1/24/2024 0 Comments November rainMy reaction at the time was that it looked wrong.” It looks like the guy jumps into the cake, and we had only one cake. When we shot it, I went, Well, that's no good, man. It's not like he just falls through it or anything. I have to say that your choice of verb, that we got the ‘jumping’ through the cake-it is jumping. “All I know is I got my instructions from Andy that we were going to shoot this. “It absolutely did come up on the spot,” Pearl said. I asked him if it was pre-planned or a spur-of-the-moment shot. Pearl’s career is the stuff of legend, but I wanted to talk about one thing specifically: The cake jump. “My reaction at the time was that it looked wrong.” -Daniel Pearl, cinematographer When I spoke to Pearl, I mentioned that his iconic shot of Leatherface flailing with a chainsaw at the movie’s conclusion reminded me of the shot of Slash soloing in “November Rain” outside a chapel. Later, when Hooper looked for a cinematographer for Massacre, he wanted a Texan. Growing up in New Jersey, he’d used an 8mm to film his friends skateboarding. In 1967, Pearl enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin’s film department after falling in love with the films of Fellini, Bergman, and Kurosawa. And if you scroll all the way to the bottom of Pearl’s impressive IMDb page, you’ll see that his very first credit is cinematographer on Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. ![]() Not only was he director of photography for Guns N’ Roses legendary video trilogy, he was behind the camera for R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe,” The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” Missy Elliott’s “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” Brandy’s “What About Us,” and literally hundreds of others. Pearl is one of the most prolific cinematographers in music video history, and arguably the most distinguished. To get to the bottom of this mystery, I figured I should talk to a person with a front-row seat to the cake jump: Daniel Pearl, the cinematographer. “I got married two months ago,” he said, “And everybody was like, ‘You gotta jump through the wedding cake!’ I was like, ‘Guys, please. To this day, people still harangue Rachtman about the cake jump. That was Riki Rachtman.’ He probably does like comic-book conventions, signing things as the cake guy, and nobody believes him.” ![]() “He's probably some out-of-work actor and on his résumé, he puts, ‘I'm the cake guy in the ‘November Rain’ video.’ And everybody is like, ‘No, you're not. “I feel bad for the cake guy,” Rachtman says. Moments later, the jumper that plows into the cake also has flowing hesher locks, but his face is obscured. He’s prominently featured in one shot, smiling ear to ear at a reception table, with his long metalhead mane. It’s easy to see why people think Rachtman jumped through the cake. Everybody seems to think it was, but it wasn't.” But the biggest misconception of the whole video is that I was the guy getting thrown through the cake. When I see the video now, it’s a lot of faces from the old scene. Axl wanted it to feel like a real wedding, so all his friends were there. ![]() “And then we went straight to the wedding reception scene the next morning. “We had been up all night shooting at the Rainbow,” Rachtman said, referring to a nightclub on the Sunset Strip. I called up Rachtman, now 56, at his home in Mooresville, North Carolina, to talk about his memories of his time on the “November Rain” set. Guns N’ Roses were regulars at Rachtman’s boîte and even filmed music videos there. And he owned the Cathouse, a Hollywood nightclub that served as the headquarters for the heavy metal bands he showcased on television. From 1990-1995, Rachman hosted Headbanger’s Ball, a two-hour, late-night, metal-video show on MTV. If you Google “who jumped into the cake in ‘November Rain,’” the answer you’ll get is Riki Rachtman. He promptly responded, and declined to comment, saying, “The secrets of the video are safe with me.” I’d have to start my quest for answers someplace else. The first person I reached out to for answers was Andy Morahan, the director, who helmed some of the biggest videos in MTV history.
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