I Want My MTV

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I Want My MTV Page 22

by Craig Marks


  RICK SPRINGFIELD: Michael Jackson had taken hold of the video form and shown everyone what you’re supposed to do with it. We all thought, Oh, okay—dancing. Thank God I only danced in that one video, “Affair of the Heart,” because it was abhorrent.

  BRYAN ADAMS: Michael’s videos stand up today. The guitar bands suffered because they weren’t innovative—just, you know, standing on a rock cliff with a wind machine blowing your hair.

  JANET JACKSON: My brother was always trying to do something different, fresh, exciting. Something that had never been done before. George Michael did a wonderful job at that. Madonna did a wonderful job, too. My brother, though, did it the best.

  Chapter 15

  “THE TWO M’S”

  MADONNA TOUCHES MTV FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME

  MICHAEL JACKSON WAS THE FIRST VIDEO ARTIST; Madonna was second, and she’s the one who created the idea that video could be a forum for provocation and exhibitionism. Who else could stir the Vatican to condemn a music video? After a few low-budget, undistinguished clips, she found her footing, in part by teaming with director Mary Lambert. Madonna filled the frames of her videos with images of burning crosses, interracial kisses, gay kisses, lavish jewels, crucifixes, wedding dresses, S&M toys, Keith Carradine, Danny Aiello, zoo animals, cleavage shot from above, and cleavage shot from below. Her appearance at the first Video Music Awards in 1984 was the award-show equivalent of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—the ideal against which all successors would be measured. She treated MTV as her canvas and, later, her bitch.

  But at first, her interdependence with MTV (“You believed in me when I was chubby,” she said in a filmed tribute to their tenth anniversary) was a source of contempt within the rock establishment. She, like MTV, was viewed as a passing fancy. “Madonna will be out of the business in six months,” a Billboard editor pronounced, because “her image has completely overshadowed her music.” This quote is the “Dewey Defeats Truman” of music video, disproven by Madonna’s seventeen consecutive top ten hits. She did this not by making her image secondary to her music, but by combining them until they were inseparable.

  LES GARLAND: Freddy DeMann had managed the Jacksons and Michael, but he got fired by the dad, Joe Jackson. So Freddy wasn’t really doing anything for about a year, if not more, and he was a good friend of mine. One afternoon he phoned and said, “Gar-Man? I got one that’s gonna be huge. She’s gonna be bigger than Michael.” I go, “Dude, you’ve got big balls. Big balls, Freddy.” “Trust me, Gar. Her name is Madonna.” He showed up a few days later and played her video, “Burning Up.” It sounded very disco to me. But all right, we’ll put it on.

  SUSAN SILVERMAN: Madonna came into our office on a skateboard, all sweaty and dirty. I was like, “Shit, what’s with this girl?” She went to see Bob Regehr—a big product manager at Warner Bros.—and left a note on his bulletin board that said, “Sorry I missed you, because I’m gonna be a star.”

  BOB GIRALDI: Freddy DeMann brought Madonna to my studio, and we talked about me maybe directing her first single. I said to Freddy, “I’m not sure she’s going to amount to anything.” Good job, Giraldi.

  STEVE BARRON: I didn’t like “Burning Up.” Not at all. But my partner, Simon Fields, said, “We’ve got to do this because it’s Warner Bros. and they think she’s gonna be massive.” I went to New York to meet her, begrudgingly, and showed up at an address in SoHo, which turned out to be a squat, basically. Madonna was scantily clad, working out to a massive disco track. She was charismatic. She kept putting her head down on the table and talking to me, very flirtatious, and that gave me the idea for the scene in “Burning Up” where her face is on the road, and the camera’s really low and close.

  JEFF AYEROFF: I introduced Madonna to Steve Barron. I don’t think that’s one of his best videos.

  GALE SPARROW: “Burning Up” was too disco for MTV. Simon Fields arranged a dinner for us to meet her. Madonna wore a black schmatte, and it had green on it—I thought it was mold. She had on purple lipstick and was very sweet. A few days later, she called the office and said, “Are you gonna play my video?” I said, “It’s not quite our format, but we’ll play it.” So we played it at three in the morning.

  STEVE BARRON: Madonna had a fling with my partner Simon. Before we shot the video, she said, “Come on, we gotta go to Trashy Lingerie”—which was across from Simon’s flat—“and get some stuff for me to wear.” So she tried on lingerie for us. “Do you like it?,” that kind of thing. A week after the video, I rang up Simon at his flat. He had an answer machine, and the message said, very English: “This is Simon Fields, leave a message after the beep.” But this one day, the voice on the machine said, “Hi, this is Simon’s phone”—it was Madonna’s voice—“if you’re a guy, leave a message. If you’re a girl, fuck off.”

  SIMON FIELDS: I had gone to London for the weekend, and I told Madonna she could stay in my apartment while I was gone. She changed my outgoing phone message to something crazy, like, “If you’re a girl and looking for Simon, you can go eat pigeons on the roof.”

  DANIEL KLEINMAN, director: Simon Fields and I used to share a house together. Simon has an edge of wheeler-dealer about him, but he’s also the most charming man in the world, which is quite a good quality for a producer. I had the looks and no charm, and he had the charm and no looks. I thought he had a face like the back of a bus. I mean, how he got Janice Dickinson into bed, I do not know. That was the end of our sharing a house together.

  STEPHEN R. JOHNSON, director: I used to say, “Simon Fields is a snake. But I want him to be my snake.” When I arrived at Limelight, I was made aware by Simon that he had slept with Madonna. Then I bumped into two more guys who said they’d slept with Madonna. One was her mixer, I think, and one was a record executive. At first I thought she was just anther floozy trying to fuck her way to the top. But I sat back and watched as she played them like a fiddle, and I realized she was a genius. She was using what she had and was getting way more out of those guys than a piece of tail.

  SHARON ORECK: When I got into the video business, I didn’t actually know what a video was. I hadn’t seen MTV because I was too poor to afford cable. I went to film school, then worked in the independent film industry, which prior to music videos was the only place you could get experience if you weren’t in the union. It was all karate movies and horror films. Then in 1983, I produced a short film that got nominated for an Academy Award.

  I kept getting phone calls from a friend of mine, a camerawoman who was working on a video called “Borderline” for some chick named Madonna. She kept calling with questions like “Where do you get a generator?” “How does film flashing work?” “What do you do when you don’t have lights?” Basic film questions. I said, “What are you doing?” And she said, “I’m doing this thing called a video for Madonna.” And I was like, “Don’t you have a producer? Don’t you have someone who gets the stuff for you?” And she’s like, “We do, but he doesn’t know what to do.” So I said, “Well, I’ll help you this time, but next time you should hire me, and I’ll produce it.”

  TONY WARD, actor: Since I was a kid, when I first saw “Borderline,” I was really obsessed with Madonna. I was like, “That’s my lady and I’m gonna be with her someday.” I knew it. But I wasn’t obsessed with her music. I was into black music, and then Oingo Boingo.

  MARY LAMBERT, director: I studied film and painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late ’70s. Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz of Talking Heads were two of my closest friends at RISD. After college, I moved to LA and got a job in the fledgling special effects business. I was on the fringes of the film industry, directing special effects commercials for washing machines, going to punk clubs, and making weird films. And then, in like, ’82, I saw a music video: Rickie Lee Jones’s “Chuck E.’s in Love.” I thought, Wow, this is kind of like my films. I should do music videos. I had no concept of the industry, actually. I thought I was going to be an artist and make short abstract films. I wa
s really stupid.

  I asked Tina and Chris if I could do a music video for them, which was “As Above, So Below,” for their other band, the Tom Tom Club. When I took it to Warner Bros. to show Jeff Ayeroff, he said, “This is great, but it’s useless, because we’re not promoting the album anymore.” But he did give me a job directing a video for a new artist named Madonna. She’d released a couple of disco-pop singles, and Jeff wanted to position her with a little more integrity and depth. He gave me the song “Borderline” and bought me a plane ticket to New York to go meet her. I had no idea what she even looked like. When I heard her music, I thought she was black.

  First I had to track her down—this was before cell phones—and she wasn’t easy to find. She was living in a bare-bones apartment on the Upper East Side. It didn’t look like anyone lived there, to tell you the truth. There wasn’t any furniture. But we hit it off. We bonded on the level of just being girls. I came away thinking that she was a piece of work, and that this was going to be fun. She had four or five different boyfriends at the time. One of them was a record producer, Jellybean Benitez, but he was really, really jealous of everybody. Of everything. He was the prototype for Sean Penn. He was convinced that she was seeing other guys and that he wasn’t going to be able to control her. And he was completely right, of course, on both accounts.

  We talked for a couple of days about “Borderline.” She was really into Hispanic boys, and she wanted the video to be about having an affair with a cute Hispanic boy who was part of the street scene. She wanted to be involved in casting the cute Hispanic boy. She was going to be in LA, so we decided to make it into a real LA video. I knew the downtown LA area really well, because there were a lot of artist bars there.

  There was no formula. We were inventing it as we went along. When I screened “Borderline” for Madonna’s manager, Freddy DeMann, he was hysterical that I had combined black-and-white footage with color footage. Nobody had done that before. He made me screen it for all the secretaries in his office and see how they reacted, because he felt I had crossed a line that shouldn’t be crossed.

  JEFF AYEROFF: MTV jumped on “Borderline,” and that was it. Away we go.

  CINDY CRAWFORD, model; host, House of Style: Madonna was the first person on MTV whose style we tried to emulate. I was a freshman at Northwestern University and my roommate from New Jersey was a huge Madonna fan. The way she mixed things—lace and skirts, gloves and boots—I didn’t know what to make of it, but there were elements I could relate to.

  MARY LAMBERT: She works with a lot of different stylists and costume designers, but nobody really dresses Madonna except Madonna. The whole trashed-out lingerie street-look—where your dark roots and bra strap are always showing, and there’s holes in your stockings—that was all her.

  DEBBIE GIBSON, artist: Madonna paved the way for all of us, and may we never forget it. “Lucky Star” was my favorite video, because it was all about her and the performance. Those early Madonna videos were about her energy, and what she was wearing, and how she was dancing. When I was fourteen, I won two tickets on WPLJ radio to see her in concert, and my cousin and my sister were upset that they couldn’t go, because I had to take my mom. And so in a very cocky manner, I said, “Well then, I’ll win two more.” And I did. The four of us dressed like Madonna and went to the concert.

  JEFF AYEROFF: I made “Lucky Star” for $14,000 with a friend who was a pot grower from Bolinas, California. We’d released “Everybody,” “Burning Up,” “Holiday,” and “Borderline” as singles. And Madonna didn’t want to release

  “Lucky Star.” Around the same time, she was getting sued and needed money. I said, “Let me release ‘Lucky Star,’ and I guarantee you’ll sell enough records to pay that off.” “Lucky Star” broke the first album wide open.

  WAYNE ISHAM: Jeff Ayeroff gave his friend Arthur Pierson a video to direct, and I ended up as the director of photography on that clip, “Lucky Star.” And Madonna was so pissy. We start to do a shot and I realized I was using the wrong lens. I said, “Sorry, I have to change lenses.” And she was angry. Didn’t want to wait. I said, “Dude, I can’t just shit a lens.” Everybody was freaking out. Maybe I could have said it in a different way.

  MARY LAMBERT: For “Like a Virgin,” Jeff Ayeroff said, “We want to do something outrageous.” I said, “Let’s do it in Venice!” The idea of Madonna singing in a gondola was the most outrageous thing I could think of. And Madonna dug it, because she has the whole thing with the Catholic Church and her Italian heritage. It turned into a huge party. One night, we were waiting to take a ferry back to where we were staying. Everyone had been drinking, and somebody bet the photographer Larry Williams that he couldn’t put his fist in his mouth. He did get it all the way in his mouth, but then it got stuck and he couldn’t get it out. He won the bet, though.

  Madonna stayed at the Hotel Cipriani, partly because she was avoiding Simon Fields, who still wanted to sleep with her—so did everybody else, for that matter—and partly because there was a pool there, and she swam every morning as part of her exercise routine. The rest of us stayed at a sleazebag hotel on Lido, a little island just outside Venice. There were 3 million mosquitoes and the mattresses were stuffed with rocks. Shooting in Venice was definitely excessive. We shot during the day, ate in little cafes, and partied with Madonna at the Cipriani at night.

  JEFF AYEROFF: By that point, Madonna was on the cover of Rolling Stone. So we went to Venice, like a bunch of fucking whack jobs. I don’t know what we spent—$150,000? $175,000?—but it was way more than we’d ever spent on a video. Simon Fields was having an affair with Madonna, Mary Lambert was having an affair with somebody else. What did I do on the shoot? I sat on the back of the barge and yelled “Duck,” so Madonna didn’t smack her head on the bridges.

  MARY LAMBERT: There’s this famous yearly Carnival in Venice where everyone wears elaborate masks. I loved that idea, of things not being what they seem. Madonna’s love interest in the video wore a lion mask, and that gave me the idea to get a real lion. I wanted to have the guy in the lion mask turn into an actual lion. Nobody else liked the lion. Madonna went along with it.

  SIMON FIELDS: The lion started to get crazy around Madonna. No one else. And then we found out that you can’t have a lion around a woman when she’s on her period.

  MARY LAMBERT: You can’t be in Madonna’s presence, ever, without feeling the raw sexuality and sensuality she exudes. And that’s something I encouraged in all the videos we did. When you’re near her, and she turns that charm on you, it’s like somebody switching on a spotlight. The camera sees it.

  SHARON ORECK: I was on the “Material Girl” set when Madonna first met Sean Penn. They were so perfect for each other—she was an extraordinary beauty and a rebel princess, and he was a young god of cinema and also clearly the James Dean, rebel type. The PA on the video, Meegan Lee Ochs, had been Sean’s assistant. She was Phil Ochs’s daughter, and Sean met her when he was trying to make a film about Phil. So she said to either Mary Lambert or me, “My ex boss really wants to meet Madonna.” The crew knew he was coming and everyone was super excited and giddy. We were shooting the musical sequence where she’s in the pink halter dress. So he met her when she was in her Marilyn Monroe finery. We all knew they were going to fall in love and get married.

  Madonna’s breasts are super perky, so they tend to pop out when she dances. In the “Material Girl” video, she’s wearing a pink outfit, and I guess it didn’t have a bra, so whenever she’d go upside down, or lay back with her arms in the air, one or two of her boobs would come out.

  FREDDY DeMANN: People often misunderstand the “Material Girl” video. The idea was that Madonna was a Marilyn Monroe–type actress playing the role of a gold digger—a “material girl”—in a musical, but off-camera she was a good person. She chooses the poor guy in the shitty car instead of the rich guy. But everyone assumed Madonna was identifying with the material girl, not the good girl. The title stuck to her, and that bothered he
r. She never liked that handle.

  MARY LAMBERT: Madonna’s always had a dual personality. A lot of her early videos—“Borderline,” “Material Girl,” “La Isla Bonita,” perhaps “Like a Virgin” and “Like a Prayer”—are largely about her straddling two different worlds.

  DANIEL KLEINMAN: After I shot Madonna in concert on the “Like a Virgin” tour, she came to look at the footage while I was editing, and to tell me what I’d done wrong. She was going out with Sean Penn, and she used to take cuts home and show him, and she’d come back with notes from Sean Penn. The editor and I would tear our hair out.

  ADAM HOROVITZ, Beastie Boys: The first time we went to LA as a band was when we opened for Madonna. That was the greatest. Kids were literally in tears when we were playing. It was one of the most punk rock things we’ve ever done. And Madonna is the best. After the first night, her manager, Freddy DeMann, said, “These guys suck.” “No, seriously, they suck. They need to go home.” And Madonna was like, “These guys are staying.” She put her foot down. We didn’t realize until later that the audience’s hatred for us worked in her favor. When she got onstage, they couldn’t have been happier to see her.

 

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