Dancing in the Street (1985) Workprint, 35mm - David Bowie and Mick Jagger

This isn’t something you see everyday. This is the workprint to the 1985 music video “Dancing in the Street“ starring David Bowie and Mick Jagger. Compared to a final print, this version is only missing its opticals, which means those shots run a little longer. While the music video was shot in open matte, I’m presenting it here in because it seems like when it was shown theatrically, it was in wide-screen due to the “Kodak remembers“ intro being hard matted to wide-screen. Ironically enough, even though it opens with the Kodak ad, it was printed on Agfa stock! Ha! The sound comes from a 4 track fullcoat mag, with Dolby A noise reduction. only 2 tracks were used for a stereo output. Something to note, it would seem the Live Aid narrator was temp, as final prints include a much deeper voiced narrator. After much headache, I’ve learned that this film is supposed to be played at 25fps. I do know this was shown theatrically in the US, which means it would’ve been played ~4% slow at 24fps, meaning the sound would’ve been pitched down. If I had to take a guess, I’d say this was shot with the intention of going directly to TV (where 25fps would’ve been fine), when it was later decided that this was going to end up in theaters. The picture looks pretty nice, given that it would’ve been printed directly off the camera negative. The timing is bad, but that is to be expected from a workprint.