Apparently, in 1980, RSO sent this videotape to record retailers to play in-store to promote the soundtrack to Times Square. It features the two songs performed in the film, “Your Daughter Is One” and “Damn Dog.” The fact that the lyrics to “Your Daughter Is One” consist primarily of curse words and racial slurs guaranteed that it would never be played in any store for more than thirty seconds. The fact that nobody at RSO, from the tape’s conception to its distribution, realized that would happen, boggles the mind.
The middle portion of the tape is an edit of the dance the girls do along 42nd Street to “Life During Wartime” by Talking Heads. Much of this sequence is made up of shots that do not actually appear in the film; unfortunately here they’re only four or five frames long. Even more unfortunately, this digitization is at such low resolution that individual frames turn into pretty smears of color.
There are no close-ups of the girls’ feet in the movie.
Pammy doesn’t dance with the Man in Red in the movie.
These cops are only shown from the reverse angle in the movie.
“Tiger” Haynes breaks the fourth wall.
This video was originally digitized and uploaded on February 24 2012 by “PsychoticNorman”. I’ve offered to buy or borrow the tape to make a higher quality transfer, but have not received a reply. I have fixed the aspect ratio and brightened and sharpened the image a little. You can see PsychoticNorman’s original upload here. My file is technically at a higher resolution, but that’s an artifact of my editing software refusing to save at the small resolution of the original file. I’ve tried to make it easier to look at, but there isn’t really any more detail.
TIMES SQUARE soundtrack promotional video (trailer (motion picture) AAT ID: 300263866), videotape promoting the film and soundtrack for use in record stores, 5:29 (work); H264 – MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc 1), 480 px (W) x 386 px (H), 19.4 MB (video); MPEG AAC (mp4a) stereo 48000 Hz (audio) (video modified 25 December 2015 from the file digitized by PsychoticNorman at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S38UzHtkmeA)
RSO Promo Video Image4.png, RSO Promo Video Image5.png, RSO Promo Video Image15.png, RSO Promo Video Image17.png, RSO Promo Video Image21.png, RSO Promo Video Image22.png: frame captures from “TIMES SQUARE soundtrack promotional video”, 655 px (W) x 486 px (H), 72 dpi (images)
Robert Stigwood passed away January 4. If it hadn't been for him, Jacob Brackman and Allan Moyle would have likely continued to develop the screenplay for Times Square for another year or two. The result would have been a more coherent story, somewhat darker in tone, with more overt indicators…
Typically, shortly before my last post was published (but weeks after I'd initially written it), five more stills from the UK series turned up. Two were duplicates of numbers 20 and 29, but the others were new to me. They follow the series' general conventions of being black and white…
Times Square opened in Japan on June 20, 1981. I don't know if Robin and her mom made it there on their promotional tour. I do know that the Japanese publicity for the movie relied heavily on it being a hip young American movie, and illustrated that fact in a…