Looking for You is the music video set to the fourth song on Bachelors Anonymous’ unreleased second album, In the Land of Nod, remastered and released digitally. Bachelors Rob Berg and David Hughes as well as director/editor Adam Soch and actor (and drummer) Del Mar Richardson tell the story behind the video.
Adam Soch: It was great revisiting the music video, after so many years.1
David Hughes: I think Adam had seen us perform. He was a professional videographer but hadn’t yet produced a music video. So we agreed to collaborate.
Adam: Sweet Tim Bennet must have been the one to take me to see you perform at Lhasa Club on Fairfax. Not sure, but loved the music and we talked.
David: We last performed at Lhasa in November of 1986 (according to our timeline). That would have been at Lhasa’s first location on Hudson. The place was big and rambling. I think Jean-Pierre and Anna actually lived there. Those were the days of live/work on the sly…
Rob Berg: I was getting into writing for stage and screen at the time, so I worked with Tim on the script. Unfortunately, after several moves over the years, that was lost along the way.
Adam: We had a script by Tim [and Rob], but really were free to suggest and to create, and we did.
Del Mar Richardson: “Flattery will get you everywhere!” I thought, after meeting Adam Soch, the director of Looking for You, for the first time somewhere in Burbank, Calif. I don’t remember where he was from—Ukraine? [Romania]—but he was really fun and sweet.2
Adam: At first I didn’t know who would play the lead and when I saw the beauty and strong facial [structure] and body of Del Mar… I was, WOW, great casting! The camera loves him, as they say in the trade, really loves him.
Del Mar: I think David mentioned it would be at least anywhere from three to six weeks, give or take. David and Rob both had day jobs and there were additional fun folks and crew whose schedules had to be coordinated. The season seemed like late spring when we started.
Del Mar: An early Saturday morning at Highways Performance Space, in Santa Monica, in an industrial-like area near the train tracks. It was huge and the walls were black as I recall. This was where we would do the “bed scene” with the sleeping beauty, unconscious self. Which was great because I got extra rest. Smack does that. But my skin looked FLAWLESS. Coming from the death rock scene, I got into the habit of coloring my hair blue black. I did however have a body-conscious problem. I was shy. I was down to my underwear and I don’t know what Robert and David were thinking. Looking back I can’t imagine being objectified.
Del Mar: I was lying in a sea of packing popcorn, the kind used in cushioning fragile objects in parcels. Which in my case, was very apropos. My nipples were like hard little diamond cutters from the chill of the place, on a mattress on the floor. Like a bed in Eden, where the Cholos had their way. It was explained to me that the umbilical cord had to be cut, my ties to unconscious states and it was time to “wakee-wakee.” They were going to slowly drop a golden rope onto me, which had been cut with scissors in a separate shot.
Del Mar: Rob and David were decked out in these really elegant threads. I mean, Saks Fifth Avenue-clad men who represented my “Guardian Angels” that would descend from the heavens to take that walk with me. The problem with the descent shot was that there were no wires to suspend them, or anything to make them appear to be flying and landing. Luckily the floors were black! I remembered a book I read as a teen geek about the filming of flight sequences of The Enterprise, from the original Star Trek series. I suggested it to Adam and the Gents, who needed to keep that wardrobe pristine—more on that later—and he liked to try the idea. In Star Trek, the camera moved, not the full-scale model of the Enterprise. So if he put the camera on a dolly, positioned the Gents on the black floor and rolled the camera past them, that they would appear to be drifting down if he shot from their feet up. The last scene, which I used to do play-pretend as a kid when I was flying, was to film the floor and have Rob and David jump from an apple crate down to the floor. The slow motion would smooth out the movements and that’s how that was done. I must say that the satin sheets that fell down over me, felt really good and I could have laid there all day. Which I did. We were there for almost eight hours.
Del Mar: The last place was on on Marengo Ave. or Raymond in South Pasadena, where the bathroom sequence was shot and then the ending with the light blast on me outside the window, the mirror with the blue tinted water running down, Anne, David, Rob & I, the TV and the apple. I believe that’s where we finished and we had the “let’s party” vibe.
Rob: The bathroom scene actually was shot at Gary Maynard and Don Neumeyer’s house in Pasadena. It was a block from the Gamble House. I know because I rented from them, and that was our bathroom.
David: In the bathroom you’ll notice that, behind Del Mar, our lips are moving. Adam suggested that on-set.
Del Mar: I can’t believe I didn’t have a shirt on! See? The Gents were getting under my then bisexual skin. The bathroom. I was standing in front of a mirror which had to be steamed by running the shower’s hot water and sink. The camera lens was fogging; that had to be remedied, because the door had to be closed. I think what they ended up doing was having a big pot of boiling water there, under the mirror. Swiping away the steam in one swipe on the mirror took a few tries, but we got to it. Adam had me looking up into the camera; did I mention that my skin was flawless? Poor Rob and David, the decked out Saks Angels, had to stand in there after we got the logistics of the “swipe” down. My swipe away of the steam on the mirror to clear my perception and show the angels behind me in reflection. I’m thinking, this has Hesse, Upanishads, and Gita, Watts, all over it.
Del Mar: The second scene, someone please correct me if I get this out of sequence, would be shot in a lovely house in the Los Feliz district on Los Feliz Boulevard. The scene where we see me through the window, at the desk with scissors, putting on a jacket to go for the stroll that picked up in Pasadena.
David: The leaded window behind which Del Mar walks was in Los Feliz. The house was owned—who knows who actually held the title—by Johanna Guzmán, my friend and schoolmate from Immaculate Heart College, a concert-level pianist who had moved from Bolivia, mainly to escape homophobia and the expectations placed on the child of a prominent army general (who was later assassinated). And speaking of IHC, one of our cameramen, Albert Gasser, I met through his then-wife, a fellow alum. Anne Atwell-Zoll appears to have placed the scissors on the table in Johanna’s kitchen where she and I would talk.
Del Mar: The [next] scene would involve the scissors again… hmm… and a seat at a desk, with my Guardian Angels handing me the scissors this time. I drew an almost imperceptible shape of a human head with shoulders on a white piece of paper so I could cut it out easily. That’s when I was matched with the street clothes I would wear throughout the middle of the story. I told them, no, these jeans are too loose and bitched about wearing a V-neck; the jacket wasn’t so bad. But you know, the clothes that other people have been dressing me with as an actor today, I wouldn’t even dream of wearing. But it looked really good. Trust. See, in my head, I was the Star! L.A., twenties, inferiority complex. Actor. NORMAL. The finishing shot, I would walk out of the house with the paper cut-out that could be “anybody,” to go looking for…. It was about five or six hours, not bad.
Del Mar: The following week’s shoot was an outdoor shot, in Old Town Pasadena, in an alley which led to an end at the back door of the Loch Ness Monster Pub. Night. I remember Philip Tarley there, and there were strangely familiar people from my Goth days as extras. Tim Bennet, who co-wrote the video was there, sassy as usual and hilarious! and then there was Chris Cornwell. MMM-mmm-good. Bonnie noticed that I noticed, and so she noticed, and I noticed that she noticed, and it became “that thing.” I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. I went home with fantasies. I mean, I think a majority of us were googley-eyed. He was the art director. He could direct me, directly to… looking for you, is becoming an obsession….
David: Chris [2:20] is the first person shown in that sequence. Yvonne Roberts [2:27, background] was a coworker of mine at Kaiser. She’s wearing an oversize black-and-white faux silk scarf that I still have today. When we were assembling a cast of extras I asked her if she had any 8x10s. She was what they call plus-size, had a sense of style, and I thought she might have done some modeling. She said she had some and I gave them to whoever was doing casting. I think Yvonne brought along her friend, who holds the compact, and that would have been either Deanne Turner or Lena Wakeman.
David: Luiz Sampaio [2:31] I first met when he returned to L.A. from abroad or out of state; he’d played French horn with Fat and Fucked Up. Hmm…. We must have forgotten that when we asked Doug Lyons to provide the horn line in the recording. In that shot Luiz reminds me of Charly Brown, the vocalist from Voice Farm. Our screenwriter Tim Bennett [2:35] points at the camera while Duane Pierson [2:53] sits in the doorway. Chris [2:37] talks with Bonnie Wylie, who also was script supervisor. Ann Russell [3:19] we met at the same Catholic choir in Pasadena where I first met Rob. She had a gal group called the Original Sin Sisters and would sing backup with us before devoting herself to acting. Not shown are Richard Barkin, Andrea Carney, and Philip Tarley.
Del Mar: Our craft service guy [at the alley location, Manuel Gonzales], he was so nice! Everybody was so nice. But those shoes were too big. Those jeans, that V-neck, the jacket. It was hard to be relaxed with people around. I walked rather stiff. I had to forget about everything around me and pretend I was in a desert, walking casually, like a saunter, in those shoes. Rob and David were behind me, and all these extras were hanging around eating hot dogs; it was really a lot of fun. That had to have been a Friday night. We were there for six hours, maybe seven. Adam had his camera hand-held and may have had the dolly. Many re-takes, an occasional car, different setups for the angles and featuring the extras.
David: I think it was Johanna who suggested we ask Manuel Gonzales to cater. We were taking a chance in Pasadena, because you couldn’t even shoot commercial still photographs on location there without a permit. It sure helped that it was in an alley.
Adam: I remember all the locations Del Mar is describing so well; great memory!!!
David: I think the South Pasadena house that Del Mar recalled earlier is where all the last sequences were shot. It was a “freeway house” lying in the path of the cancelled 710 highway, owned by Caltrans, and rented out to Rob’s friends Lothar and Ricardo Delgado. The room is bare—that’s because I think we had to clear it out. It might have been Lothar’s sewing room.
Rob: That chair with the piping that Anne sits in is amazing.
Del Mar: There was this full-length mirror they had attached to a hook so they could swing it from side to side. Adam’s assistant [perhaps cameraman Andy Szabo] had blue tinted water and I think they flash-fashioned a light with a blue gel on it. And they put me in front of this mirror, and swung it with the camera and the Gents behind me. While shooting they did a close-up and poured the blue water down the mirror, washing me, distorting my image. Like a baptism?
David: Before production ever started, Adam came over to the house Rob and I rented and we talked film and video and pulled out tapes and LaserDiscs. I remember showing him a scene from a Tarkovsky film in which water flows over a surface. I was tickled that it made its way into Looking for You.
Del Mar: These were the last scenes. I believe we did a day shot interior and either ran to nighttime or we returned. Again… no shirt! I’m starting to feel comfortable.
Adam: One of the major challenge was the Picture Wall in the video, but we did it well. It looks really good and it is all hand made by pulling the pins out on the other side of the thin wall. So many hands; probably four or six pulling fast, randomly. We did not have today’s luxury of special effects.
Del Mar: “The Wall of Faces.” I caught sight of his muscular arms and back as Chris Cornwell was working up a smoldering sweat, hammering and setting up the false wall, wearing a tool belt. The wall had color magazine cut-outs of men, women, different people. I don’t know who cut all of those faces out of magazines. They were each pinned to the wall from behind. I would stand in front of the wall, innocently, and watch these faces fall down away from the wall. It was a cool effect. People were behind the wall furiously pulling out the pins from behind so the pictures would fall. But this had to be done twice. Because the magazine cut-outs weren’t separating from the wall and falling. The holes were too tight. The “Looking for You” music was always playing during shooting. So with those pictures I also fell. It was my death. I think I started out waking up in a dream and then dying, or waking up in transformation, my rebirth!
Del Mar: I was blinded by the light. It was getting dark, or we returned again at dusk for the last scene? I met Anne Atwell-Zoll, who helped do my makeup, with sassy Larry Dias and Yvonne Espinach. Good people. It was from Larry that I learned how they were able to use expensive-looking wardrobe on productions. They returned it. I’m still naive.
David: I applied my own pancake—liberally, Lugosi-ly it seems. I remember telling Larry, who was an industry professional, that I was excited about having dressing room trailers and honeywagon catering. He broke it to me that honeywagons are port-a-potties. I didn’t fare any better with wardrobe procurement. I had a Bullock’s credit card, which I gave Larry so he could, mm…, borrow our costumes. But the limit on the card was only a few hundred dollars! (Working-class stiffs were we.) He brought it back, not really concealing his disgust, since he hadn’t learned the limit until checkout. I think he had to use his own.
Del Mar: They shot me exterior with an HMI light from a lighting place; it was really bright, right through the window as I approached it. They shot me from inside while I was outside at the door. We broke for coffee. We were a bit punchy, we’d laugh at anything. I mean a cough was hilarious. I recall being a bit randy. I had a crush! And I got close enough to get a whiff of his underarm deodorant.
Del Mar: After our break, they sprang some fancy threads on me and WOW! My rebirth! Or annihilation? To enter that firmament where Anne really did made my skin FLAWLESS! I had brought a boom box, so that I could play Ravel’s Boléro. The last thing one might expect to hear from a boom box. I brought this to get into character. I was on this Ravel kick and got hit by this meatball to shlep it along with me, a way to feel like a romantic bullfighter, on the inside. I have strange ideas to other people and they can dig it, but David was kind enough to ask and I had forgotten that I did that. I just needed what the music could give me for something to read on the camera. It “exalted” me on the inside. So when I walked into the room as the transformation, I wanted to feel self-possessed. I don’t know if that shows but it’s the thought that counts, and my skin was flawless. I mentioned that.
Del Mar: In 1980, I had three sixes tattooed on the palm of my right hand, where the lifeline is. It represented the Devil to people who actually saw it, but to me it represented the sphere of “Tiphereth,” the sixth sphere on the Hebrew Tree of Life. Tiphereth means Beauty, and represents the Sun and the light of consciousness, what some refer to as “Christ Consciousness.” Three sixes, is light, manifested in three earthly dimensions. That’s the “Big tuh-doo!” There’s some loose symbolism in all this because an apple has been passed on from the Angels to me, and although this wasn’t intended, it ended up in my right hand in slow motion, which I open, revealing the sixes to the camera and handing this apple to Anne Atwell-Zoll, who takes a bite.
David: Since you’ve mentioned both Hesse and the Tree, Del Mar, I’m compelled to remark that I did an apprenticeship with Charles Cameron, whom Anne eventually married. One project Charles and I worked on was a game of ideas inspired by Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, which employed the Tree’s ten spheres—nodes—as spaces in which to place the ideas. Once an idea was placed in a node by one player, if the next player placed an idea in a node that connected to the first, via the tree’s path, the second idea had to have some conceptual correspondence—connection, conceptual rhyme—with the first. And because Tiphereth, which you mention, is the Tree’s major nexus (eight paths), the game becomes one of skill and strategy. Some players played the game three-dimensionally, for instance rhyming the placed idea with the sphere’s original Kabbalistic aspect(s).
Del Mar: I don’t think we were drinking when we finished. But we were happy we made it through, and Adam was kind enough to show us some of the takes. If I’m not mistaken, the dialogue at the end of the video [during the credits] is dialogue we were having during filming, because it’s a music video and it’s MOS—“mit-out sound,” without sound. So it’s cool to hear us talking. I think there was something unplugged that caused a loud feedback between sound playbacks of the track.
David: I think the dialogue at the end was literally that: dialogue at the end of shooting in one of the interiors. Adam asked us to do a chorus line with some leftover debris, probably the “heads,” and asked us to kick them up as he filmed. Then, as we swooned, the feedback blasted us out of our collapse. And so I had to break it to cast and crew that members of the household were asleep. Also included in the audio is Adam giving directions, during which you can hear the oboe sequence of Boléro.
Adam: Looking at the credits, it was done on our newly purchased chyron hardware for superimposing text. Hearing myself talk was so strange, but I can see my enthusiasm and joy as soon as a shoot looked great in the monitor. It was passion, really, from beginning to end.
Adam: It was taped in 3/4″ format, a standard for the time, but Betacam SP format would have been a step up. A cassette player was playing back the music and we filmed MOS. It was fun editing from two Playback decks into the Edited master, but compared to today’s digital technology, it was HARD, very hard.
Del Mar: I’m really proud to have been a part of this. Even though I had a third position on a shared card in the credits! But that’s just a snarky actor-speak for “I’m jealous! I thought I was the Star!!!” I really had a good time helping to make it and I learned things I needed to learn.
David: Actually I was third. You were fourth.
Header image:
Edward Norment
Video Credits
Music and Lyrics
Robert Berg
David Hughes
Director/Editor
Adam Soch
Screenplay
Tim Bennett
Bachelors Anonymous
Art Director
Chris Cornwell
Actors
Anne Atwell-Zoll
Robert Berg
David Hughes
Del Mar Richardson
Camera
Albert Gasser
Andy Szabo
Costumes
Larry Dias
Extras
Richard Barkin
Tim Bennett
Andrea Carney
Chris Cornwell
Duane Pierson
Yvonne Roberts
Ann Russell
Luiz Sampaio
Philip Tarley
Deanne Turner
Lena Wakeman
Makeup
Anne Atwell-Zoll
Larry Dias
Yvonne Espinach
Production Assistants
Victor Bowman
Eva Nemeth
Edward Norment
Randy Reeves
Reed Roles
Larry Slaughter
Script Supervision
Bonnie Wylie
Catering
Manuel Gonzales
Special Thanks To
Einer & Olive Berg
Robert & Phyllis Hughes
George Copanas
Lothar & Ricardo Delgado
Johanna Guzmán
Gary Maynard
Don Neumeyer
Clive Wright
Music Recorded At
Wildcat Studios
Josh Schneider, Engineer
Red Zone Studios
Duncan Aldrich, Engineer
Music Mixed At
Red Zone Studios
Drums
Del Mar Richardson
French Horn
Douglas Lyons
Music Produced By
Bachelors Anonymous
Looking For You
© A Significant Other/Adam Soch Production
In Memoriam
Tim Bennett
Einer & Olive Berg
Johanna Guzmán
Gary Maynard
Don Neumeyer
Bonnie Wylie
Lyrics
Ear to the door, hoping that love won’t ignore me
Lips against glass, watching as strangers walk past me
Looking for you…
My hands turn to fists, resigned to the power that twists them
Tears burn my eyes; these sudden emotions surprise them
Looking for you…
I move in the night, a sheet of white heat and white lightning
Turn and toss, in silhouette trees burn like crosses
Chorus
Looking for you is becoming an obsession
Looking for you—a solitary passion
Looking for you in many different faces
Looking for you—so many different places
Are you looking for me
Like I’m looking for you?
Looking for me… looking for you… looking for me…
Circling the globe, a barricade road that I go by
Lights flash ahead, your dust trail explodes in a red sky
Chorus
Round
Looking for me, looking for you, looking for me, looking for you…
Looking for me, looking for you, looking for me, looking for you…
Looking for me, looking for you, looking for me, looking for you…
Looking for me, looking for you, looking for me, looking for you…
Lyrics Reprinted by Permission
Song Credits
See album credits