E8 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST. SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2019 EZ EE E9
Springsteen makes his feature directing debut with
“Western Stars,” sharing a credit with Zimny and making
official a fact that has been obvious to anyone who’s ever
listened closely to his music: Bruce Springsteen — singer,
songwriter, rock star, consummate showman, American
icon — has always been a filmmaker. Whether in the form
of widescreen, highly pitched epics or low-budget slices of
daily life, Springsteen’s records have been less aural than
immersive, unspooling with cinematic scope, drive and
pictorial detail. Phil Spector might have built a wall of
sound, but Springsteen used sound to build worlds.
He greets the suggestion that he’s an auteur with one of
his frequent self-effacing chuckles. But Springsteen ad-
mits that a cinematic point of view came naturally to him.
“Movies have always meant a lot to me,” he says in his
familiar rasp. “It’s probably just a part of being a child of
the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s, when there was so much great
filmmaking.”
He grew up in a blue-collar, Irish Italian family at a time
when the local bijou was still a vital community hub. “The
Strand Theatre in Freehold, N.J., was dead in the center of
town,” he recalls. “It was your classic old, small-town
movie theater. Its main attraction was, ‘Come on in, it’s
cool inside.’ ”
He laughs again.
“It didn’t matter what they were playing, it was
air-conditioned. So, on all those dead, small-town summer
days, when it would get up into the 90s in Freehold, you’d
drift in no matter what was playing, and see what was on
the screen.”
Springsteen’s f irst album, “Greetings From Asbury Park,
N.J.,” introduced him in 1973 as an instinctively visual,
character-driven storyteller. The title of his second album
that year, “The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle”
was inspired by a 1959 movie starring the icon of postwar
American Westerns, Audie Murphy. The songs evoked
everything from “West Side Story” t o the edgy, urban style
of young Martin Scorsese.
But it was 1975’s “Born to Run” that brought Spring-
steen’s sensibility into its fullest expression. Structured as
a day in the life of young people trying to escape their own
dead, small-town summer days, the record plays like a
movie of the mind’s e ye, with propulsive movement, linear
narrative and third-act catharsis.
Zimny, who has directed several Springsteen music
videos and documentaries and recently won an Emmy for
“Springsteen on Broadway,” recalls listening to “Born to
Run” long before the two worked together and being
particularly affected by the album’s most ambitious track:
the street opera “Jungleland,” with its fugitive leading
man, barefoot love interest and kids flashing guitars “just
like switchblades.” The song “opened up a world of
possibility for me,” he says, “because it just dealt in
imagery. ‘Jungleland’ was the first time I heard a sax solo
feel like a Te chnicolor film.”
If “Born to Run” evoked the chrome, concrete and
escapist fantasies of the movies Springsteen watched at
the Strand, the lexicon of “Darkness on the Edge of To wn”
was grainier and less mannered but still harked back to the
imaginary worlds of his youth.
“When I wrote ‘Born to Run’ and ‘Darkness,’ I saw them
as B-pictures,” Springsteen says. “If they worked really
well, they were good ones, and the songs I was unhappy
with were bad ones.”
He w anted both records “to have the breadth of cinema,”
he says, “while at the same time remaining very, very
personal for me. Those were the parameters of what I was
imagining at that particular moment. I was sort of using
the contours and the shape of films and movies, while at
the same time trying to find myself in my work. But the
film-ness of my songs was never far from my mind.”
And it was a self-mythologizing vernacular that his
audience immediately understood.
“It was just how you processed everything,” he contin-
ues. “A s a teenager, you were looking for a dramatic life.
Where is my dramatic life? As if things weren’t dramatic
enough. And you were writing your own script in your
head as you walked down the street. It was all just part of
living at that time.”
J
on Landau co-produced “Born to Run” and “Darkness
on the Edge of To wn” ( as well as several subsequent
records) and would talk with Springsteen for hours
about music, novels and movies, a conversation that
hasn’t ended (Landau has been Springsteen’s manager for
42 years). While they were making “Darkness,” he remem-
bers, Springsteen told him about a movie he’d seen on TV,
without catching the title. “He started to describe the film
to me, and I said, ‘Oh, Bruce, that was “The Grapes of
Wrath.” ’ He said, ‘That’s about the greatest thing I’ve
[ever] seen.’ I said, ‘What did you like about it?’ And he
said, ‘Everything. The look, the intensity, the focus, the
artistry, e verything.’ A nd I said, ‘Well, you know, John Ford
directed that.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I’ve heard of him.’”
That was the point, Landau says, when Springsteen
“started looking at f ilm in a whole different way. H e started
to make contact with great American cinema, and it just
grew and grew and grew.” Eventually, Springsteen formed
SPRINGSTEEN FROM E1
SEE SPRINGSTEEN ON E10At 70, the
Boss tries
a new gig:
Filmmaker
movies
PHOTOS BY MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POSTCLOCKWISE
FROM TOP: Bruce
Springsteen walks
to his 1948 Chevy
pickup truck in
Monmouth County,
N.J., last month. He
recently co-directed
the movie “Western
Stars.” Springsteen,
seen in his
recording studio,
has long drawn
inspiration from
movies and actors
to tell stories with
his songs. The Boss
carries a camera on
his property, which
includes a 100-year-
old farm.