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→Peter Christoperson on the Broken Movie
After I’d made a couple of videos for them that were relatively conventional in the early 90s, Trent phoned me and said, Would I make the heaviest video ever made? So stupidly, of course, I said, “Yes I’d be delighted” and proceeded to do just that.
[[Coil ]] had already done some remixes of Nine Inch Nails and they’d been used in ''Seven'', the famous horror movie. So I was on pretty good terms with the guys and we put together a compilation for the ''Broken'' album of which the culmination was a track called “Gave Up”. Basically the video was what I intended to be a comment on the existence of snuff movies and people’s obsession with them.
And I did it without regard for MTV and what was showable and not showable, because that’s what he asked me to do. But when the video was finally assembled, the record company thought they would get into all sorts of shit if they actually released it, but Trent leaked a couple of copies to a video shop in Ventura Boulevard or somewhere, who subsequently made what I understand to be in excess of $20-30,000 bootlegging and selling copies of copies. So because Nine Inch Nails were in the charts with no video, it became one of the first viral distribution products, so loads and loads of Nine Inch Nails fans copied their copies and distributed them, because the net wasn’t really working for video then.