1/27/2024 0 Comments November rain gui tar soloLater, when Hooper looked for a cinematographer for Massacre, he wanted a Texan. Growing up in New Jersey, he’d used an 8mm to film his friends skateboarding. In 1967, Pearl enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin’s film department after falling in love with the films of Fellini, Bergman, and Kurosawa. And if you scroll all the way to the bottom of Pearl’s impressive IMDb page, you’ll see that his very first credit is cinematographer on Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Not only was he director of photography for Guns N’ Roses legendary video trilogy, he was behind the camera for R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe,” The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” Missy Elliott’s “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” Brandy’s “What About Us,” and literally hundreds of others. Pearl is one of the most prolific cinematographers in music video history, and arguably the most distinguished. To get to the bottom of this mystery, I figured I should talk to a person with a front-row seat to the cake jump: Daniel Pearl, the cinematographer. “I got married two months ago,” he said, “And everybody was like, ‘You gotta jump through the wedding cake!’ I was like, ‘Guys, please. To this day, people still harangue Rachtman about the cake jump. That was Riki Rachtman.’ He probably does like comic-book conventions, signing things as the cake guy, and nobody believes him.” “He's probably some out-of-work actor and on his résumé, he puts, ‘I'm the cake guy in the ‘November Rain’ video.’ And everybody is like, ‘No, you're not. “I feel bad for the cake guy,” Rachtman says. Moments later, the jumper that plows into the cake also has flowing hesher locks, but his face is obscured. He’s prominently featured in one shot, smiling ear to ear at a reception table, with his long metalhead mane. It’s easy to see why people think Rachtman jumped through the cake. Everybody seems to think it was, but it wasn't.” But the biggest misconception of the whole video is that I was the guy getting thrown through the cake. When I see the video now, it’s a lot of faces from the old scene. Axl wanted it to feel like a real wedding, so all his friends were there. “And then we went straight to the wedding reception scene the next morning. “We had been up all night shooting at the Rainbow,” Rachtman said, referring to a nightclub on the Sunset Strip. I called up Rachtman, now 56, at his home in Mooresville, North Carolina, to talk about his memories of his time on the “November Rain” set. Guns N’ Roses were regulars at Rachtman’s boîte and even filmed music videos there. And he owned the Cathouse, a Hollywood nightclub that served as the headquarters for the heavy metal bands he showcased on television. From 1990-1995, Rachman hosted Headbanger’s Ball, a two-hour, late-night, metal-video show on MTV. If you Google “who jumped into the cake in ‘November Rain,’” the answer you’ll get is Riki Rachtman. He promptly responded, and declined to comment, saying, “The secrets of the video are safe with me.” I’d have to start my quest for answers someplace else. " at which point we realised we could do nothing but this).The first person I reached out to for answers was Andy Morahan, the director, who helmed some of the biggest videos in MTV history. (And with much thanks to reader Iain Mathieson, who sent an email with the tempting claim "I don't think you can get much more pompous than. Dr Pepper have promised a free drink to every single person in the USA if it actually gets released this year I will match that with a can of Irn Bru for everyone in this office) those times will come again. Perhaps when new album Chinese Democracy finally surfaces (it's been 15 years in the making so far. But then, they don't really make rock ballads any more. They just don't make 'em like this any more. We all burst into spontaneous applause.Īlthough the video - still, apparently, the 13th most expensive ever made, and head and shoulders above most offerings in terms of cinematography - is ostensibly based on a short story by Del James called Without You, it is really just a retelling of that age-old tale: boy meets girl boy marries girl reception gets rained on girl gets shot in the face.īut my GOD it's bombastic. Axl has a bit of a cry, the song performance in the theatre, that we haven't mentioned much because it is comparatively dull, ends and then the video does too. In the ninth minute, in a triumph of symbolism, the bride throws her bouquet in bright sunlight, and as it passes through the air, the white roses turn pink, then red, then land on her grave in the dark and the rain. The action moves to the graveside, this time without Axl (apparently due to the fact that he didn't show up for the video shoot that day, rather than any plot-driven reason) but we see him later on.
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