Like the voice of the working man that he is, Springsteen immediately tried to make things right with the director, offering to let him use the song whenever Schrader got around to making Born in the U.S.A. Instead, Schrader asked Springsteen for a new song for the film, and the Boss obliged, writing the tune “Light of Day.” And, sure enough, when Schrader finally produced the film, it came out under that tile, Light of Day.

Today, Schrader looks back at Light of Day, which finally saw the… movie theaters in 1987, with some disappointment, but not because of the song. Instead, he blames himself for casting Michael J. Fox and rocker Joan Jett as the leads (“Fox and Joan Jett were never meant to be in a movie together,” he admitted).

But he does not regret letting Springsteen have the song title without trouble. “I suppose there could have been some financial advantage for me, but I just didn’t want to be that kind of guy, who would milk Bruce’s head for X amount of dollars. And he didn’t ever forget it. This shows you that there is such a thing as karma, and that if you do the right thing, sometimes people remember,” he stated.

Turns out, some people remember better than others. Because when the upcoming Scott Cooper-directed movie Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere recreates the scene of Bruce (Jeremy Allen White) getting a script from Schrader, it has a map of Ohio drawn on the front. “I’d completely forgotten I’d done that,” he told Deadline. “I talked to Scott Cooper afterwards and asked him, where did you find the actual script? He said Bruce kept it all these years.”

Thus, there’s one more great credit in Schrader’s career, alongside credits for writing Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and directing First Reformed. Now we’ll just have to wait for the inevitable Taylor Swift biopic to see if he was also responsible for the title The Life of a Showgirl.