I Predict 1990: The Video Album

[Image: 'I Predict 1990: The Video Album' Front Cover]

© 1988 Word, Inc.
VHS · 8015021693

Sections:

Tracks

  1. What Is The Measure Of Your Success?
  2. I Blew Up The Clinic Real Good
  3. A Principled Man
  4. Jim Morrison's Grave
  5. Babylon
  6. Svengali
  7. Since I Gave Up Hope I Feel A Lot Better
  8. Harder To Believe Than Not To

About The Video

From Interviews: Steve Taylor, Cornerstone Magazine, Q1(?) 1994:

Once I'm directing a video, especially if I'm in it, my mind is on that and nothing else. When we were shooting "Jim Morrison's Grave" in Paris, we were supposed to be meeting friends in the middle of the countryside three hours away. The trouble was we were supposed to be meeting them in two hours, and here we were in this graveyard dancing around Jim Morrison's tomb. She's thinking, if we miss this rendezvous point we'll never find them. You know, we don't even speak French.

At the same time she notices some particularly nasty looking German punk rockers who don't like the fact that I am filming around this hallowed place even though everybody else is drinking and writing on the cemetery walls. So she sees these guys getting mad and starting to get threatening, and of course the whole time I'm oblivious to everything except getting the next shot.

From The Three Faces Of Steve, The Lighthouse Electronic Magazine, April 1996:

"I Predict 1990" [November 1987] was next?

I'm trying to think... There were five or six videos in that one package and some of them were OK. "Since I Gave Up Hope" was pretty good. I think "Principled Man" had some good things going for it, but I don't think it necessarily aged very well. When I look at it now it just looks a little silly.

Were you going for a Swedish art film thing with the black and white?

Actually, they messed up the color processing on one of the source reels in the lab so we had to match the rest of the footage with that...so that was one of those accidents that we had to run with.

How about "Harder To Believe Than Not To?"

One of the things I learned from that--when I direct other artists now-- is that I'm way over-emoting, and the camera looks silly. I don't think my part in that video was very good, but the story that it tells is a good story.

One of my favorite videos from I Predict 1990 is "Jim Morrison's Grave."

I think that one's probably one of the better ones. It was a good song. The song had many layers to it and so there were a lot of different ways you could see it. We shot it in Paris at Jim Morrison's actual grave. One of the reasons I like natural settings as opposed to manufacturing something is that a good setting can interpret things and add sub-texts. When we were there, we were sort of shooting things at random. The real craft always comes when you actually put it together while you are editing. A lot of the video was made up of happy accidents--things that just worked out well.

Same album--your most controversial video--"I Blew Up The Clinic Real Good."

I don't actually think that was a very good video. It was a tough one to do and it's just sort of boring--it's like, there's not that much going on. I have a hard time watching that one. I think Smashing Pumpkins did a video with an ice cream truck that was much better.