Huey Lewis has revealed in a recent interview that he still has yet to see Christian Bale’s hit 2000 film American Psycho.
Huey Lewis initially boycotted the film upon its release due to an embellished press release that claimed Lewis had pulled his band Huey Lewis and The News’ ‘Hip To Be Square’ from the film’s soundtrack due to the film’s excessive violence. Read excerpts from the archived press release here.
Lewis has consistently denied those claims, now revealing what had really happened in a recent interview with Mark Hoppus the latter’s After School Radio podcast.
“I’d read Bret Ellis’ book, which is amazing. When I read the book, it was like a review of art stuff. And not only us, but Phil Collins and Tina Turner, and man, he really knew his stuff, he got us pretty much correct.”
Lewis went on to explain that the film’s producers had reached out to buy ‘Hip To Be Square’ to include it in the film, to which he agreed. Two or three weeks before the film was scheduled for release, Lewis’ manager informed him that the film’s producers wanted to include the song on the official soundtrack.
Lewis’ manager went on to tell him that the soundtrack would consist of ‘Hip To Be Square’, “one other song and then a bunch of source music.” Lewis and his band then decided to “politely decline” as they did not want to “make our fans buy that for just that one song”.
“On the eve of the release of the movie, they came out with a press release that went everywhere that said that Huey Lewis had seen the movie and it was so violent that he yanked his tune from the soundtrack, to pump up interest,” Lewis explained. “And that pissed me off frankly, so I boycotted the film. I’ve never seen the film, but I did see the clip when we lampooned it for Funny or Die.”
Watch Lewis’ American Psycho parody below.
In November, Huey Lewis and The News sold their catalog to Primary Wave for a reported sum of US$20million.
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