Metal Monday!

I never get star-struck. Living and working in Los Angeles killed all those early fanboy jitters long ago. But walking into a Santa Monica radio station on a Monday morning to meet and interview the legendary Alice Cooper gave me Wayne & Garth sized butterflies. To anyone who grew up a horror-loving rocker (which would be 90% of you), Alice Cooper is like the President, Emperor, and Don Corleone of our world. He’s one of the men who lit the switch for our day-to-day passions. And when it comes to meeting your heroes, there’s always that anxiety that you’ll walk away disappointed. Thankfully, upon instantly meeting the man, all those worries were dashed: Alice Cooper couldn’t be further from the egomaniacal self-important rock-star type. Out of the hundred-something people we’ve interviewed, he was the group favorite; the kind of nice, articulate, down-to-Earth horror fanatic you could geek out with all day.

Mere hours after that interview, we found ourselves at the Sunset Strip’s infamous Rainbow Room with three of the band members from Dokken (Don, Jeff, & George) who were cool enough to appear and discuss their song for Dream Warriors. In a strange twist of fate, we conducted the interview in the rock star VIP balcony area of the bar, called “The Lair of the Hollywood Vampires” where Alice Cooper was listed as President. With others like Keith Moon, Ringo Starr and John Lennon mentioned, one can only imagine the kind of historic rock star debauchery that took place in that room. An employee said that John Belushi was listed as a member, until some random asshole painted their name over it. Fuck you, “Tammy Constable.”

With three rockers in one room, you can imagine the kind of craziness that came out of the Dokken interview and every minute was a blast. The guys sang the original unused version of Dream Warriors, reminisced about shooting the video and even gave the crew stock tips! When they joked about doing a song for the end of the documentary, I had to contain an excited banshee scream. If only…

We’ve gone to the ends of the Earth to try and get as many Elm Street faces as possible, but our final day of rolling cameras on these rock stars proved to be the ultimate dark frosting on this over-sized cake!

The perfect end to an amazing shoot...

--Andrew Kasch (co-director/editor)