Trading Places
It was gray, drizzly spring day in Cleveland, and Michael J. Fox was getting nervous. Accustomed to coasting through light comedies on the strength of his likable personality and clean-cut looks, here he was in a gritty drama concocted by Paul Schrader, the guy whose credits include Taxi Driver, Hardcore and American Gigolo. Experienced as an actor but out of practice as a musician, he was expected to play lead guitar alongside Joan Jett. And without much of a singing voice, he was about to tackle the vocals on, of all things, a brand-new, unreleased Bruce Springsteen song.
“This is one of those movies where every time you get a certain thing licked, there’s another dragon in the closet that you gotta tame,” groaned Fox, nursing a Pepsi and pacing in the small courtyard behind a funky, cluttered Cleveland rock & roll bar called the Euclid Tavern. “I learned the guitar parts, then I finally got myself pumped to sing this, and now I just realized that I have a whole intro where I’ve got to act where I need to get across everything we’ve just come out of at the end of the movie. It’s really stacked up.”
But did anybody say it would be easy?
“No, nobody said it would be easy,” he said, flashing that familiar, wholesome Michael J. Fox grin. “And there are rumors I’m being paid.”
In fact, Fox is being paid so much that his salary took Light of Day from a low-budget movie to a medium-budget movie, joked director Paul Schrader. Six years ago, Schrader wrote the first draft of what he envisioned as a quick, inexpensive movie that would explore some of his own family conflicts against a setting of Midwest bar-band rock. Since then, Light of Day has developed into something considerably more complicated – and risky.
In the movie, which will be released next month, Michael Fox gets the chance to shrug off the kid-next-door image of TV’s Family Ties and the movie Back to the Future, to grow his hair long and wear an earring and play a struggling rocker caught in a violent battle of wills between his older sister and his mother. His costar, rocker Joan Jett, has the chance to hold her own opposite established actors like Fox and Gena Rowlands. Moviegoers have a chance to see if the Barbusters —– Fox, Jett, Michael McKean of This is Spinal Tap on bass, L.A. drummer Paul Harkins and Michael Dolan on keyboards –— can play convincing bar-band rock without overdubs, lip-syncs or any of the usual movie tricks. Schrader has a chance to recapture the commercial and critical success that has eluded him in recent projects. And the Boss gets the chance to atone for swiping the movie’s original title, Born in the U.S.A.
Springsteen saw a script around 1980 and chose not to write the music. “He’s a control freak,” said Schrader during lunch in his trailer, “and doing films requires giving up an awful lot of control.” Though Schrader turned his sights to Cat People and Mishima, he didn’t forget about Born in the U.S.A. and planned to make it “before I turned forty and the idea of doing a film about my youth lost its appeal.”
Then, on location in Japan for Mishima in the summer of ’84, he walked into a record store and saw his title above Bruce’s rear end on the album cover. On the inner sleeve was a note from Springsteen: “Thanks to Paul Schrader.” “I was never formally asked, but there’s no legal reason to do so,” said Schrader, who added that he’s hardly the first to have supplied Springsteen with a song title. “From ‘Mansion on the Hill’ to ‘Wreck on the Highway’ to ‘Point Blank’ to ‘Badlands,’ Bruce has turned a lot of titles around.”
Near the end of his 1984-85 tour, Springsteen invited the director to dinner, avoided the issue for most of the meal and finally, over dessert, apologized and made an offer: Schrader could use the song “Born in the U.S.A.” for free, or Bruce would write a new song. Schrader opted for the latter. “By this point,” said Schrader, “I didn’t want to use the title anyway.”
Later, Michael Fox picked up the story. “So we were all waiting for this new Springsteen song to come, and here comes this thing called” – he grimaced – “‘Just Around the Corner to the Light of Day.'” They kept the song, a raveup with echoes of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Green River.” (A version of the song, with Jett singing and the four Barbusters playing, will soon be released as a single.) But for the benefit of theater marquees everywhere, they took a pair of scissors to the title.
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