I Want My MTV

by Craig Marks

  TOM FRESTON: This was at the height of the LBO mania. We each had a little money, although the way the stock options were distributed—Bob got something like 100,000, David had 100,000 or 200,000, everyone else got between 1,000 and 10,000—raised a lot of eyebrows.

  BOB PITTMAN: Not long after David and I met with Forstmann Little, Steve Ross called me in to his office. He said, “Listen, Bob—I’ve made a deal with Viacom to buy MTV Networks, and I want you to be part of it.” Viacom was a television syndication company that owned half of Showtime/The Movie Channel; Warner Amex owned the other half. At that moment I was Mr. MTV; if Viacom tried to purchase MTV and I didn’t stay, they wouldn’t get their financing. Now, Steve had been very good to me. He was a father figure. I said, “Steve, of course I’ll stay, because I owe it to you, but I’m going to ask one thing first: Please listen to Teddy Forstmann before you say yes to Viacom.” Teddy came in and pitched Steve. He offered a lot of money for MTV: $475 million. And Steve said yes. He accepted our offer. David and I brought together Sykes, Freston, and the whole inner group, and told them we had a deal. We actually began working out how we would divvy up the equity.

  JOHN SYKES: We were preparing to take ownership. We were going to have to carefully manage overhead and increase revenues, but this was a long-term play, and we knew the business had barely scratched the surface of its potential. The night our offer was accepted, I took some of the Forstmann Little people to a Bruce Springsteen concert in New Jersey to celebrate. The LBO had gone through! We had a press release written. We were having a great time.

  BOB PITTMAN: Steve Ross was a great trader. And as we were drawing up the papers, he was whittling away at the conditions—changing terms, trying to get more and more out of Teddy. At a certain moment, Teddy blew up at Steve. I forget what about. But things got heated between them. And at that point Alberto Cribiore, who was Steve’s dealmaker, went across the street to Viacom and told them, “You pay us $525 million and buy our half of Showtime/The Movie Channel, and we’ll sell you the company.”

  I was having dinner with Teddy and Nicky at a restaurant on the Upper East Side when I got a message that Steve Ross had called. I had no idea what was happening. I walked over to Nicky’s apartment to use the phone. And that’s when Steve said, “I’m not going to do the deal with Forstmann. I’m going with Viacom. It’s done.” I went back and told Teddy. Teddy said, “Well, I’m not gonna pay any more. That’s it.”

  JOHN SYKES: We told Forstmann Little that if we matched the offer, Steve would do the deal with us. And Forstmann’s quote was, “No cable network is worth $500 million. We’re out.” We ran into a brick wall. Fortsmann Little were very disciplined about their deals. Once they put pen to paper and figured out a valuation, they weren’t going to budge from it. They weren’t emotionally caught up in the deal like we were. Our feeling was that this company could be worth a lot more than $500 million. And it turned out we were right, of course. Years later, I said to Ted Forstmann, “My God, if you had made that deal, you could have a multibillion-dollar company.” And he said, “If I had to do it all over again today, I’d make the same decision.” That’s just the way these guys run their companies.

  BOB PITTMAN: MTV Networks sold to Viacom for $525 million. Teddy Forstmann’s brother Nicky was a pal up until he passed away, and years later I’d periodically tell Nicky, “MTV’s now worth $2 billion . . . $3 billion . . . $5 billion . . . $10 billion.” We’d laugh about the fact that we cared about $50 million back then.

  JOHN SYKES: Virtually overnight, we went from thinking we were going to own our company to becoming salaried employees of an outside corporation. We felt blindsided. We were all in our twenties. We didn’t have enough experience to know that this was the way business sometimes went. We were demoralized. We’d built this company from day one—we had been in the room when the logo was sketched, when we named it, when we went on the air with a handful of videos. We built it cable system by cable system. We’d put our lives into this startup, and we felt like it was taken right out from underneath our noses. It wasn’t all bad—we cashed out our stock when Viacom bought the company. But it was really a consolation prize.

  And that was the beginning of the end for the original group of MTV executives. Within the year, Les, Bob, and I all left MTV.

  BOB PITTMAN: It was very tough to lose out on the LBO. But I felt I owed Steve, so I agreed to stay on and work for Viacom. David Geffen called me and said, “Listen, disappear from town. I’ll negotiate your deal. Steve should pay you $10 million or $20 million to go to Viacom.” I said, “I can’t do that.” I think I got $3 million or $4 million out of the deal. By the way: $3 million or $4 million? A lot of money to me at that age.

  JOHN SYKES: When Steve Ross sold to Viacom, that’s when all the fun stopped. In the fall of ’85, MTV Networks held an offsite at Gurney’s Inn in Montauk. This was the first time most of us were meeting the new owners. Terry Elkes, who ran Viacom, landed on the property in a helicopter. That didn’t make such a good impression. He spoke to us, and it wasn’t a well-received speech. He basically said, This is how we’re going to do things from now on, and then got back in his helicopter and flew back to Manhattan. MTV Networks get-togethers were always kind of wild, but this one turned a notch crazier. We were frustrated that we had been bought out by a hostile opponent and then to talked to like children by a company that, in our minds, made widgets. So the offsite turned into an Irish wake.

  TOM FRESTON: All the top MTV Networks management was at Gurney’s. The night before we met our new owners, we stayed up drinking tequila. I remember people grabbing fish out of the aquarium and throwing them everywhere. We were tossing around six-foot palm trees. Chairs were overturned. We trashed the hotel. And then into this very hungover group walks Terry Elkes for this lunch meeting. And about the first thing he says is, “We know that many of you have stock options”—because the only silver lining of this Viacom deal was that our meager options would accelerate and vest. “Well,” he said, “I just want you to know that we don’t intend to honor that.” This was the coldest possible water you could have thrown on this crowd. We were dumbfounded that this was their opening gambit. They did end up paying us our options. But a feeling of dread and pessimism was cemented right there.

  BOB PITTMAN: Every year I hear another story about that offsite, so god knows what went on.

  TOM FRESTON: Viacom was not a major player back then. It was run by Terry Elkes and Ken Gorman, and they owned a few TV stations and cable systems, some radio stations. Their big asset was a syndication company that distributed The Cosby Show. Terry and Ken were smart guys, but they were more the financial engineering types. They had a reputation for being very cheap. It would be impossible for them to look at a business and not think there was a lot of fat to be trimmed. When they saw that Bob had two assistants, they said, “Two assistants is not the Viacom way of doing things. We’re a one-assistant or a split-assistant company.”

  BOB PITTMAN: Terry Elkes and Ken Gorman’s business philosophy was one-hundred-and-eighty-degrees different from Steve Ross’s. They were former finance guys who’d been in syndication sales. They were very stiff. They were not at all like the people at Warners or MTV.

  ALLEN NEWMAN: It started to become about profit and programming. All of a sudden, there was hierarchy and bureaucracy. The attitude changed. The fun had gone out of it. When Viacom came in, it just started to become corporate.

  MARCY BRAFMAN: It wasn’t fun anymore. Our ideas were getting rejected. I could feel the tectonic plates shifting.

  TOM FRESTON: People started heading for the exits.

  LES GARLAND: When the company was sold, Pittman signed a long-term deal with Viacom. He was a cheerleader for the new company and talked about how we needed to make this work. Finally, in the middle of ’86, he came to me, one-on-one, and dropped the news that he was leaving. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I admit it, I was like, “Oh. My. God.”

  BOB PITTMAN: David Gef
fen had a huge impact on me. When MTV became wildly popular, he’d said, “Are you just going to be a one-idea guy?” You know when somebody says something to you and it just picks at you? That question picked at me and picked at me. I was thirty or thirty-one, and I had a lot of other ideas I wanted to try. I’d come out of radio, where every year or so I moved to another station. Plus, as a preacher’s kid, we moved every two or three years. I’ve got it in my blood; always on the go. But it was tough, because I felt like I was leaving my family. MTV was my baby.

  It was a very difficult decision. But at a certain point, I realized that Viacom had taken my company and my heart wasn’t in it anymore. People would offer me jobs, and my attorney would say, “No, not that one.” Finally, Sid Sheinberg at MCA said, “Why don’t you start your own company? We’ll finance the company and split it with you fifty-fifty.” My attorney said, “You should take that deal.” So I left MTV and started Quantum Media.

  TOM FRESTON: I think Bob was getting a sense that the bloom was off the rose for MTV. And Bob very much wants to be associated with success. I believed the bloom wasn’t off the rose. Hell, five years earlier I was living in fucking Afghanistan. Who was I to complain?

  LES GARLAND: One of the terms of his exit from Viacom was that Bob wasn’t allowed to poach people, but I can admit now that he and I had some conversations. We decided that the move had to take place in two steps. First, I had to resign. There was a great going-away party at the China Club; David Bowie’s band played, and I got up and did “Secret Agent Man” with them. We blew it out, and I said good-bye to MTV. I went on vacation for a while. When I surfaced a month or so later, I took an office over at Quantum Media. Nothing was official. We let it go real slow like that, and ultimately MTV allowed it to go down.

  Quantum developed TV shows, we had a music company, we had publishing, we were gonna do magazines, we wanted to do films. We’d come off a home run, we were ambitious guys, and my recollection is that there were no budgets. We launched The Morton Downey Jr. Show, which was huge, until Downey claimed someone painted a swastika on his forehead in an airport bathroom.

  JOHN SYKES: When Viacom took over, I checked out. There was nothing there for me emotionally. I left in the summer of ’86 to go work for Mike Ovitz at CAA. Bob went to work for MCA. Les left with him. The dream was over. We cashed in. We didn’t make the kind of money guys make now when they cash in, but we all made more money than we ever thought we would.

  TOM FRESTON: I was the general manager of MTV and VH1 and had been for some time. When Bob left, he anointed me to be his successor. He made me copresident with a fellow named Bob Roganti. I was the president of MTV Networks Entertainment, and Roganti was the president of ad sales and operations. When I took over, a lot of people were leaving the company, not just because of the change in ownership, but because they were burned out. Our ratings were eroding, and as they slipped, the perception grew that MTV was a flash in the pan, that this downward trend was irrevocable, that we’d burned hot and bright, and now we were going to crash.

  Chapter 24

  “GACKED TO THE TITS”

  TWENTY-FOUR STORIES ABOUT DRUGS

  STEVIE NICKS: “I Can’t Wait” is one of my favorite songs, and it became a famous video. But now I look at that video, I look at my eyes, and I say to myself, “Could you have laid off the pot, the coke, and the tequila for three days, so you could have looked a little better? Because your eyes look like they’re swimming.” It just makes me want to go back into that video and stab myself.

  Was I doing drugs on the set of my videos? Absolutely. Which videos? All of them. I knew only two people from that era who didn’t do drugs. And one of them did drugs, but never very much.

  BOB GIRALDI: I had a meeting with Stevie Nicks where we sat on her bed. I’ve never seen a woman that stoned in my life. She was so wasted, we couldn’t even communicate.

  DOMINIC SENA: I did Fleetwood Mac’s “As Long As You Follow.” Christine McVie had the lead vocals, and I was focused on her, then drifted over to capture Stevie Nicks sitting on the arm of a couch, and there was no Stevie there. She had fallen off the couch and onto the floor. I said “Jesus Christ, would somebody please pick Stevie up and put her back onto the sofa?”

  JEFF STEIN: My crew and I had a thirty-six-hour day once. It was for the Vinnie Vincent Invasion. I can’t remember the name of the video—would you?

  BETH BRODAY: There was never enough money or time to fully execute the ambitious visions of directors and artists, and we would end up shooting twenty-four-, twenty-five-, twenty-six-hour days. I would have to keep my crews happy and awake by providing them certain substances beyond coffee.

  DAVE GROHL: My father-in-law used to help bands make videos in the ’70s and early ’80s, back when they’d just pay you in cocaine. “The band’s gonna be here, you have them for one hour, just set something up quick.” They’d get a bunch of VHS tape and cocaine, and you got yourself a video.

  MICK KLEBER: I certainly saw a lot of eight balls being consumed on set, especially when a video would run long. Bump up and go. I heard a lot of records in those days where we’d go, “That’s the cocaine mix.” All brittle treble, no bottom end.

  PAUL FLATTERY: Toto were known as David Paich and the New Crusty Nostrils. But then again, everyone was doing coke. Lawyers. The record company execs. Everyone.

  STEVE LUKATHER: Everybody was gacked to the tits for a decade. There was piles of coke everywhere. Some of us dabbled, some of us became drug addicts. It started out fun, and then people got hurt. We had to fire our singer because he disappeared into drugs. That whole period was just a nightmare, let’s face it.

  SHARON ORECK: One of the guys in Toto kept sending a PA out to get coke. And while he was snorting, he told me he’d been saved by the Lord from hard drugs. I said, “Well, what’s that going in your nose?” And he’s like, “That’s just cocaine.” In the early ’80s, there was still this bizarre impression that heroin was a drug, but cocaine was like a cigarette. Pretty much every person in the music-video industry was doing cocaine, except me. And I wasn’t doing cocaine only because I’d finished with it in the ’70s. It was beyond pervasive. Everyone was high. I never heard the term “rehab” until 1985 or so. And then, all of a sudden, I started hearing it a lot.

  BOB GIRALDI: I smoked a lot of dope. We were always high. We were never straight.

  LOL CREME: The crew was as stoned as the rest of us. Early on, a lot of them were paid in drugs, since there were no real budgets yet. They’d go overtime and they got paid a little bit more coke or grass. The crew were delighted to do these shoots, and they did great favors to us, because they were so bored with doing advertising or movies. This was the spirit of rock n’ roll, as far as they were concerned.

  DARYL HALL: I’m sure the cameramen were doing blow. That’s pretty much the’80s. The artists were high, but not as high as the crew.

  JERRY CASALE: Nobody thought coke was bad for you. We thought it was great. Executives at Warner Bros. used to break it out at meetings.

  ROBERT LOMBARD: Cocaine in those days was just something to get laid with. If you give cocaine to girls, they’re gonna pull their clothes off.

  JOHN DIAZ: Coke was all over the place. The excuses were the long hours and the hard work, but I don’t know if the drugs were the result of that or the cause. The coke didn’t make anyone more aware or help them get things done more quickly. It just made them want more coke.

  ROBERT SMITH: Drugs and alcohol were the fuel for many of our videos.

  SIOBHAN FAHEY, Bananarama: The “Cruel Summer” video was just an excuse to get us to the fabled city of New York for the first time. It was August, over one hundred degrees. Our HQ was a tavern under the Brooklyn Bridge, which had a ladies’ toilet with a chipped mirror where we had to do our makeup. When we repaired to the tavern for lunch, we met a bunch of dockworkers. They were intrigued by us and started chatting, and they all had these little vials of coke. I’d never done coke—I was aware of its
existence, but I didn’t know anybody who could afford it. We were exhausted and they gave us very generous bumps. That was our lunch. When you watch that video, we look really tired and miserable in the scenes we shot before lunch, and then the after-lunch shots are all euphoric and manic.

  BOY GEORGE: There was one video when Jon Moss and I had this massive fight, and as he was about to go on set, I dropped a vase of flowers on him. By that point, we were pretty messed up on drugs. That affected everything, not just the videos—that affected life, full stop.