Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen came to music video the way he came to everything else: late, and on his own terms. He had been making records for a decade when MTV arrived, and his reputation rested on three-hour concerts rather than on television. So he hired people who made films.

Brian De Palma, a year after Scarface, shot Dancing in the Dark at the Saint Paul Civic Center in June 1984, during an actual show, with the song performed twice so the cameras could be moved between takes. The fan pulled up onstage at the end is Courteney Cox, an actress placed in the front row for the purpose. The crowd around her was not: they had come for the concert.

John Sayles, the independent writer-director of Return of the Secaucus Seven, made three in a row — Born in the U.S.A., I'm On Fire and Glory Days — and shot them the way he shot his films, with actors, locations and a story that stays on the ground the songs describe. Jonathan Demme, working with his nephew Ted, filmed Streets of Philadelphia in the city he had just made a film about, following Springsteen on foot through it. That song won an Academy Award.

The pattern holds later too. Meiert Avis, who made videos for U2 in the same years, shot the Tunnel of Love clips in 1987, and Thom Zimny, by then already the band's documentary filmmaker, directed Radio Nowhere in 2007. Almost none of them were music video directors first.