A mini-documentary about MTV’s 1984 “Lost Weekend” Van Halen contest is now available to watch online.
The film, which runs a little less than 15 minutes, screened at festivals last year, and is now presented by 60 Second Docs. Lost Weekend was directed by Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb, who previously made the documentary GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, the inspiration for the hit Netflix show GLOW.
The winner of the contest was 20-year-old Kurt Jefferis from Phoenixville, Pa., who had one of his 13 postcards picked out of the more than a million that were submitted to MTV in 1984. In early April, Jefferis and his friend Tom Winnick were ushered in a limo from their suburb outside of Philadelphia to the airport, where they boarded a private jet to Detroit. Van Halen were performing two nights at the city’s Cobo Arena in support of their smash album 1984.
The band brought Jefferis onstage during one of the shows to congratulate him and then smashed a cake in his face and sprayed him with champagne. “The rush was unbelievable,” Jefferis said in the film. Things got a little out of hand at a backstage party, the contest winner recalled. He drank with the band, smoked some pot and snorted “a little cocaine off David Lee Roth’s pinkie.”
What the band and MTV staff didn’t know was that Jefferis had a metal plate in his head after a recent fall down a stairwell left him with a blood clot on his brain. He shouldn’t have been drinking at all, and Winnick eventually pulled someone aside and told them. A decision was then made to separate Jefferis from the festivities, a move that may have saved his life.
Image by Dirk (Beeki®) Schumacher from Pixabay
