One Man Brand
- Description
- Reviews
- Citation
- Cataloging
- Transcript
If you have been to NYC, you have heard of the Naked Cowboy. Robert Burck was a singer and musician who couldn't get anyone to listen to his music, until he made a simple discovery. In One Man Brand, we meet the man who transformed himself from a penniless outsider into one of the Big Apple's most visible and popular attractions.
Citation
Main credits
Burck, Robert (interviewee)
Nicholson, Lucy (filmmaker)
Nicholson, Lucy (photographer)
Nicholson, Lucy (videographer)
Ahmad, Jassim (filmmaker)
Ahmad, Jassim (editor of moving image work)
Sacha, Bob (film producer)
Other credits
Photography, audio & video, Lucy Nicholson, Reuters; editor, Jassim Ahmad, Reuters; music by the Naked Cowboy.
Distributor subjects
Labor studies, New York City, Performers, music, psychology, urban studies, relationship; Expository; WOKeywords
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We\'re on an elliptical
together and you know
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start a conversation like
everyone does on the ellipitcal.
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What exactly do you do when you leave here?
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We’re talking all this time
and you know everything I do
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and I still don\'t have a freaking
clue what it is that you do.
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He’s like, “I\'m a one man band.”
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I said, “Oh,
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so where do you play?
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He\'s like, “45th and Broadway.”
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So now I\'m thinking, OK it must be
like this little dive of a place
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because he\'s not telling me the
name of the place he works at.
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He\'s like, \"I\'m famous, people know me.\"
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And I\'m like, “Oh.”
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I grew-up in a small town.
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I was basically a notoriously bad kid.
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I was literally once arrested
for farting in a woman\'s face.
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I was constantly told what I couldn\'t do.
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No one ever told me that I could
do something with my life.
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So of course I just showed that I could.
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I had already been a stripper.
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Danced naked on a hundred
different bar tops
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across the country.
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Every thing short of being
just a full blown prostitute.
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You know what I mean?
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I went every single place
you could possibly go to be
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seen, filmed, videoed, you
know, the center of attention.
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I want to be a movie star or I’d
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wanna be President of the United States.
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Those are the coolest people.
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I wanted to be the most
beautiful thing in the world.
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Every man woman and child
would want to come up
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and lick my balls because
I was so freaking cool.
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I went from going nowhere... fast...
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to going anywhere I wanted to go.
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Alright, I gotta check this out for myself.
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I\'ve been friends with
him for a few months.
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He\'s Robert from the gym to me.
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I got over there and I went, “Oh my god .”
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This guy is seriously like in
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his underwear.
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Oh my god this is ridiculous.
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I\'m like afraid. I can\'t even
go over there now because
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I can\'t keep a straight face.
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We get to the parking garage
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and he opens the hatchback of the truck
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and starts putting his clothes back on.
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He gets in, and all of a sudden
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we are having our normal conversation.
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I have to tell you honestly,
I like this Robert better
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than the one out there
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that’s just like too weird for me.
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I went out there to just to sing
and play guitar in my clothes.
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I was ignored
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and the photographer who
was shooting me for the
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naked magazine
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said “Why don\'t you play
in your underwear?”
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I thought it was the greatest
idea I\'d ever heard.
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So the next day I went out
and played in my underwear.
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No brainer, why didn’t I
think of this before?
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First naked cowboy tour I get
in my car I go to Nashville,
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get arrested, make the news.
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I call all the newspapers.
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The news comes, they film it
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and I\'m in the next city an hour later.
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Page after
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page after
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page after
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page, about 40 something arrests.
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I think he’s adorable. We
feel like Sex in the City.
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I was like 40 thousand
dollars in credit card debt.
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I wasn’t making money. I never
even thought to ask for a dollar.
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He’s hot.
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A lady tried to put a five-dollar
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bill in my boot one time.
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He’s got a lot of muscles.
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After that five,
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every time they tried to give me a dollar,
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I said, “Ah just put it in the boot.”
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He’s got a nice butt.
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After that it was like 600 bucks
to a thousand bucks a day.
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Except he’s not all the way naked.
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Maybe I’d like to see him completely naked.
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So I literally went from massive
debt to completely out of debt
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and sending money to everybody I know.
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There is definitely a
huge difference between
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the Robert I met at the gym
and the one I started dating.
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It\'s becoming more of the cowboy
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and less of Robert.
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There was even a point when he tells me
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he\'s changing his name
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officially and I need to call him that.
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I\'m like, Bob, I\'m very sorry,
I\'m not calling you that.
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What I’m doing is creating a huge
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advertising campaign for
the city of New York.
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The last two Popes together don’t have
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as many pictures as I do.
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And now I’m the third
rated tourist attraction
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in the city of New York,
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after the Empire State building
and Statue of Liberty.
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Even grabbing asses is boring now.
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I mean I’ve been doing it all freaking day.
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Oh yeah – you’re hot –
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come on, let me squeeze
it and get out of here.
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It\'s a movement.
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And it\'s a word of mouth epidemic
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where a guy comes into a city,
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throwing naked brashly into advertising
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and now it\'s naked this, naked
that, naked everything.
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It\'s like a virus that\'s going
across the entire world.
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We’re in a world of branding.
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What can you make yourself into
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represent it, and then proliferate it.
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I’m not attached to you.
You’re my girlfriend.
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Um... I know he loves me.
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I do know a big part of that
is his ego and his image
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that he upholds but it doesn\'t
make it any easier to hear.
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When he does at the end of
the night finally sit down,
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he is a totally different person.
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It’s like he doesn’t have the
energy to put on the act anymore.
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He doesn’t want to think about all
his goals and everything else.
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He wants to just relax
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and now all of a sudden he’s a big baby
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and he wants 100% attention from me
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and he wants to know why I
don\'t love him like I used to.
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The way you feel about
yourself and the way you
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communicate to yourself about who you are -
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that\'s the kind of life
you\'re going to live.
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Who are you?
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Naked cowboy.
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What’s your religion?
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Naked cowboy.
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What’s your philosophy?
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Naked cowboy. You know what I mean?
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You know, it\'s freaking unbelievable.
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That I would be the
leader of the free world
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where I’m the free-est man in it.
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In the freest society,
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living without any inhibitions
or rules or regulations
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and doing whatever the fuck I want
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regardless of what anybody else is doing.
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And a guy who doesn\'t
have a care in the world
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naked, just singing and playing the guitar
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in the heart of it all.
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People just conform and do
what everybody else does
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but your power is in your individuality.
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He desperately needs
attention, which is why he
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is good at what he does. It’s
why he’s become so successful.
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But not everybody\'s fame lasts forever,
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so when that\'s not there
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and you push away all the
people in your life,
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you know, then what?
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Like Emerson says, work like a
digger in the field all day long.
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That\'s how you get rich.