by Craig Marks
JOHN DIAZ: On “Eyes Without a Face,” I brought in Tony Mitchell as DP—that was one of the first videos he shot. David Mallet directed, and David always shot in 16mm. I said, “I don’t care what else you do, but we have to shoot this in 35mm and Billy has to look like a beauty queen.”
BILLY IDOL: The video was super-important because we had large hopes for “Eyes Without a Face.” We poured into it not only ideas, but also money and time. For three days, I didn’t see anything but dry ice, smoke, fire, and naked bodies. We hardly slept.
JOHN DIAZ: Bill Aucoin brought some new contact lenses for Billy. I said, “You can’t give them to Billy, they might redden his eyes during the shoot.” Well, he gave them to Billy. David Mallet liked to use lots of dry ice in videos. So Billy was laying in dry ice for quite some time, and he was really tired, and his eyes dried out. The contact lenses fused to his eyeballs.
BILLY IDOL: We’d been up all night finishing the video and got straight on a plane to do a gig in Arizona. It was boiling hot so I laid down on the grass outside the venue, and when I woke up, a sheriff was standing with his gun drawn. I’d never really had a gun barrel in my face.
I almost couldn’t think because of the pain in my eyes. I’d fallen asleep with my contact lenses in, and they were dried out from being on set, then on an airplane. I said, “I’m with the band that’s sound-checking inside that building.” My eyes were tearing, pouring water. So we got inside and the sheriff made my road crew line up. He said, “Who is this?” And they said, in unison, “The boss.” So he left me alone. Then they had to take me to the hospital because I’d scraped the cornea so badly. I had my eyes bandaged for three days, until the cornea grew back. It was stupid, really; I should have known. But I wasn’t thinking too much, I was just trying to get the video done.
PERRI LISTER: On “Flesh for Fantasy,” Billy and I had a terrible fight. We were screaming at each in one of the dressing rooms, and I stormed out. When I slammed the door, it made the door of the next room open, and all the dancers were peeking through a hole in the wall, trying to see what we were fighting about. Between the drugs and the drama, it’s amazing that video ever got finished.
JOHN DIAZ: “Flesh for Fantasy” was the most difficult video I ever produced. Jeff Stein didn’t direct that—Howie Deutch did—but Jeff’s the reason it was a disaster. My whole crew was working for Jeff on another video that went way over deadline. I had to push our shoot back and charter a LearJet to fly the crew back. On the day he was supposed to light the set, my DP, Tony Mitchell, arrived at 4 P.M., totally wasted because he hadn’t slept in five days. Our first day ended up going thirty-six hours. The second day went about twenty-four hours. The final setup was a long dolly shot, and Tony said to me, “Johnny, you gotta do this shot.” I said, “What?!” He goes, “I’m blind.” He couldn’t see anymore. The pace of the last six days had wrecked his vision.
HOWIE DEUTCH, director: I don’t know if I was qualified to direct that video. But Billy liked that I’d worked on the Apocalypse Now trailer. I wasn’t used to staying up for days. I wore contact lenses, and I was awake for so long directing the video that when it was done and I fell asleep, my lenses stuck in my eyes. I couldn’t get them out. That’s my biggest memory.
ROBIN SLOANE: I found Jeff Stein for the Cars. He’d done “Rebel Yell,” one of the best live videos ever made. He showed me footage from a company called Charlex that he really wanted to work with. They’d been doing National Enquirer commercials with weird cut-and-paste animation. So I hired Jeff and Charlex to work together on “You Might Think.” Then it got complicated.
JEFF STEIN: After “Rebel Yell,” Robin Sloane wanted me to do a video for the Cars. They had a reputation for being completely boring live, and I said, “I’m not interested.” I had worked with the Who, the greatest live act ever. I’d done it. I was going to turn in my badge. Charlex was doing a campaign for the National Enquirer that had animated cutouts and photographs of celebrities, big heads on bodies that moved a little. I heard the Cars’ “You Might Think” and thought I could make the first cartoon with real people, which I think we did.
One of the worst parts of the video process was pitching ideas to the band. I met the Cars and told them, “The band’s in the medicine chest, and then on a bar of soap, and Ric’s a fly,” and one of them said, “Why don’t we all just play on a turd in the toilet bowl?” That was the prevailing attitude.
I wanted them to make fun of themselves and be self-effacing. I put together all this pop-culture imagery, from Ric as King Kong on the Empire State Building through B- and Z-movies: Incredible Shrinking Man and Glen or Glenda, the Ed Wood film, because Ric changes from a dude to a lady in it. It was the first music video put in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
ROBIN SLOANE: Charlie Levy and Alex Wild, who owned Charlex, shut down their company to do the video, so they had no income coming in, and it took months to make. Animation takes a long time and no one had ever done anything like this. Everyone was up all night, every night, for months. Jeff was difficult to deal with, and he ended up in a huge fight with Charlex: Whose name is going to go first? Is it Jeff Stein and Charlex, or Charlex and Jeff Stein?
We had to finish the video without Jeff there day to day. When Charlex finished, they came up to Elektra and wouldn’t let us have the video. They wanted more money. One of the guys who worked for Charlex had the video in an attaché case handcuffed to his wrist. I kid you not.
Ric hated “You Might Think.” He thought it made fun of the way he looked. The original version ran on MTV without the fly part, because the video wasn’t finished when it was scheduled to world premiere, so we had to give them an unfinished version, then replace it. But that video completely changed their image. It took a band that was not visually dynamic and made them incredibly visually dynamic. “You Might Think” won the Video of the Year award at the first VMAs.
JEFF STEIN: “You Might Think” was nominated for so many awards, eight or nine, and we’d lost all of them. So I was asleep in the audience at Radio City Music Hall when Eddie Murphy announced the Cars for Best Video of the Year.
TIMOTHY HUTTON, actor: In 1984, you couldn’t have a conversation about a song without someone saying, “Did you see the video?” I was a twenty-three-year-old actor living in New York, and the manager of the Cars played me their new album. I especially liked the song “Drive,” and Ric asked to talk about me directing the video. I wanted to direct—who doesn’t?
I called a casting director and said I needed an attractive, exotic woman who has something fierce about her. Paulina Porizkova walked in toward the end of the casting session. It was before she became a supermodel. I rented a hotel suite to rehearse, and asked them to imagine they’d had a fight that was escalating. We rehearsed for a whole day, and neither Ric nor Paula wanted to stop. They said, “Give us another situation to play.” Little did I know they would end up married.
DARYL HALL: Jeff Stein directed “Out of Touch,” which was maybe our most significant video because of its look: the huge bass drum and my costume, which made me look like a Dalmatian. It’s visually arresting, for sure. Jeff did psychedelic cartoon versions of songs, that was his trademark. He loved anything connected to the circus. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the circus. Later on, Jeff wanted to do a video on Martha’s Vineyard in December and have me stand in the surf. He said, “No, it’s all right, we’ll have towels, we’ll have heaters.” I said, “No, Jeff, it ain’t gonna happen. I’m not part of the Polar Bear Club.”
PAUL FLATTERY: Jeff Stein did some good stuff, but he bankrupted our production company, Picture Music International. Every video went over budget. The Jacksons’ “Torture” video is legendary. The shoot went on so long that band members stopped showing up.
JEFF STEIN: The Jacksons’ “Torture” video: an experience that lived up to the song title.
JOHN DIAZ: Michael Jackson was at the first meeting we had with his brothers for “Torture,” and
he said, “I want to do this, I want to do that.” And then, of course, Michael didn’t show up to the shoot. I had a feeling he wasn’t going to show, so I found a wax museum in Nashville to make a dummy of Michael. And that’s what you see in the video. We placed it in different positions: sometimes with its hand up, sometimes with it down at its side.
Perri Lister was the choreographer on “Torture.” She was Billy Idol’s girlfriend and choreographed many videos I produced. But Jackie Jackson kept saying, “She’s not right for us.” And I had to fire her.
PERRI LISTER: I love Jeff Stein. He’s a great director and a sweetheart. “Torture”—so aptly named. Jeff wanted me on board as choreographer, but I had to get approved by the Jacksons first. It was like I was joining the CIA. I’ve never been through more security checks in my life, to get to the inner sanctum of the Jacksons sitting in their hotel room. I finally get there, and they’re all there but Michael, and they each had their own lawyer. And manager. Anyway, they liked my reel and they hired me.
A few days later, Jeff says, “Listen, I’ve got a slight problem. Jackie’s girlfriend wants to be in the video. He says she’s a dancer.” I’m like, “Let her come to the audition, and if she’s okay, we’ll put her in the video, and if she’s not, I’m sorry, I’m not putting her in.” She comes to the audition, and she’s a little shorter and a little plumper than most, but I figured if I hired some other girls that were the same size, she wouldn’t stand out. The first day of rehearsal comes and she doesn’t show up. So I thought, Never mind her, I’ll keep the other short girls. So we rehearsed for a week, and the day comes to show the routine to Jackie Jackson. I see this girl come in and stand with Jackie. I’m like, “Oh my god, it’s the girlfriend.” Afterwards, Jeff Stein said, “I’m sorry, Perri, but, um, Jackie’s girlfriend has decided that she wants to choreograph the video.” I said, “Well, as long as you give me my check, Jeff, I’m fine with that.” So they gave me my check and I left. And the girlfriend was Paula Abdul.
JEFF STEIN: I’ll take the blame for many things, but not for that video. We were constantly waiting around for everybody to be ready. It was endless. I don’t even know if there was a budget. I mean, it was not my company, I was not the producer, I did not make the deal. I have no idea what it ended up costing. For certain videos, I remember the cost only in terms of human lives. One of our crew members lost control of her bodily functions while we were making the video. The crew motto used to be “Death or victory.” I think that was the only time we ever prayed for death.
I had a gut feeling Michael wasn’t going to show up. So I had the foresight to get a wax figure from Madame Tussauds to double for Michael, and that proved to be a good decision. That wax figure was put through the ringer. Its head ended up in the salad bowl at lunch one day.
PAULA ABDUL, choreographer; artist: Michael couldn’t make it, so they ended up using a wax dummy stand-in. I was so young and naive, I just figured this is what they normally do on music videos.
JEFF STEIN: The Jacksons were Jehovah’s Witnesses, I believe, and I was told there could be no drugs or alcohol on the set. So I gathered the crew and told them I expected everybody to adhere to those instructions carefully. We were ready to shoot a sequence, and I couldn’t find two key members of my crew. I was frantic. I turned around and behind the cyclorama I saw two silhouettes of my missing crew guys, the size of Godzilla and Rodan, shoveling something into their nostrils. The silhouette was thirty feet high. I ran the length of two football fields, kicked out the lights, and nobody ever saw it but me.
JON LANDAU: When it came time to announce the release of Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. in 1984, we gave MTV a spectacular live version of “Rosalita” we’d shot in 1980 to warm things up. Then Bruce bit the bullet. He said, “Well, I guess we’ve got to.” He understood we had to do a video for “Dancing in the Dark.”
We both loved Jeff Stein and went to him first for “Dancing in the Dark.” Jeff had a particular idea, a no-frills way he wanted to shoot Bruce, and we were all for it. We had a couple of days’ shooting planned, and after the first day, we knew it wasn’t working. It was just a misfire.
DANIEL PEARL: Jeff Stein’s idea for “Dancing in the Dark” was to get a Louma crane, the original remote-controlled crane with a camera on the end of it, put Springsteen in an all-black stage—black floor, black walls, no set—and fly the camera around Springsteen as he performed. This would be the first real Bruce Springsteen music video, and he was concerned about everything. When he arrives at the Kaufman Astoria studio in New York, he looks like a ’50s rock n’ roller: He’s got sideburns, a day’s stubble, a wife-beater T-shirt, and tight sharkskin pants. And he’s ripped. He’s been working out.
He starts telling me how to light him. “I want a big silk over the camera. Throw a big light through it and front light me all flat.” I go, “No way, man.” He goes, “What?” I go, “That’s how we light Stevie Nicks. That’s for lighting women. I want to light you hard, I want to show the ripples of your muscles.” So I lit him much harder than he wanted. I figured we’d do one take and then talk about it. He performed one time, we cut the camera, and he walked off the fucking set and didn’t come back. No explanation. We stood around for half an hour, people scoured the building looking for him, and we finally realized, Oh my god, he’s gone. Jeff had no real idea for the video, anyway. Black and dark? That’s a concept?
JEFF STEIN: Bruce and I were friends; my brother and I played on his softball team, the E Street Kings. But I did not want to do a video with him, because, due to scheduling, it couldn’t be done as a performance video. And Bruce comes alive onstage—along with Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend, he’s one of the greatest rock n’ roll showmen of all time. It was definitely the video everybody wanted to do, and I got talked into it.
We came up with one epic concept, which was a spoof of “Thriller” with elements of The Wizard of Oz, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then I came up with the idea—which hadn’t been done at the time—to shoot Bruce doing the song in one take. And Daniel Pearl took forever and ever to light the set. It took way too long. And I think Bruce got restless. If you knew Bruce, you knew when he was into something or he wasn’t into it. It was probably the worst experience in my music-video career. It was traumatic. But it was not my fault. I’d take the blame if I should, but Daniel should take the bullet for it. I know there are copies of our camera rehearsals on YouTube.
It didn’t ruin the friendship, thank God. Bruce gave me a muscle car, a 1969 Ford XL convertible that his mechanic rebuilt for him. We were driving around, he wanted to play me the Born in the U.S.A. album in the car. “Rock n’ roll always sounds better in the car.” We got back to his house and there was a car in the driveway with one flat tire. He said, “I’ve got to get rid of that.” I said, “I’ll take it.” I was joking. He said, “Okay.” And he went in his kitchen and got the keys.
JON LANDAU: I happened to be a very good friend of Brian De Palma, who was a wonderful director, and I said to him, “We took a shot and it really didn’t work. You got any ideas?” At this point we were pretty much up for anything. Brian came to the first night of the “Born in the U.S.A.” tour in Minneapolis with his crew, and he shot us performing “Dancing in the Dark” in the afternoon a couple of times. He lit it fantastically, found Courteney Cox, and created a little vignette where Bruce pulls her onstage from the front row.
AL TELLER: Bruce didn’t like the idea of videos, and I wasn’t enthusiastic about his doing them, either. When I saw “Dancing in the Dark,” I almost winced. Bruce pulling Courteney Cox onto the stage, that struck me as very contrived.
JOHN SYKES: Before 1984, Springsteen hadn’t done anything with us. He did a video for “Atlantic City,” from Nebraska, but he wasn’t even in it. I met with Jon when they were rolling out Born in the U.S.A., and he was ready to play. And it was huge for MTV for Bruce to make the “Dancing in the Dark” video. Les went to the video shoot in M
inneapolis. He flew in the CBS jet. I missed the flight.
LES GARLAND: I flew on the CBS private jet with Walter Yetnikoff to the taping of the “Dancing in the Dark” video. Landau was there, and we said hi to Bruce before showtime. Bruce grabs a young girl from the audience and pulls her up onstage. We didn’t know she was a plant. He plops her back down into her seat, and that’s when Bruce told the crowd, “We’re shooting a video tonight. We gotta make sure we get it right, so we’re gonna do that one again.” I think he did it three times.
JON LANDAU: When Bruce looked at it, he had mixed feelings. He knew Brian and was very appreciative that he’d bailed us out. But the whole thing was slick and high gloss, not a typical Bruce Springsteen thing. On the other hand, because it was commercial, it helped us go after a younger audience. It was controversial with fans, but it broadened Bruce’s appeal, especially with women and teens. Bruce would be out on the Jersey Shore and kids would come up to him and start imitating his dance moves from the video.
“Cover Me” was the next single, but we couldn’t figure out what to do with that, so we skipped making a video for it. And then we hooked up with John Sayles for “Born in the U.S.A.” Bruce and I both liked John’s work; Bruce gave John permission to use his music in his film Baby It’s You, which Bruce never did. When we got to “Born in the U.S.A.,” I said to John, “The big thing is, Bruce doesn’t want to do anything special for the video. You can film him onstage. You can build a story around that. But he’s not going to act, and he’s not going to lip-sync.” So John filmed Bruce doing the song, then tried to match the recorded version with Bruce’s live performance. And then John shot some lovely documentary footage to go around the concert. We loved the video. So John became our guy.