Audrey Hepburn meets the Love Parade babies

An actress on a bicycle-scooter awaits direction before filming a Mercedes commercial. Photo by David Lansing.

As Hardy and I were sipping our beers and waiting for our hearing to return, a small film crew set up in front of the café to shoot a car commercial. An elegantly dressed older actress in white linen and a large straw hat, tipped up in front—the sort of hat Audrey Hepburn might have worn in the 60s—was being coached to pedal a bicycle-scooter past a gleaming 500 CL Mercedes.

Meanwhile, four young women, in black leather pants and matching leather bikini tops, kick-started their Harleys which were parked in front of the café. The director impatiently waited for the biker babes, who had yellow daisies painted on their cheeks and chests, to depart so he could start filming.

But the cinematographer couldn’t stand it. His camera reflexively swung away from the aging film star and the Mercedes to the youthful free-spirited bikers and their hogs.

The director began screaming at the cinematographer, demanding that he return his attention to the business at hand, but he would have none of it. Like us, he was inextricably drawn to the exotic scene of wild youth. While the actress in white pedaled past the Escada shop and the Drescher Bank, the camera lens—and everyone in the café—followed the four Love Parade babes as they zoomed towards the techno beat that reverberated in the air like a quickening storm.