Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

dangerously enthused in a way that brought Terry
Burns’s Beat-era mania to mind. He simply had no
off switch mechanism, by design. Projects were
brought up, sketched out and then either abandoned
altogether or put on the back burner indefinitely.
While on tour, Bowie would turn his hotel suites into
mini film sets, using his high-tech video equipment to
make short film demos, building sets out of materials
he sent out for and constructing elaborately drawn
backdrops. David would shoot separate videos of
himself later, then have them edited by some techsavvy
MainMan employee at great expense, so that,
in the final edit, he would essentially appear to be
walking throughout the city as though he was
marooned in some nightmarish Sid and Marty Krofft
dimension. These videotapes never make it into the
many museum retrospectives of Bowie’s video work,
but there is a pair of documents that clearly
demonstrate where Bowie’s psyche was at during
this period.
Alan Yentob, producer of the 1975 BBC Bowie
documentary Cracked Actor, had been to the Ziggy
retirement concert at the Hammersmith Odeon in
1973 and had remained fascinated by Bowie’s
pursuit of masks and personas. “I loved the idea of a
guy that was acting out rather than a pop star,”
Yentob explains. “I was intrigued by his art school
origins. I called it Cracked Actor [named after the
Aladdin Sane track; it was nearly titled The
Collector] because I saw that he was trying out
different personas. I also thought that he was so