Punk City was a low-budget project by the late actress Luisa Marsella. It was to be her first time at directing, as well. It was made on a budget of less than $40,000 with Marsella starring as a punk rocker who goes over the edge because she can't make it. She decides to commit suicide but instead resorts to holding the customers and staff of an all-night diner hostage. A cult figure in the New York underground film scene of the early 1980's, Marsella had been dismissed from New York University's film school and forced to transfer to the English department, but she never gave up her dream of becoming a filmmaker. After banging out a first draft of the screenplay in less than three weeks in 1983, she enlisted as her associates former cartoonist and illustrator Richard Siegel as director of photography, and John Paul Davidson, a Brown University graduate, as production manager. A demo reel enabled the fledgling filmmakers access to several investors who provided her money with which to buy a used 35mm camera and lenses. The film was shot in Manhattan but not completed until 1989, and it has yet to be released. As Luisa Marsella Davidson, she filed a federal trademark registration on March 16, 1984, but it was abandoned for failure to respond on March 6, 1985. Davidson committed suicide in 1995.
