Style Wars - Directed by Tony Silver and produced by Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant, is the epic documentary about New York’s legendary graffiti artists and B-boys in the early days of Hip--Hop's emergence from the streets into the world. The film's 69 minutes of art, dance, music and adventure chronicle the climactic battle of New York’s graffiti writers to get their art up on the city’s subway trains--an elegy for of the travelling, public art extravaganza that was destined to change the world of art and popular culture forever. Simultaneously the film documents the emergence of B-boy breaking from the streets to media prominence. As The Source put it to the world of Hip-Hop: “Know Style Wars and you know your history.”

Style Wars documents how New York writers of the early 80s from every walk of life and neighborhood lived daredevil careers of artistic adventure--risking life and limb and dodging arrest in the subway yards and layups--to create and display their names as art. The film features such artists as DONDI, CASE 2, SEEN, NOC, WASP, SKEME, ZEPHYR, SHY 147, MIN ONE, SACH, DEZ, DAZE, DUST, DURO, CRASH, MARE, HAZE and IZ THE WIZ, along with CRAZY LEGS, KEN SWIFT, LENNY LEN, FROSTY FREEZE, MR. FREEZE, TAKE ONE and other B-Boys of the ROCK STEADY CREW. In the city’s escalating war against graffiti writers, Style Wars offers fascinating glimpses into the minds and strategies of Mayor Koch, the police and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The film includes the legendary confrontation between SKEME and his mother:

“You tell me you don’t doodle on the paper?”
“I don’t doodle.”
“You do too doodle!”
“Cecil, you have destroyed your room.”
“I’m testing out my paint"

Equally legendary are the unique photographs by Henry Chalfant of classic trains, Martha Cooper's images of writers like Dondi and Seen and B-boys in action, the cinematography of Burleigh Wartes and James Szalapski, and the editing of Sam Pollard and Mary Alfieri. The film's title was inspired by NOC's Style Wars--one of the all-time great whole-car top-to-bottoms, whose complex iconography juxtaposes NOC's funky favorite characters and unique wild style lettering with perspective 3-D straight letters and the trains and machinery of the Transit Authority—in an epic composition in paint. The film plunges us into the graffiti writers’ own “style wars—to determine the "kings of style" and the "kings of bombing" on the trains—and the struggle to unite against CAP, the infamous rogue writer who was dogging everyone else’s work.

Style Wars was awarded the Grand Prize for Documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival and at the Montreal Festival of Films on Art. It was an official entry in the Toronto Film Festival. It won the Prized Pieces Award from the National Black Programming Consortium. It won prizes at the Chicago Int'l Film Festival, The Houston Int'l Film Festival, the Athens Film Festival and the American Film Festival. It premiered nationally on PBS in 1983, but was censored on the flagship New York station WNET after its first airing and never repeated on that station. It has since been shown on Channel Four (GB), and on TV in France, Scandinavia, Spain and Germany.

In 1999 at a conference on Hip-Hop culture at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, KRS-1 in his keynote speech advised, "if you want to know what Hip-Hop is really all about, check out a film called Style Wars."

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