Pump Up the Volume (1990)

“Feeling screwed up at a screwed up time in a screwed up place does not necessarily make you screwed up.” — Mark Hunter

It’s all there... the hustle and bustle of any suburban American high school at 8am, school buses, teachers, students, lockers, classrooms, bells ringing, an intentional for-shot remake of The Breakfast Club open with a Molly Ringwald look-alike getting out of dad’s Mercedes. The cool kids, the regular kids, the dweebs, the defeated, the autocratic teachers, all playing their parts. Everybody knows what’s coming next. Everybody knows it’s another Hughesian teen angst-fueled opus.

Except it isn’t.

This is an Allan Moyle film. The Canadian writer/director laughed out of Hollywood for making Times Square, a movie about the New York punk scene descending into the New Wave with two girls as main characters. This is Leonard Cohen. This is Bad Brains and Henry Rollins and Ice-T. This is pirate radio proclaiming everything in America is “completely fucked up” in the opening line of Christian Slater’s voiceover. These are iconoclasts. And this is iconoclast designer Pablo Ferro introducing them to the unsuspecting status quo.

Ferro does so skillfully, of course. Under Slater’s warped voiceover, Moyle’s camera pans over a no-moon nighttime suburbia, abruptly turning in the opposite direction to illuminate what has to be the most boring tract of all the tract homes in America. This is what we were looking at under the darkness? Fade to red. Red? Yes, death to monotony.

Awaken to letterforms. It’s graffiti, the visual language of the disenfranchised, acid green and dripping. The letters are Pablo Ferro’s, tall and thin, with no dull edges. The letters rebel, confront, and demand our attention. We’re stirred. Cue the Hughes stereotypes at High School, USA.

By the time Cohen’s wise baritone plays in the protagonist’s refuge, “Everybody Knows” we’re in for something very different than a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal frolicking in forced high school harmony. This verbal bloodletting is a challenge to the viewer’s own prejudices. This is disillusionment and crude angst being broadcast into the darkness.

A discussion with Title Designers PABLO FERRO and ALLEN FERRO.



So, tell us about Pump Up The Volume. How did you work on that?

Pablo: We made that look like a stencil.

Allen: That was the tabletop shoot that we did with the yellow stencil lettering.

Pablo: The director [Allan Moyle] – that’s what he did as a kid in New York. He’d make a stencil and paint on the wall. He cracked me up because sometimes he’d like some dripping and sometimes he didn’t want any dripping. I said, “You can’t control the drip, you can only add more…

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