The New York Post
August 24, 2003
BACK IN BLACK
By MARY HUHN
Sure, he's old enough to be their grandfather, but Johnny Cash is still cooler than all of his VMA competitors.
August 24, 2003 -- At age 71, Johnny Cash is the oldest musician ever to be nominated for an MTV Video Music Award -
let alone six of them in one year.
The country music legend's haunting, elegiac video for "Hurt" - in which old footage of Cash as a vibrant, broodingly
beautiful young man is interspersed with scenes of him as he is today, ravaged by an illness that causes Parkinson's-
like tremors - will compete against Eminem, Missy Elliott, 50 Cent and Justin Timberlake for Best Video of the Year.
(The awards air live Aug. 28 at 8 p.m.)
"It shows that great art is timeless," says Cash's longtime producer Rick Rubin, "and goes beyond any boundaries of age
and style."
The new footage was shot in the Cash household and the Johnny Cash Museum in Nashville - making the video feel as
brutally personal and revealing as the song's lyrics ("Everyone I know goes away in the end.")
"To have someone with such a commanding presence speak about such vulnerable things - we never see that," says Rubin.
"Our culture hides older people, and vulnerabilities aren't cherished by our society."
Acclaimed video director Mark Romanek (who also directed the feature film "One Hour Photo" starring Robin Williams)
knew that with Cash, "Hurt" - a cover of the original by Nine Inch Nails - had, in his words, "found its greatest
interpreter."
Indeed: Cash turns the song - which originally sounded like a teenager's indulgent lament after getting ditched by
friends at the strip mall - into an unsparing meditation on loss and mortality.
"There's nothing phony in [the video]," says Romanek.
"It's him in his house, [in] his clothes."
Originally, Romanek had scripted a version of the video in which Cash sat alone, strumming his guitar next to a stack
of memorbilia - which was to gradually be cleared away until the legend was sitting alone.
But when Romanek and his crew arrived in Nashville and toured the Cash musuem - which had suffered flood damage and had
not yet been repaired - Romanek decided to trash the script and shoot a video on the fly. The director was also granted
unprecedented access to Cash's archival footage, which took him two weeks to screen.
Adding to the video's poignancy is a brief appearance by the singer's beloved wife, June Carter Cash, who died suddenly
last May.
When June entered the room as her husband was performing the song, "Mr. Cash looked at her," Romanek says, adding that
she had a "complex look of love and pride and sadness. She was so beautiful. Even at her advanced age, she was very
magnetic."
When Romanek began editing the footage, he was astounded.
"When we began juxtaposing images of John then and John now, we saw that something powerful was happening," he recalls.
"You can tell when something is great - it takes on an energy of its own."
"Freaked" is the way producer Rubin describes his initial reaction.
"I didn't know what to expect," he says. "It made me cry. I still cry."
Apparently, the video even freaked out Cash.
"Mr. Cash was a little unsure, but his family was very moved," Romanek says. "They all wept."
But no one ever imagined the dark song would be a hit single on the radio - let alone that MTV would put it into
rotation.
"Music video expectations are pretty low," Romanek says, adding that viewers "don't expect to be moved."
While the video is a look back at Cash's storied life and career, Romanek says it's in no way meant to serve as an
obituary.
"It's meant to be a truthful [portrait] of where Mr. Cash is now," says Romanek, who feels the only thing the video
fails to capture is how "sprightly Johnny is. He was frisky with June. And he autographed copies of the album for the
crew. He's a lot more energetic than the video makes him out to be."
SOURCE: The New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/3914.htm
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