress/producer Hilary Heath, who held the film rights to the novel and was initially attached as an executive producer, was credited in the US version as an associate producer.