EXCLUSIVE: Before he strummed his acoustic guitar and sang “Land of Hope and Dreams” at Lincoln Center following the New York Film Festival premiere of The-Boss-in-existential-crisis drama Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Bruce Springsteen thanked filmmaker Scott Cooper, Jeremy Allen White (“for putting his whole heart and soul into the part and playing a much better looking version of me”), Jeremy Strong, who (“had us on the phone all hours of the night with different ideas and played a much, much better looking version of Jon Landau), Stephen Graham (“for being the embodiment of my late father”), the producers (“for whatever the f*ck it is that producers do”), and execs Bob Iger, Alan Bergman and David Greenbaum. The surprise was a hat tip to Paul Schrader (“I don’t know where the f*ck any of us would be without Paul Schrader who was always good about me stealing the title of his film.”)
The Boss was essentially thanking the Taxi Driver scribe for forgiving the creative larceny Springsteen perpetrated in those early days of his career. Schrader revisited the scene of the crime with me.
It’s a worthy primer for the film that bows Friday, as Schrader figures in a small way in the drama about the precipitous existential decline and depression Springsteen felt after Born to Run put him on the covers of both Time and Newsweek the same week, and heralded rock and roll’s next superstar. Springsteen channeled his unresolved childhood trauma into his seminal album Nebraska. As manager/mentor Jon Landau sent his client off to do that, he handed him a Paul Schrader script called Born in the USA; Schrader wanted Springsteen to play the lead role.
“Well, there was a moment there when Bruce was blowing up, and I wanted to do a film about working-class bar bands,” Schrader told Deadline. “That film became Light of Day [Michael J. Fox and Joan Jett would star in the 1987 film]. There was a moment there when Bruce was being courted by the studios. Paramount had it, and they would have given anything to star him in a movie. I met with and gave the script to Landau, and he got the back about a month later and said, ‘Bruce has been thinking about it and he’s not going to be in movies. He thinks it’s a trap and that he’ll end up like Elvis.’
“So, fair enough,” Schrader said. “I go off to Japan for the color correction on Mishima, and I see this album, Born in the USA. I think, well that sounds familiar. And sure enough, there’s a small credit [in the liner notes]. I come back to the U.S. still wanting to make that film, but now I had a problem that the title is associated with another project. I called Landau, who said, ‘Bruce still feels bad about this; he mentioned it the other day, and you two should get together.’
“We met in Los Angeles and he said, look, I never did read your script,” Schrader said. “I was working on this song called ‘Vietnam‘ and I thought that was a bit too-on-the-nose. Your script was on the coffee table, and I kept walking past it every day. And finally it caught in my head and, I stole it. He said, if you love the song, I’ll give you the song [for your movie]. If you want a new song, I’ll do something. I said, I would rather have a new one. So he wrote the song ‘Light of Day,’ which is what the film became.”
The idea of Springsteen playing the main character might make Boss brethren giddy, and Schrader said he wished Springsteen would have made that ultimate offering. Springsteen had only just begun to headline his own MTV videos at that time with the Born in the USA album, starting with the Brian DePalma-directed “Dancing in the Dark.” Schrader remembers the stampede to deliver The Boss to movie screens, starting from the dizzying week of the Time and Newsweek covers.
“Everybody saw that,” he recalled. “From the time he first played at the Roxy, everybody knew it, that this was a ticket to ride,” Schrader recalled. “It’s just like in the film I wrote. He had a long bar band period, but once he got going, people knew that he was going somewhere. And the next step is what do you do after you have hit songs and fill arenas? What new worlds are there to conquer? Well, there’s movies and a tradition of music stars, going back to Sinatra, making the jump to being movie stars. It seemed a natural thing, and more a question of who would get him first.”
Turned out Springsteen was a big enough fan of Elvis to have closely followed the creative stagnation that came with Presley being Hollywood’s highest-paid star. He transformed from edgy disruptor who inspired a generation of future singers, and into a pampered Vegas stage act.
“It’s a path you can take when you had some success, but then they want you to do the same thing again,” Schrader said. “And all of a sudden, like Elvis, you’re under a Tom Parker, and you’re making movies and you’re not touring. He was doing a movie a year, and it changed his image. Worse, it changed his image of himself. I think Bruce [made the right choice]. I would’ve loved to imagine him being in that role, that character in my film. If he had decided to make that move in his career, it would’ve come with a lot of control. He’s not the sort of guy that just signs on for a film like Elvis did. If he’d said, I’d like to do this, it would’ve become a Paul Schrader slash Bruce Springsteen film. And I would have been just fine with that.”
While Schrader can lay claim to being an inspiration for two Springsteen songs that for decades have been staples of his concerts, Schrader was underwhelmed with the film he ended up with, sans Springsteen.
“Unfortunately, the film didn’t turn out so well because essentially I miscast it,” Schrader said. “Fox and Joan Jett were never meant to be in a movie together. I suppose there could have been some financial advantage for me [in making a legal fuss over Born in the USA], but I just didn’t want to be that kind of guy, who would milk Bruce’s head for X amount of dollars. And he didn’t ever forget it. This shows you that there is such a thing as karma, and that if you do the right thing, sometimes people remember.”
Schrader said he loved Cooper’s film Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere: “When I first heard of it, I thought, now that is a fool’s errand, because there were just too many ways it could go wrong, and so few chances for it to go right,” Schrader said. “Scott Cooper pulled it off. It fires on all cylinders. It is good as a music film. It’s good as a study of creative crisis and just as good as a biographical film though I wouldn’t really call it a film biography. I probably wouldn’t have even seen it, but when Bruce started lining up behind it, I realized it had to be good, because he would be the first person out of the room if it wasn’t.”
Watching his small part in the drama unfold onscreen, Schrader was surprised by one thing, watching Landau giving Springsteen his script: “The script cover page had an Ohio map on it, and I’d completely forgotten I’d done that. I talked to Scott Cooper afterwards and asked him, where did you find the actual script? He said Bruce kept it all these years.”
Charlie Matthau‘s Cryogenic Reality Series Vision
The non-profit Alcor Life Extension Foundation’s business of deep-freezing whole bodies or heads (hello, Ted Williams and possibly Walt Disney) in hopes their big brains can be revived in the distant future is the subject of a reality series that will be shopped by Charlie Matthau. He’s the film director (Freaky Deaky) and son of the great actor Walter Matthau.
Societal fascination with reanimation spans centuries. That includes the number of incarnations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with a new version coming from director Guillermo del Toro. Making a series that turns sci-fi into science wouldn’t have the sex appeal of the addictive Housewives, Kardashians or Below Deck series that dominate the viewing passions of my daughters and make me wonder could I have been a better father. But it turns out Alcor brings plenty of drama, and a lot of action as former special ops surgeons and ex-SEALs race the clock to preserve the brains and more of freshly dead clients before their organs degrade too far to be deep frozen.
Charlie Matthau has been a longtime believer in Alcor, and made a proof-of-concept docu Death is Optional in Arizona. He is also a believer in James Arrowwood, the Alcor co-CEO and general counsel who, according to Matthau’s docu, suffers from Vascular EDS. Most of those diagnosed with that rare tissue disorder perish by 50. Arrowwood is only a few years away. That’s part of why he moves like his hair’s on fire to serve expiring clients, but he rejects my suggestion that this is about his own race against time, hoping to advance the technology as far as possible for when it’s time for him to be frozen. Alcor is funded by everyone from billionaires down to regular people who sign over part of their life insurance policies to be members. A reality series would boost awareness, and demystify a process that is less sci-fi than a longshot investment in being brought back someday.
“I don’t love that through line about me, it’s a little intense and heavy,” he said. Not that the work of Alcor doesn’t have ticking clocks. “Right now, this very minute, I have a team with a preeminent cardiothoracic surgeon, three former Navy SEALs and a nurse, bedside with a 36-year-old about to die. He’s a big crypto name. I have that twice a month and we don’t know if we’re going to get there in time. You never know because death is random.”
Cryonics sounds to a layman like betting on a longshot horse. The steps taken to preserve and freeze a brain are well established; less certain is exactly what one’s brain might be implanted onto or how a whole person might be brought back. The race to make possible things like deep space travel, AI, stem cell and other advancements gives hope that even in a few decades, a thawing could be possible. But only if one pays the price to be part of a program that involves replacing a body’s blood and water with a concoction that costs $50,000-$80,000 and keeps organs viable, and that includes fluids culled from fish that can hibernate when their lakes freeze over, anti-coagulants and other elements. That is according to an episode for Funeralcast, a podcast for the mortuary industry, which is being deputized to be part of Alcor’s preservation process.
“There’s a ton of misperception, so I’ve got to give you some context,” Arrowwood said. “We’re not trying to revive anybody. It’s not immortality, it’s not Dracula. That’s a misperception. What happens, and this is just biomedical fact, is it’s basically organ procurement with your brain as the primary organ that we’re trying to catch before the viability of the brain cells die. You’re not dead yet just because you have an injury or illness incompatible with life. That just means medical science doesn’t have a way to keep you alive, meaning your brain. But if you have a heart attack, your brain’s alive for 12 to 24 hours after you’ve been declared dead. Your brain has knowledge and experience nobody else on the planet has, right? You’ve seen things nobody else has seen. That’s immensely valuable. We represent this little bit of hope. We don’t promise anything. That’s another misperception. We’re doing the research. We’re the only nonprofit that does this. We get confused with these for-profits where you’ve got a bunch of charlatans out there, trying to set up religions, trying to make themselves out to be gods. That’s not what we’re doing. I’ve got guys from Stanford, Harvard, University of Michigan, Notre Dame. I mean, I went to Notre Dame, right? We have a murderers row of the experts in Cryobiology and Medicine on our team, and we have special forces guys who look straight out of central casting. They’re 6’3” Cary Grant-looking motherf*ckers who are 18 Deltas, they’re trauma surgeon trained. So they can literally cut your head off, but we have to get to you within about six to 10 hours after death. You can be anywhere in the world, we’ve got to get to you. And that happens twice a month. Alcor has never given media access because it was too risky. We couldn’t trust people. They were trying to turn it into something crazy. The only reason Charlie has any ability to do this whatsoever is because I trust Charlie and Charlie’s been an OG member.”
Matthau joined Alcor when he attended USA Film School, and until his father’s death, the son tried repeatedly to become well, a popsicle.
“I’m actually one of the first 100 Alcor members,” Matthau said. “I was always interested in it. It always made sense to me because I thought, well, it’s the second worst thing that could ever happen to you because the worst thing is you die and you’re not frozen. Maybe a long shot chance you can come back, but the alternative didn’t sound exciting to me. When I signed up and I tried to get my dad to do it, first thing he said to me was, how are you paying for this, Charlie? And I said, well, you get an insurance policy, and because I’m in my early 20s, I can get one very cheap and the death benefit goes to Alcor. And he said, ‘Charlie, are you crazy? They’re going to come and kill you to get the money.’ I said, I’ve been to Alcor and I’ve seen the cars that they drive and they’re not doing that. They weren’t driving expensive cars, so I figured they’re not whacking people to get the death benefit. So then I thought, okay, I’m going to sign up. So I sign up, and then I really wanted my dad to sign up.
“He is my best buddy, and if I come back for the next lifecycle, if this thing actually works, I would like to hang out with my best buddy. So I thought, okay, I’m, we’re going to go out to dinner and convince him. I know he’s going to say, ‘Charlie, this is a bunch of bullsh*t, and you’re crazy.’ And then I’m going to say, well, if that’s the way you feel, then you really have to do this because it’s not going to work anyway and you’re going to make your son happy. So we go to dinner and I say, I’d like to talk to you about cryonics. And he just looks at me and he goes, I’m not doing it. I said, oh, really? Okay. Why not? He looks at me and he says, because I’m afraid it’ll work.”
The one answer the son hadn’t expected.
“I thought he was going to say, because it’s a bunch of bullsh*t that’s not going to work,” Matthau told me. “I had my answer all prepared for that, I was laying the trap for him, but he was always one step ahead of me at least and much smarter. He said, ‘I’m not doing it because I’m afraid it’s going to work. And I don’t want to come back and be a circus act.’ ”
If the elder Matthau is going to live forever, it will by merit of his Oscar- and Tony-winning work. He shut the freezer door on the cryonics and his son backed off. But Charlie Matthau remains determined to have his whole body frozen. When that happens he will be in good company: Arrowwood said that at least 10 of the world’s richest people are clients, though he said he could not name them because of confidentiality agreements.
