"The rock and roll world has changed ten-fold since 1985," explains Berke. "Thematically, the staging and presentation in mounting a rock show was entirely different than what came before, or what is happening now. In the '60s, live festivals like Woodstock emphasized the music, but in the '80s, the emphasis became not only the music, but also the show itself The 1 980s ushered in the birth of big theatrical sets, which expressed the theme of the tour. People like Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd, The Who and the Rolling Stones introduced these giant sets, where it became more like live theatre. or opera."
Berke and his design team created period-authentic staging, lighting, texture and the ubiquitous logos of the world-famous Steel Dragon, while taking care not to upstage the characters or the story. "This movie's originality and its shock value lie in what happens to these characters," says Berke. "The world of rock and roll is compelling in and of itself, and we didn't want to detract from that."
Berke drew inspiration for the design of the stage and the band's identifying imagery from the name of the band itself. "To give this band an identity, we wanted to come up with an eye-catching, iconographic logo, not unlike the Rolling Stones tongue- and-lips, so we designed the winged dragon profile. It's everywhere — if you look carefully, you'll see it on the sides of the band's trucks, on t-shirts, posters, bumper stickers, backstage passes, tattoos and the equipment cases backstage."
"For the concert staging, we incorporated the elements of the steel town Chris had come from and developed a design in which a shiny metallic descending staircase wraps around the drum set, so that the lead singer could sort of descend down onto the stage, and we added huge, heavy cauldrons at the sides of the stage, from which we could have flashpots, smoke, pyro, or lights escape. A backstage elevator-like structure was rigged to transport Mark up to the top of the metallic stairs, which made for quite a dramatic entrance."
Berke then had to take the elaborate setting down a few notches for Blood Pollution, in order to reflect the limited finances that dictated their homemade look.
"We had to assume that these guys had no money, so how would they go about putting on their low-rent version of a Steel Dragon concert?" explains Berke. "They would improvise, making something out of nothing. So we created homemade stage lights, using Chock Full o' Nuts coffee cans to simulate par cans, stage lights which were essentially car headlights. In the '70s, when Bruce Springsteen was first touring around with his band in a station wagon he, like lots of bands, was using coffee cans with headlights inside."
For the house in which Chris lives with his family, Berke enjoyed creating a disparity between Chris' rock persona and his parents' cozy home.
"It's a great dichotomy... I wanted to make the hallway as homey and old-world as possible, because it's so funny to see Chris, this leather-clad, somewhat androgynous rock wanna-be, thundering down the hallway to meet his bandmates. And outside is Chris' old Dodge Dart, which probably belonged to his grandfather, with flames painted on the sides! From the first frames of the film, you definitely see these two worlds of his colliding, and they juxtapose each other in a wonderful way.
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