I Want My MTV (33 page)

 

JON LANDAU:
I happened to be a very good friend of Brian De Palma, who was a wonderful director, and I said to him, “We took a shot and it really didn't work. You got any ideas?” At this point we were pretty much up for anything. Brian came to the first night of the “Born in the U.S.A.” tour in Minneapolis with his crew, and he shot us performing “Dancing in the Dark” in the afternoon a couple of times. He lit it fantastically, found Courteney Cox, and created a little vignette where Bruce pulls her onstage from the front row.

 

AL TELLER:
Bruce didn't like the idea of videos, and I wasn't enthusiastic about his doing them, either. When I saw “Dancing in the Dark,” I almost winced. Bruce pulling Courteney Cox onto the stage, that struck me as very contrived.

 

JOHN SYKES:
Before 1984, Springsteen hadn't done anything with us. He did a video for “Atlantic City,” from
Nebraska
, but he wasn't even in it. I met with Jon when they were rolling out
Born in the U.S.A.
, and he was ready to play. And it was huge for MTV for Bruce to make the “Dancing in the Dark” video. Les went to the video shoot in Minneapolis. He flew in the CBS jet. I missed the flight.

 

LES GARLAND:
I flew on the CBS private jet with Walter Yetnikoff to the taping of the “Dancing in the Dark” video. Landau was there, and we said
hi
to Bruce before showtime. Bruce grabs a young girl from the audience and pulls her up onstage. We didn't know she was a plant. He plops her back down into her seat, and that's when Bruce told the crowd, “We're shooting a video tonight. We gotta make sure we get it right, so we're gonna do that one again.” I think he did it three times.

 

JON LANDAU:
When Bruce looked at it, he had mixed feelings. He knew Brian and was very appreciative that he'd bailed us out. But the whole thing was slick and high gloss, not a typical Bruce Springsteen thing. On the other hand, because it was commercial, it helped us go after a younger audience. It was controversial with fans, but it broadened Bruce's appeal, especially with women and teens. Bruce would be out on the Jersey Shore and kids would come up to him and start imitating his dance moves from the video.

“Cover Me” was the next single, but we couldn't figure out what to do with that, so we skipped making a video for it. And then we hooked up with John Sayles for “Born in the U.S.A.” Bruce and I both liked John's work; Bruce gave John permission to use his music in his film
Baby It's You
, which Bruce never did. When we got to “Born in the U.S.A.,” I said to John, “The big thing is, Bruce doesn't want to do anything special for the video. You can film him onstage. You can build a story around that. But he's not going to act, and he's not going to lip-sync.” So John filmed Bruce doing the song, then tried to match the recorded version with Bruce's live performance. And then John shot some lovely documentary footage to go around the concert. We loved the video. So John became our guy.

 

JOHN SAYLES, director:
The mandate I got from Springsteen was “I've made one of these videos and it did its job. And this song needs something gritty.” I was able to say, “Well, I do gritty.” I shot it in 16mm, so it would have a little bit of grain. I said, “Let's include some concert footage and some documentary stuff of images that are suggested by the song.” So artistically, it was a kind of free association on the images from the song. Not the Ronald Reagan version of the song, but the song the rest of us heard. The character in the song is talking about tough things. There's pride in it, and stubbornness, and disappointment.

We shot in a Vietnamese neighborhood in LA, we went down to the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey, where Bruce started, and shot there. Ernest Dickerson, who had already shot for Spike Lee, was our main guy, and for the concert stuff we shot in LA, I used Ernest and second camera was Michael Ballhaus, who later shot
Goodfellas
and a few other films for Martin Scorsese, and shot most of Fassbinder's movies.

We said, “Bruce, we're going to shoot you in concert, do you want to lip-sync?” And he said, “God, I hate to lip-sync, especially with this song.” So he wore the same outfit every night for three or four nights, and I got a bunch of different camera angles. If you look at the video, a couple things are slightly out of sync. At one point, he turns away from the microphone and his voice stays right there. Whatever its technical roughness—some of that was on purpose, some of it was the best we could do—it kept that emotion.

So it is gritty, and it is kind of guerrilla filmmaking. The cutting is more frenetic than other rock videos, there aren't any dissolves, and you keep coming back to the concert footage and Bruce's energetic performance. It was right about the time that Ronald Reagan had co-opted “Born in the U.S.A.” and Reagan, his policies were everything that the song was complaining about. I think some of the energy of the performance came from Bruce deciding, “I'm going to claim this song back from Reagan.” He made it mean something.

 

JON LANDAU:
When John Sayles did “I'm on Fire,” Bruce's confidence level was high enough for him to try some acting.

 

JOHN SAYLES:
He was going to play a character from one of his songs, and not Bruce Springsteen. It's a short song, and the intro we did, before the music starts, makes it a normal-length video. I wanted to give him an entrance. I figured, in the context of the song, he should come from underneath a car with a little grease on him. It's the car Suzanne Somers drives in
American Graffiti
. You never see the woman he's talking to, but you know she's a classy dame. The two characters know it's going to be a big mistake if they get together, but the sexual longing is there and they can't ignore it.

For the next video, “Glory Days,” Bruce had a basic idea about a character who's a mix between the guy telling the story and the guy he's telling a story about, the guy who can't stop talking about his baseball days. That's the bittersweet part of the story. My first question was “Bruce, can you pitch?” He said, “Well, we get to do more than one take, right?” His pitching was okay. When we shot that sequence, we placed a big board behind home plate, with a cutout for the lens, and the DP was looking over the board. I said, “Put a helmet on.” The first pitch,
boom
, hit right off his helmet. There's a cutaway shot of him toeing the mound, and Bruce said, “Oh shit, I don't want to endorse the sneakers.” He took some dirt and rubbed it on the sneakers.

Making the video was complicated by how famous Bruce had gotten. When our little caravan was going to find the ballpark, there were radio-station helicopters following us. “They're heading left on Route Three . . .” There was a big crowd outside the bar where we were shooting the band, so we pulled a car up and my assistant editor ran out with his coat over his head, so people would follow him and we could take the band out through another door.

 

JON LANDAU:
The most important component of the success of
Born in the U.S.A.
was the quality of the songs. Second was the tour. We played to five million people on that tour. If it wasn't the biggest tour of all time, it was very close. It was a magic time for us. Everything we did worked. The videos were a component, too, but I don't think any of us who worked on the project would say that the videos were the key element.

 

SHARON ORECK:
The first video I was hired to work on was Sheila E.'s “The Glamorous Life.” I was immediately drafted to go to a meeting with Prince on the Warners lot in West Hollywood, to discuss important things about the video. Mary Lambert was introduced and told everyone what she had in mind. She said, “We'll shoot performance footage, and she'll be bathed in colors and light, and she'll look stunning, and we'll also do a little narrative and Sheila will explore her sexuality and life and love . . .” It was mostly horseshit—that's what you did, you said this kind of stuff. When she was done, everyone was like, “It sounds great.” And then, quietly, almost in a whisper, Prince said something that sounded like “Sheila should have drumsticks on her.” But no one could hear him. The table went silent. Steve Fargnoli, Prince's manager, who's this super-handsome Italian guy, huddled with Prince and said, “Prince says Sheila should have drumsticks on her pants.” And they got up and left. Prince was there for ten minutes.

After he left, I was like, “Do they mean real drumsticks taped on her pants?” We figured out that he meant fabric drumsticks sewn into the pants. And of course, Jeff Ayeroff from Warner Bros. said, “Mary, she better not be wearing fucking drumsticks on those pants.” We're like,
You tell him!
That's how things worked around Prince. No one ever said
no
to him. And she ended up with drumsticks on her pants, I'll tell you that. They were the silliest pants I've ever seen.

 

MARY LAMBERT:
I met Prince when I was hired to do Sheila E.'s “The Glamorous Life.” He had two stylists named Louis and Vaughn. When I was introduced to them, it looked like they'd made their entire wardrobe out of chenille bathroom rugs and toilet-seat coverings. They were the most bizarre clothes I'd ever seen. The weirdest thing, though, was that they designed a wardrobe for Sheila E. that could barely fit a Barbie doll. They were itty-bitty-teeny-weeny. She's small and thin, but these clothes weren't going to fit
anybody
. On the day of the shoot, she tried them on and couldn't even get her legs in them. They had to put extenders in the pants. We never did zip them up.

SHARON ORECK:
When we cast “Glamorous Life,” we hired a really handsome black guy to play Sheila E.'s love interest. A short while later, we heard back from Simon Fields that Prince's camp didn't like him, and we couldn't hire him. Mary Lambert said, “Why don't they like him? Is he too tall? Too short?” And finally Simon said, “They don't want a black guy.” We were like, “What are you talking about? She's black!” We were told they wanted the record to cross over, so there needed to be a white boyfriend. Mary and I were appalled.

 

SIMON FIELDS:
I produced most of Prince's video between 1980 and 1990. He hardly talked to me for the first year; he was very shy. Then he grew to trust me. Which sometimes meant having to fire directors before they'd even started. We'd fly in a director and Prince would whisper in my ear, “Get rid of him.” So I would, and Prince would direct the video himself.

I hired Larry Williams to direct “When Doves Cry.” Before the first shot, Prince said to me, “He doesn't have to be here.” So I gave Larry some magazines and he sat outside and did some reading.

 

SHARON ORECK:
Prince was cuckoo paranoid. When I produced “When Doves Cry,” I didn't know what the concept was until the day of the shoot. The director, Larry Williams, had worked with Prince on some still photographs. I'm like, “Well, what do you want me to do as the producer?” He said, “Just get a stage, a crew, a bunch of cameras, a bunch of smoke, and some doves.” A crapload of smoke, and a crapload of doves. The day before we're going to shoot, I was told, “Paint a room purple and get a bathtub and some candles.” And the bathtub wrangler had to get three bathtubs, so Prince could choose. We were finally told that Prince would be in the bathtub naked, then crawl around on the floor. The day of shooting, he got there six hours late. He'd tell Steve Fargnoli to put this here and that there, then Steve would tell Simon Fields, then Simon would tell me, then I would tell someone else. At one point Prince told Steve, “Tell Simon to get me a pair of woolen underpants.” So we got him this teeny-weeny size of long underwear. He had the wardrobe person snip them down into a tiny little banana hammock for him, and then dye it purple. And that's what he wore when he was in the bathtub.

 

LISA COLEMAN:
Prince basically directed all of his videos. He'd get help from people on the technical side, but he didn't let anyone else have creative control. It was part of his megalomania. He didn't trust other people to translate his vision.

 

RANDY SKINNER:
I was editing a Prince video with Albert Magnoli, who directed the
Purple Rain
film. All of a sudden, Albert says, “Prince is coming.” The rule was, Don't look at Prince, don't talk to Prince. So I huddled in a corner thinking,
Oh God, what do I do?
He came in, walked right up to me, said “Hello,” and put out his hand. I was thinking,
Oh shit! Do I look at him, do I shake the hand, do I not shake the hand?
So I shook the hand. And he was lovely, actually.

 

LISA COLEMAN:
“When Doves Cry” was the first time the band had to perform choreographed dance steps. Prince tortured us in rehearsal. He said, “Everybody come to the front of the stage. Let me see you walk.” And of course, he started making fun of us. “That's not sexy. You don't have a sexy walk.” I said, “Let me see
you
walk.” And then he walked like George Jefferson. Total swagger.

 

HOWARD WOFFINDEN, producer:
I was dispatched from Limelight to Minneapolis, where Prince was rehearsing for a tour, to meet with him about a video concept. I sat in the arena watching rehearsals for three days before somebody came and told me, “You should go home now.”

 

SIMON FIELDS:
For “Raspberry Beret,” we filmed a whole video, then Prince got a Japanese animator to do a completely different video and we mashed the two up. He would mess with directors. He would give them the impression that they'd be in charge of the video, then halfway through he'd go, “Thank you,” take what he liked, and edit it himself.