I Want My MTV (35 page)

 

RICHARD SCHENKMAN:
I go back to my hotel, go to bed, and I get a call that there's a problem with the winner. His friend said, “You know, he has a plate in his head, and he's not supposed to drink.”
Thanks for telling us now
. There was a coked-out asshole who worked for Van Halen's management, and he called John Sykes, because the winner was throwing up and freaking out. The crazy coked-up guy was breaking glasses and plates into the phone, and saying to John, “You see what you did to me? I'm breaking glasses. That's how upset I am.” John's assistant had the job of sitting up all night with the winner, to make sure he didn't swallow his tongue or anything.

 

TOM FRESTON:
They gave cocaine to the guy who won the contest. It turned out he had a plate in his head.

 

KURT JEFFERIS:
I blacked out the first night. I don't remember going back to the hotel. Really, I don't know what happened that night. I'd been on an antiseizure medication, Dilantin, since I had my head trauma. The next morning, I had one of the worst hangovers of my life. On the second night, Alex Van Halen handed me a sixteen-ouncer and said, “You're not leaving this spot until you drink that beer.” I poured it out in a trash can.

 

RICHARD SCHENKMAN:
To add insult to injury, John sat down with the asshole from management and went through my footage frame by frame and let him dictate what we could and couldn't use. I had a strenuous objection to that. I said, “John, we're MTV. A band doesn't get to tell us what we can or can't do.” And he said, “Yeah, but if we don't have a good relationship with the bands, there is no MTV.”

 

KURT JEFFERIS:
I'm in an Anonymous program now. I was drinking oil tankers of booze, smoking plantations of marijuana, snorting coke and meth, and heading to buried. My parents gave me an ultimatum: Get help or move out.

I now work as a facility manager at a school, doing maintenance and that. I've had surgery on my eyes three times. I'm legally blind in both eyes, my balance is off, I have diabetes insipidus. I don't have a wahoo life. Someone said, “Kurt, you got your fifteen minutes of fame.” I said, “Dude, it lasted a little longer than that.”

 

 

 

 

 

AS 1984 ENDED,
ROLLING STONE
RENEWED ITS ATTACK
on MTV, even in a year when their cover stars included Duran Duran, Madonna, Culture Club, Cyndi Lauper, the Go-Go's, Huey Lewis, Tina Turner, and David Bowie—all staples of MTV. In a barbed essay, film critic Kenneth Turan (a baby boomer born in 1946) described music videos as “Orwellian” and complained that filmmakers were being forced to keep up with MTV, which was “creating a generation of gratification-hungry sensation junkies with atrophied attention spans.” He also saw a societal threat in “the non-stop video parade of pouty cuties wearing low-cut leather bikinis or skintight skirts, their bodies sometimes chained but always concupiscent,” adding, “videos offer nothing
but
sexual stereotypes.”

By 1985, the record industry's recovery was clear, as evidenced by headlines in
BusinessWeek
(THE RECORD BUSINESS IS SOLID GOLD AGAIN) and
Variety
(RECORD BIZ MAKES A STRONG COMEBACK: BUYERS RESPOND TO NEW MUSIC). A
BusinessWeek
reporter wrote, “Much of the credit for the turnaround may belong not to the industry itself—or to better product—but to the popularity of Music Television (MTV).” In
The Washington Post,
CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff said, “MTV has been a shot in the arm for the record business. If somebody had asked me three years ago, ‘What do you think of an idea like MTV?' I would have said they were crazy. Fortunately, nobody asked me.”

 

PETE ANGELUS:
Videos changed the music business completely. It brought the business back to life. It created stars out of people who normally would never have been seen. Because the revenue streams increased dramatically with labels, more money was handed out. That doesn't necessarily mean something is going to be more creative, it just means that more money is handed out. Some artists took advantage of that and did memorable work. There were some exceptional videos, and some fucking car accidents. And sometimes a car accident cost as much as an exceptional video.

 

LES GARLAND:
I got word that Pepsi had bought the first spot in the 1984 Grammy telecast and they were gonna play a new Michael Jackson Pepsi ad. I'm like, “Michael Jackson belongs to MTV, not the Grammys.” I wasn't gonna let it happen. So I called Roger Enrico, the head of Pepsi, and said, “Roger, I've got a major problem. This Pepsi Michael Jackson spot that's gonna run in three weeks on the Grammys? That should run on MTV first.”

“Well, Garland, I've already made a deal with the Grammys.” I go, “Wait a minute. You know how we do world premieres of videos. What if I world premiere the commercial? And what if I give you twenty-four promos a day for two weeks leading up to it? Would that interest you?”

He goes, “How much do you want for this?” I said, “Nothing.” He goes, “What? You're telling me you would promote a commercial twenty-four times a day for two weeks before playing it? Garland, I like your style. Done.” So it played for the first time on MTV.

 

BOB GIRALDI:
I got the ad campaign for Pepsi, because I had a relationship with Michael. The money was big, but I really don't think he wanted to do it—the father had signed the Jacksons to it. I believe they were embarrassed to do television commercials. I didn't like the Pepsi people telling me what to do. “Tell the Jacksons to take their sunglasses off.”
You made the deal, you go tell them
. The vibe on the set was brutal, with everyone trying to get a piece of the biggest superstar in the world.

When we did “Beat It,” Michael came in the van with us to scout locations. I remember saying, “I'm hungry, let's stop for a pizza.” Michael said, “Oh good, I've never had a pizza.” This is a twenty-five-year-old man who'd never had pizza. Now he wasn't accessible like that. He was a superstar, but then he became a deity.

There was an explosion on the set. Sparks hit him, ignited the pomade in his hair, and went traveling down his body. Am I responsible for the accident? Yes, as the director, I guess so. Did he blame me? I think so. His bodyguard, Miko Brando, blamed me and we went at each other. I feel bad for the pain it caused him. There was a little relief for the pain because the next day,
Thriller
returned to number one.

 

TOM MOHLER, manager:
We did talk at one point with Bob Giraldi about doing a Billy Squier video. His fee was over $100,000. We all said,
I don't think so.

 

BOB GIRALDI:
For Lionel Richie's “Hello,” I came up with the idea of a blind girl and Lionel as a teacher. “Hello” is one of the top videos ever, still to this day.

 

LIONEL RICHIE:
I just figured that the video would be a simple love story. And then Bob leveled me to the floor when he said, “Here's my big pitch. You're a teacher, and you're gonna fall in love with a blind girl.” I admit, I hesitated for a moment. But you don't hire Picasso and then tell him how to paint.

The funniest story about “Hello” is that I kept going back to Bob over and over again, saying, “Bob, that bust of me does not look like me.” “Bob, the bust does not
look
like me.” Finally, Bob came over to me and said, “Lionel, she's
blind
.”

 

BOB GIRALDI:
With Lionel, we used to have day shoots. He would show up at 9 P.M. I'd say, “Rich, you know how much money I just spent waiting for you?” “Oh sorry, Bob. I overslept.”
Overslept? Until nine in the evening?
I wasn't very patient with that.

 

DEE SNIDER:
By the time we made “I Wanna Rock,” Mark Metcalf was on his high horse. He cost more money, he had more demands, and he showed up coked out of his brain. He'd been up all night—he was wired, on edge, and in a lousy mood. After he messed up a take, Marty Callner said to him, “Listen, we gotta do this again. You gotta stop screwing up.” And Metcalf said, “Or what? You don't look so tough.” Now Marty is a pit bull, a tough little motherfucker. He said, “Really? Let's go outside.” Everybody went quiet on the set. They're all looking at Metcalf, wondering if he was going to take on Marty. And Metcalf, smartly, backed down.

Marty yelled, “Action.” And that moment, when you see Metcalf screaming at the fat kid in the classroom, and spit is flying out of his mouth? That was immediately after he had backed down in front of the entire cast. Of course, he took it out on the poor kid. He was on fucking fire. And Marty goes, “Cut! That's the one.” We got a historic performance out of Metcalf. People have been talking about the spit flying out of his mouth for thirty years now.

 

MARK METCALF:
The line “What do you wanna
do
with your life?” was Dee's work. People still come up to me and say, “Do the line, do the line,” and they're not happy unless I spit on them.

 

GREG GOLD, director:
I got a gig with Bill Parker, who had a monopoly on producing and directing R&B videos. I was hired as an assistant director, and Dominic Sena was the director of photography. Bill's vision was always greater than his budgets. He had a thing for transportation: Every video had a huge party in a zeppelin, or on a boat, or on a train. We did one for Rick James and Smokey Robinson, “Ebony Eyes,” that started out in a plane in a storm, so I had to get a vintage plane and have the grips shake it. Rick and Smokey are in a flight and they get shipwrecked on an island. Of course, Bill picked the hardest beach to access on the West Coast, El Matador Beach in Malibu. We pitched tents for Rick and everybody to hang out in. I'm not going to comment about what went on in those tents, but I will say that part of our budget went toward a case of Cristal champagne.

 

DOMINIC SENA, director:
I'd shot a million videos between '81 and '83, and I was carrying a lot of these directors. Some of them would fall asleep in their trailer, and I'd keep making the video without them. Finally I said to an AD named Greg Gold, “We might as well do this ourselves.” So we raised $25,000 and made a video, and got representation from Beth Broday at Fusion Films. We said, “Let's go to Istanbul!” So we wrote a concept that revolved around Istanbul and went there for a week. Videos were great excuses to travel.

 

GREG GOLD:
We wrote a treatment for an English group, Vitamin Z—the idea was, they're in Istanbul to write their next song, and they go to a cafe filled with men smoking from hookahs, and some kid steals their wallet. They chase him through the city, only it turns out the kid was returning their wallet, not stealing it, and they see the poverty the kid lives in.

We got to Istanbul, and after we'd scouted locations, we got called into a meeting with the head of the local production company. He said, “In order to get permission for you to come here, we had to rewrite your script.”
Midnight Express
had made the Turkish people look like animals, and they were paranoid about Westerners shooting there. So we read the treatment he'd submitted: “Vitamin Z arrive in beautiful Istanbul, have tea at the beautiful cafe, and walk in the beautiful park.” We were so punch-drunk from traveling, we just started laughing. We refused to do anything different than we had written.

 

DARYL HALL:
Videos began to attract wannabe Cecil B. DeMilles, who had almost unlimited budgets and did whatever they felt like. “Adult Education” is a perfect example. We brought in a director I didn't know [Tim Pope], who was newly hot. He didn't have a clue what to do with the song. The plot? I couldn't tell you. It's some sort of primitive de-virginizing ritual. Everybody was dressed in kind of faux primitive war paint, John Oates shook some kind of magical stick, and there was a virgin laying on a table. That's all I know.

 

KEVIN GODLEY:
Some video directors made little versions of movies. I never felt that worked; it's not an ideal medium for telling a story. We saw it as something that existed outside cinema, with its own set of unknown rules. You don't have to tell a story. You don't have to abide by any rules at all.

 

AIMEE MANN, artist; 'Til Tuesday:
The director of “Voices Carry” really loved a scene in
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, the Alfred Hitchcock movie—there's a scene at a symphony concert at this big moment when somebody's going to get assassinated. The video is about a girl who's trying to be heard and has to suppress her feelings because her boyfriend's an asshole. The director had an idea to emulate Hitchcock, where I'd get up and make a scene in public at the symphony. It certainly resonated with women, even though it was done in broad strokes.

 

PHIL COLLINS:
“Against All Odds” was a nightmare. I was standing in two inches of cold water, in my Wellingtons. The shoot started at 6 P.M. and was supposed to finish around midnight, but the crew had a problem with the tracking for the camera. Come 6 A.M., I was still there, still standing in two inches of cold water.

 

BETH BRODAY:
The Cars shot “Magic” at the Hilton family house in Beverly Hills. Kathy Hilton rented us her house. I think Paris was in school. In the video, Ric Ocasek walks on water across a swimming pool. “Oh-oh, it's magic.” Get it? We built a Plexiglas platform that sat under the surface of the water, so Ric could walk out to the center of the pool and back. On the first take, he walked onto the platform and it collapsed. It took
hours
to rig the platform to hold him. I thought somebody was gonna decapitate themselves, because the platform was clear and you couldn't see it. I was scared to death the whole shoot.