Before she became a “Friend,” Courteney Cox was dancing in the dark. The actress updated her dancing moves from a 1984 music video by Bruce Springsteen in an Instagram post.
Cox, 59, responded on social media to the prompt, “Asking my mom how she danced in the ‘80s,” Entertainment Weekly reported.
The “Friends” star is wearing a zipped-up hoodie and jeans with her hands in the air, trying to dance to “Smalltown Boy” by Bronski Beat, according to Rolling Stone. She does not seem to be inspired, so she unzips her apparel to reveal a Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band T-shirt, the magazine reported.
You can’t start a fire without a spark. A record scratch sound segues into Springsteen’s hit “Dancing in the Dark,” the 1984 hit from the Boss’ album “Born in the U.S.A.” Cox was pulled onstage by Springsteen near the end of the video.
The music video was partly shot live during Springsteen’s concert in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in June 1984, Rolling Stone reported. The video was created by Brian De Palma over two nights at the Saint Paul Civic Center, and the director asked Springsteen to pick out a young female fan to dance with him on stage, according to Entertainment Weekly.
Springsteen assumed he was pulling a random fan, but Cox was chosen from a casting call in New York, the entertainment news website reported. She was one of three actresses who could have been chosen by Springsteen, and Cox did not want to be picked.
“I did not want to be the one -- I don’t want to dance in front of 30,000 people,” Cox said.
In a recent interview on the “Rolling Stone Music Now” podcast, E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg and keyboardist Roy Bittan talked about making the video.
“It was an interesting approach and something different for us,” Bittan told Rolling Stone. “The way it was staged was not probably quite our wheelhouse, but certainly had made a great impression on MTV. I think, of course, the song was so great that we probably could have done any number of different videos and had the same result.”
“Most of it was recorded before the concert. It was recorded the night before, as a real Hollywood sort of production,” Weinberg told the magazine. “They brought in about 500 people, and we did it over and over again. I had headphones on, because I was playing to the song. We must’ve played it 15 or 20 times in a row.
“And during the show, they did it again, with a full audience. Courteney Cox was there. Basically we did the concert, and we stopped, and Bruce announced to the audience, ‘We’re going to make a video.’”
Although she was reluctant, the appearance did wonders for Cox’s career.
According to Entertainment Weekly she joked that at the beginning of her career she was asked “What is Bruce Springsteen really like?” Then it became “What is Michael J. Fox really like?” since she played the actor’s girlfriend, Lauren Miller, on “Family Ties.”
Finally, the actress, who played Monica Geller on “Friends,” said the question became, “What is Jennifer Aniston really like?”
As the Boss sang, “Come on, baby, the laugh’s on me.”
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