Projections on the (unmade) film by Russell Mulcahy
It's one of the most curious 'what if's in pop cinema
history. Russell Mulcahy, the Australian director
who, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, pioneered the art of the music
video, approached his frequent collaborators, English new-wave band Duran
Duran, with a unique proposition. Mulcahy was
looking to expand his range into the mainstream cinema and had set his heart on
an adaptation of the cult 1971 novel "The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead"
by William S. Burroughs. Mulcahy was keen to
have the group provide a soundtrack for this potential film adaptation and
asked them to create a kind of anthem to help promote the idea. Suitably
energized, the band went off and recorded their title song, The Wild Boys,
which was released to huge success in July of 1984.
Despite Mulcahy's ambition and the enthusiasm of the group, the
planned film adaptation never came to fruition. However, a music video did,
and it provides a rare and fascinating insight into what might or could've
been.
Duran Duran: The Wild Boys [Russell Mulcahy, 1984]:
Produced on a then unprecedented budget of £1million,
with both elaborate robot and monster effects, wirework and acrobatics, all
filmed on an enormous purpose-built industrial set covering the vast 007 soundstage
at Pinewood Studios, the music video for The Wild Boys interprets the surreal
text of Burroughs's dark dystopia through a combination of the post-apocalyptic
horrors of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), the rag-tag pirate band of
outlaws found in the portrayal of Peter Pan and The Lost Boys, and the
balletic, ultra-physical, dancing-as-fighting stylizations of the musical
West Side Story (1961). In the process, the clip redefined the possibilities of
the music video at a pivotal moment in its development, and ushered in a new
era of artists being given enormous budgets to create promotional films that in
many ways overwhelmed the creative merits of the song itself.
The Wild Boys was a far cry from the kind of videos Mulcahy had previously shot for Duran Duran, or indeed
any other group from the same period. Most music videos, then and now, are
about promotion. On one level, they're selling the song, but what they're
really selling is the artist, their image, and the general aesthetic they're
trying to convey. This was most apparent in the earlier videos Mulcahy had directed
for the group, where the look and style was defined by exotic locations, icons
of affluence and decadence, and the image of the band itself as handsome,
fashionable, and upwardly mobile. They were a proper band, as proficient with
their musicianship and instrumentation as U2, or as committed to the art of
song-craft as The Pet Shop Boys or Roxy Music, but too often discredited as a
lightweight boy band because they put the celebration of the surface, fun and
fashion, at the forefront of what they did.
You only have to compare The Wild Boys to Mulcahy's still
dazzling video for Duran Duran's earlier song, Rio, to see what a marked
contrast the director had brought about in this later work. By introducing the
influence of Burroughs and the intention to create something that stood outside
of their own work and interests, the director pushed the band's style and image
to strange new places, creating a work that attempted to sell, not their own vision,
but the vision of the subject matter; this phantom film.
Duran Duran: Rio [Russell Mulcahy, 1982]:
From quick-cuts and canted angles, from sharp suits
and peroxide hair, from pastel shades and body paint, we leave the exotic
shorelines and romantic misadventures of Rio and arrive instead at this pop
video "Interzone", with schoolboys wrecking a classroom in syncopated
cuts, horror footage played out on Orwellian TV monitors, half-naked figures
locked in combat by firelight, and a stranger emerging from the shadows like a
gunslinger from an Italian Western, albeit one transposed onto this post-apocalyptic
scene.
While much of The Wild Boys is steeped in 1980s
silliness, including the "Starlight Express" style choreography of
Arlene Philips, the belching fire motif, the bad video effects work and lead
singer Simon Le Bon pouting his way through the lyrics as he's tortured on a
giant water wheel, the visceral nature of the video, the physicality of the
background performers and the syncopation between the choreography and the
cutting, creates some incredibly compelling moments. The earlier sequences in
particular help to draw the viewer into the world that Mulcahy and his
collaborators are both creating, but also to a large extent adapting
from the lyrics of the group. As Le Bon sings: "The wild boys are
calling, on their way back from the fire. In August moon's surrender to, a dust
cloud on the rise", it's matched by the image of the stranger
emerging, silhouetted, from the dusty, desolate planes of the soundstage.
It's in these moments that the audience gets a sense
of what Mulcahy's vision for his film of The Wild Boys might have been, with the
mix of iconography, ripped as it is from westerns and post-apocalyptic science-fiction
cinema, and the greater emphasis on the relationship between physical
performance, sound, music and the cutting between shots, creating an aesthetic
that was very much characteristic of the period and the influence of films like
The Warriors (1979), Blade Runner (1982), Liquid Sky (also 1982) and the
aforementioned Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.
Had the film been released, it could've been a
disaster; pilloried and lampooned as an example of the MTV aesthetic
infiltrating the mainstream cinema. Conversely, it might have proven to be a
singular work. One, which following in the wake of films like those
aforementioned, could have provided a key example of the new cult cinema of the
1980s. We'll never know. However, there are further hints and relics to Mulcahy's
never-realized film in his subsequent and analogous works, with the markedly
more surreal, homoerotic, Cocteau-inspired video for the Bonnie Tyler song,
"Total Eclipse of the Heart", perhaps providing some of the missing
pieces to The Wild Boys puzzle.
Bonnie Tyler: Total Eclipse of the Heart [Russell Mulcahy,
1983]:
While a full adaptation of The Wild Boys would fail to
materialize, Mulcahy would nonetheless go on to make
his mark on the cinema with two back-to-back cult films produced during the
1980s. Razorback (1984), an "Ozploitation" horror film about a
murderous pig terrorizing the Outback, and Highlander (1986), a high-concept
fantasy about warring immortals battling for supremacy. Highlander remains
perhaps the most highly regarded and well recognized of the director's
filmography, popular with fans of the actors Christopher
Lambert and Sean Connery, as well as devotees to the rock band Queen, who provided
the soundtrack. Highlander would go on to spawn several sequels and television
spin-offs since its initial release, including Mulcahy's own ill-fated sequel,
Highlander II: The Quickening (1991)
From here, Mulcahy's film
career is spotty and inconsistent. Of the other films of his that I've seen,
The Shadow (1994), an Art-Deco influenced comic book fantasy, is one that
carries a large degree of childhood nostalgia for me, as does his cult horror
film, Tale of the Mummy (1998). Less successful was the serial killer drama,
Resurrection (1999), which reunited Mulcahy with his Highlander star Christopher
Lambert and featured a supporting role for the cult filmmaker David Cronenberg.
The film has an interesting directorial aesthetic that places it squarely in
the late 1990s, but it's horribly written and hugely derivative of David
Fincher's superior psychological horror film Seven (1995). Mulcahy also
directed the third Resident Evil film, Extinction (2007), which is the best of
the first three installments, and features some visual throwbacks to the
iconography and post-apocalyptic world-building of The Wild Boys video.
Resident Evil: Extinction [Russell Mulcahy, 2007]:
Mulcahy has also directed several well-received films
outside of the fantasy and action movie genres, including On the Beach (2000), The
Lost Battalion (2001), Swimming Upstream (2003), Prayers for Bobby (2009) and
several episodes of the American remake of the Russel T. Davies series Queer as
Folk (2000-2005). His most recent film, In Like Flynn (2018), about the early
life and adventures of the Hollywood actor Errol Flynn, is currently available
on Netflix.
Ultimately, The Wild Boys would prove to have a
definite legacy. Along with the video for Thriller (1983) by John Landis and
Michael Jackson, its scope and ambition would change the way filmmakers and
record companies approached the idea of the music video as both a promotional
tool and as a way of generating conversation. From here, budgets would become
bigger, the subject matter would become more cinematic, more provocative in
nature, and the success of the video became entangled with the potential chart
success of the songs themselves. Other directors, like Mary Lambert, Bernard
Rose, Tim Pope, Steve Barron, David Fincher and Jean-Baptiste Mondino to name a
few, would continue to push the limits, injecting eccentricity, provocation or
glamour into their respective videos, and inspiring the generations of music
video filmmakers that followed in their wake. The Wild Boys may never have
become a movie in its own right, but it endures as a strange piece of 80s
pop-culture.
