I was haunted by At Close Range<\/em> long before I actually saw it. See kids, in ye olden days when MTV actually used to show music videos, the clip for Madonna\u2019s \u201cLive to Tell\u201d was in semi-constant rotation. In it, the Material Girl has on an uncharacteristically dowdy dress and sits curled up in a wooden chair, wearing far less makeup than usual while singing her doomiest ballad directly into the lens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Back then, music videos were a shrewd promotional tool not just for artists, but for upcoming movies as well. A hit song from a popular soundtrack could have audiences watching what basically amounts to a trailer for your film multiple times a day, and so the \u201cLive to Tell\u201d video cuts away\u2014a lot \u2013\u2014to scenes from Madonna\u2019s husband Sean Penn\u2019s new movie, some sort of 1970s heartland crime drama in which the young man most people knew as Spicoli squares off with a pistol against a magnificently mustachioed Christopher Walken. It looked like something sinister and adult that eleven-year-old me shouldn\u2019t be watching. Naturally, I was mesmerized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was fairly sure I had the whole story of At Close Range<\/em> mapped out in my head thanks to that Madonna video. And a year or so later, when I finally saw the picture on cable, it played out pretty much exactly as I had imagined\u2014almost like an extended version of the video, except this time with talking, especially since the movie\u2019s score, by Madonna\u2019s Virgin Tour musical director Patrick Leonard, is basically an instrumental version of \u201cLive to Tell\u201d for two hours. (He\u2019d originally worked up the theme for a teen runaway movie called Fire with Fire<\/em>, starring Craig Scheffer and Virginia Madsen, but Paramount Pictures rejected it in favor of a title track by a band called Wild Blue. Great call.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n