Despite all this work, it was entirely possible that this whole thing would be a fruitless exercise. They ended up with three versions of the video: the complete one that stuck to the original concept, a shortened take of the song incorporating both the performance footage and the film, and a 'jammin’ version' with just Metallica. The editing process took a long time, with Salomon going back-and-forth for several rounds with the band. 'They found one shitty video copy in Italy somewhere that didn’t have subtitles on it,' says Salomon. To make things more complicated, he was told there were no existing prints of Johnny Got His Gun in the United States. 'I was on set for a few hours while they were filming and that was the last time I saw Bill,' he explains, noting that he’s had about 10 minutes of conversation with Pope in his lifetime.įrom there, Salomon’s challenge became figuring how to condense a 111-minute film into a seven-minute video, while still dedicating half of that time to footage of the band.

Though Salomon and Pope are sometimes listed as co-directors of 'One', Salomon says there wasn’t much collaboration between them. the World, and Sam Raimi’s second and third Spider-Man movies. This footage was shot by Bill Pope, a cinematographer who went on to work on feature films including The Matrix trilogy, Scott Pilgrim vs. 'We showed up at a warehouse and played the song 20 times, and that was about it,' says Ulrich of their first music video experience. Metallica’s performance for the low budget 'One' was filmed in early December of 1988, around the time of their two headlining shows at the Long Beach Arena. 'The idea that we would have someone like Michael Salomon-who wasn’t a name director who was going to come in and fuck with whatever the Metallica mentality was or turn us into Warrant-felt as autonomous as the way we were making records,' he says. Ulrich remembers it differently, explaining that it was Salomon’s few directing credits that made him appealing to the band. I choked.' (Isham would eventually work on many projects with Metallica, starting in the Black Album era of the early '90s.) The opportunity came with ‘One,’ but I couldn’t figure out how to combine the footage from Johnny Got His Gun with performance footage. I kept begging Robin Sloane to let me do a video for them. In I Want My MTV, the oral history that covers the channel’s first decade, Isham says, 'I’d been a Metallica fan since Ride the Lightning, I thought they were fucking awesome. 'I don’t know exactly how I got the Metallica job,' says Salomon, 'but I have a feeling that they probably went to Wayne first.'

One of his main editing clients was director Wayne Isham, who had already worked extensively with acts including Mötley Crüe, Judas Priest, Def Leppard, and Bon Jovi. Salomon specialized in hair metal and country, and had never heard Metallica prior to the gig. Though the video for 'One' officially doesn’t have a director, the main technician behind it was Michael Salomon, a USC film school graduate who had become the go-to editor for several music video directors and production companies around Los Angeles. 'We were pretty comfortable with the idea right away-dare I say even excited about it.'

'The idea took precedent over the assumption that we had to do a video because that’s what you did when you were putting out your next single,' Ulrich explains. And none of them featured a soldier begging his superiors to euthanize him as he banged his head against his bed in Morse code. While other videos had been clumsily cutting in parts of whatever new movie they were on the soundtrack of for years, none of them tried to fully integrate in segments of an old movie to create a tone.

Mtv debut video