I always scouted filmmakers with great taste in music, or at least the music I liked, and I always called the trades to see what movies were being made that appealed to me in terms of putting the soundtrack together. Kathy Nelson: At that point I was working at MCA Records doing soundtracks. Kathy, how did you get involved with the movie? He was so young he didn’t want to do the crying scene! All adult actors would give their right arm to cry, because it shows how good you are. It’s not that he couldn’t dance, he was just embarrassed. I’ll bring my friend in and we’ll dance together and you can shoot my side of it.” It was a cool idea. He had to dance a couple of times in the movie, and he didn’t want to dance. I wish I could describe in words just how easy he was to work with. But he’s not like Dustin Hoffman, bombarding us with ideas. He can say the same line over and over again and make it real, which is gold. There isn’t one improvised syllable in the movie. But try it some day because it’s delicious.ĭid Christian recommend any music or share opinions? And I’d be rehearsing with him while he ate this scary concoction. Guess what he ate for breakfast every day? He made soup out of maple syrup and crunched up bacon! He was too young and natural to read his lines the night before, so I’d go and do it with him in the morning so he would know the lines. Oh, wow, well he was young and there were no impossibilities. And I just built it from there with help from Sandy.Ī couple years ago he said Pump Up The Volume is one of his favourite movies he’s worked on. Who would have thought there would be a helicopter? In my first version he was shut down by the FCC because what he was saying was considered dangerous, encouraging kids to kill themselves. Of course, we then dramatized it and put a helicopter chase in it. And that was the charm of the idea to me. How many people are listening in the beginning of the movie? Probably 20, and then it snowballs. I wrote this character in his parents’ basement. So the idea of a depressed kid talking to the world, and having his own private outlet really appealed to me. I’m grateful to him because it probably wouldn’t have been made or had Christian Slater in it without him.
BEASTIE BOYS KICK IT SOUND WAVE MOVIE
And then Sandy Stern read it and said, “This movie is way too dark! You’ve got to make it friendlier.” So there is one kid that commits suicide in it, and we cleaned it up. He was a mordant, funny kid but he had no intention of killing himself, he just thought it would be cool to do it on air for his ten listeners. And I ended up having too much fun playing with all of the different ways he could kill himself. So it wasn’t the most original idea, but I wrote it about a suicidal young guy who was announcing his own suicide on the radio. And before Pump Up The Volume was Good Morning Vietnam and Talk Radio, which was a play first. I was kind of disappointed when I saw the movie… or maybe I was jealous. And later there was a movie made about them where Philip Seymour Hoffman played the DJ. So they were underground and I’d heard about them. They were not subject to local laws controlling air content, like the FCC. Noisey: So where did the idea for Pump Up The Volume come from?Īllan Moyle: Previous to this, there had been pirate radio stations on abandoned oil rigs off the coast of England.
On the album were Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, Pixies, and three fantastic covers: Concrete Blonde covering Leonard Cohen, Cowboy Junkies doing Robert Johnson, and Bad Brains with Henry Rollins offering a disorderly take on the MC5’s “Kick Out The Jams.” Artists that weren’t on the album, but appeared in the film included Leonard Cohen, Descendents, Was (Not Was) and Beastie Boys with an outtake from the Licensed To Ill called “The Scenario,” which to date has never received a commercial release. But perhaps more than anything, the film’s soundtrack introduced unsuspecting viewers like myself to a whole group of artists that were on the verge of bringing alternative music to the masses. and earn critical acclaim, not to mention help Christian Slater capitalize on his bad-assery in Heathers and become the hottest young actor in the universe. Pump Up The Volume went on to earn a modest $11.5 million in the U.S. Under the moniker Happy Harry Hard-On, Mark slowly earns a cult following amongst his fellow screwed up students, doling out bullshit-free advice, dropping graffiti-worthy catch phrases (“So be it,” “Talk hard”) and challenging his school’s questionable expulsions of at-risk students.
The film told the story of Mark Hunter (the cool as fuck Christian Slater), a depressed high schooler in suburban Phoenix, Arizona, who hacks his shortwave radio and launches a pirate radio station.
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