BIZARRE LOVE TRIANGLE

The idea to approach Robert Longo may have come from Steven Baker at Warner Brothers in Los Angeles . Steven worked in A & R and also had a good knowledge of the art world. He worked with bands that were very artistic in their approach to imagery such as the Talking Heads and R.E.M.

Anyway, I met Robert in his New York studio. He loved Joy Division and had an interest in New Order. By that time he had made maybe a couple of music videos, one for R.E.M. and another for a N.Y. based group Golden Palominos headed by Anton Fier.

Robert's girlfriend was Gretchen Bender, a video artist, and Robert wanted Gretchen to edit the video. At the time of the shoot designer Peter Saville was having an exhibition at the White Columns gallery. The gallery was on Spring Street, downstairs from the Of Factory NY (OFNY) office. Peter had made an installation with language on the walls and it figures in the video. The gallery is still running in a different location and is known for showing Jeff Koons early floating basketball piece.

Robert set up a structure for the video following the song: having the verses different from the choruses. He sent out cameraman Richard Dallett with a 16mm camera to pick up a variety of shots around NY: exteriors and interiors.

These would be cut in to rapid fire edits by Gretchen in to which she put computer graphics. Those were the verses. The choruses were animations of his “men in the cities” drawing series where men in black suits and ties were suspended in the air. In order to shoot this we had to find a trampoline. That was the most difficult thing for me as a producer. I finally found one on Staten Island and on a nice day we could shoot them against the sky.

There was the band element but they were on tour. So Tony Wilson took a cameraman from Granada Television (where he worked in Manchester ) and flew to Italy . There they shot close-ups of each band member, various pieces of landscape as well as the band performing on stage.

There was one other element which Robert wanted and that was to shoot a small scene between three people in black and white 35mm film recording them speaking lines that Robert had written for them. I remember that E. Max Frye, the writer of the Jonathan Demme film “Something Wild”, argues with Jodi Long, who was an actress who played in Paul Shrader's film on Patty Hearst. I believe that this was the first time a music video had an unrelated scene cut in to the middle of the video interrupting the song for the length of the scene. I sadly cannot remember the name of the other woman in the scene but I believe she was a friend of Robert's.

At that time, 1986, such a rapid edit constructed by Gretchen was not seen before. The split screens that Robert employed also related to his visual artwork.

A year or so after the video was made I received a call from Fox Television. It was Michael Linder, executive producer for a new show he was developing, America 's Most Wanted. He had seen the video in a bar in Bali . Michael wanted something similar in the fast paced edit for the show's title sequence. I produced it and Gretchen directed and edited. I was in the first title sequence as a prisoner.