I Want My MTV

by Craig Marks

  SHARON ORECK: The biggest nightmare I ever had was on Janet Jackson’s “Control.” Janet was splitting with her father, Joe, as her manager, and he was angry and taking it out on everyone. In the video, Janet was supposed to sit on a trapeze. Joe said if I put her on that trapeze, I had to take out $1 million worth of insurance on her. I went to the record company, and they’re like, “Don’t tell Joe Jackson anything, but don’t tell him no either. We don’t say no to Joe Jackson.” So I didn’t tell him anything, and he threatened to kill me or maybe break my legs—it was something bad. Mary Lambert went to the record company and said, “We’re both quitting unless you tell Joe Jackson that you’re going to cover the insurance.”

  We went on an urban radio station in LA and said, “Come watch Janet Jackson perform at the Shrine Auditorium.” Thousands of people showed up for what they thought was a free concert. And what we gave them was fifty takes of Janet lip-syncing “Control.” None of them knew they were going to be free extras in the video. And they were unruly even before it started, because we were running late. We’re finally ready to go, and the record company said to me, “We need white people in the audience.” There were white people scattered throughout the crowd. They’re like, “No, bring the white people to the front.” At first I tried to pretend I was doing some minor rearranging: “You in the red jacket, can you move forward a bit?” But by the third time, the audience started to figure it out. So I had a nervous breakdown and started crying. I said to the man from A&M Records, “This is fucked up. If you want it, you go onstage and make the announcement.” And he agreed.

  Crying helped sometimes.

  KEVIN GODLEY: I was making a video with U2 and decided we needed an elephant. I told Ned O’Hanlon, the producer, “We need an elephant by tomorrow.” Not many elephants in Dublin. Poor Ned somehow managed to fly an elephant from Belgium to Dublin.

  SIMON LE BON: The thing about videos is, they’re awfully long days. At midday, a big glass of whiskey or a fat line of coke seems like a great idea. But come 8 P.M., when you’ve been on set for hours, it’s awful. You can see which Duran Duran members were getting too high. They’re usually covered up with sunglasses.

  JOHN TAYLOR: When we did the “View to a Kill” video, I don’t think there’s any shot of us all together. You couldn’t get us in the same space at the same time. I wish I could say, “We loved being famous and we had even more fun together than when we started.” But it wasn’t like that.

  PAULA GREIF: Duran Duran saw Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” and wanted to meet with us. My partner, Peter Kagan, said, “Put us on the Concorde and we’ll do it.” So they did. We flew to London and back on the Concorde to have a meeting in one afternoon. Those were the days!

  TOM BAILEY: Godley and Creme spent a lot of the budget for “Don’t Mess with Doctor Dream” on a Learjet. Instead of buying stock footage of clouds, they went up in the sky and spent all day filming clouds. That’s kind of rock n’ roll madness. It shows how out of control the industry was in those days.

  There’s a shot that comes out of the sky and into an open grave. That was done with a helicopter; these days, you’d do it with CGI, I suppose. A helicopter with a camera underneath was straddled across an open grave in a churchyard and then did a vertical takeoff as fast as possible, and the footage was played in reverse. The plan was that if it went wrong, we would all dive into the grave. That’s what passed for health and safety.

  The whole thing was supposed to be a critique of heroin abuse. And it was so dreamy and fantastic that everyone thought it looked like an advert for heroin.

  LOL CREME: It was banned because it was so trippy—MTV said it would turn people on to drugs, not off. They never aired it.

  TOM BAILEY: Lol was also in trouble around that time for having done a Howard Jones video which featured static on the screen. No one would play it, because it looked like your TV was breaking down.

  HOWARD JONES: The point of “Life in One Day” was that the video is like a malfunctioning TV, skipping channels every thirty seconds. It switches to a Swedish TV show, the news, adverts, a religious program, and I keep appearing as different characters. At the end, the screen goes to snow and white noise. Nobody had ever done that. It’s just so innovative and brilliant.

  KEVIN GODLEY: People had showed us medical cameras, endoscopes, boro-scopes, and so on. We were looking for an excuse to use them, and the Huey Lewis video “Hip to Be Square” seemed perfect—put a camera inside someone’s mouth, inside the saxophone, attach it to drumsticks.

  HUEY LEWIS: Godley and Creme had a fabulous camera that did all this weird stuff. We performed two feet away from the camera, three or four times, and that was it. It was all done in postproduction. They were fantastic, they really knew what they were doing. And they were stoned the whole time.

  BETH BRODAY: Everybody wanted to direct music videos. It was like a drug; there was instant gratification. You could write a concept, sell it to a label, spend two weeks putting it together, two or three days shooting it, a week cutting it, and in under thirty days, it would premiere on MTV. Compared to features and TV, it was so instant. It was intoxicating.

  CLIFF BURNSTEIN: We always wanted to find new directors, because they weren’t as expensive as established ones.

  RICK SPRINGFIELD: “Bop’ Til You Drop” was the first video David Fincher did. He was just a pasty-faced kid who had come off doing special effects on The Empire Strikes Back. I’m a big science fiction fan, and he came up with a 1984/ Star Wars theme. He stood out as a guy with a great imagination and a great eye. He made it look almost movie-esque. He was making videos, but his sights were on getting into movies, and it shows.

  BETH BRODAY: David Fincher walked into my office one day with his reel. He’d done a video for Rick Springfield. I could see he had a good feel. When I listened to him talk about filmmaking, I knew he was a star. I signed him on the spot. On the spot.

  I had to beg record labels to even look at him. Debbie Samuelson was the only one who got it. I had to beg Jeff Ayeroff to consider working with him.

  JEANNE MATTIUSSI: Debbie Samuelson and I started David Fincher’s career. He had done Rick Springfield videos for RCA. Then Deb and I made him the de facto in-house director at Columbia. Columbia and Warner Bros. were the two biggest labels, and fierce rivals. Directors who worked for Warner Bros. didn’t necessarily work for Columbia. We were jealous of Warner Bros. because they had better artists and they didn’t have Al Teller to deal with. Al Teller hated MTV. He hated everything about it, and we never had any budgets to speak of. Jeff Ayeroff and Warners gave directors monster dollars to work with, and we could only give them $75,000.

  ANNE-MARIE MACKAY, producer: Jeanne Mattiussi, Debbie Samuelson, Randy Skinner, Robin Sloane: those women were visionaries. They would go to bat for a director if they believed in him. Without them, the careers of David Fincher and others would never have taken off.

  JEANNE MATTIUSSI: We put Fincher on the map. Deb Samuelson got him to do the Outfield, Loverboy, Patty Smyth, Wire Train, and the Hooters. I got him to do Eddie Money’s “Endless Nights” and a pop group called the Stabilizers.

  Eddie Money was an idiot. He was a drug addict. He was loaded all the time, and he acted like a shit. Then he had half his face paralyzed. He was not a happy camper. For “Endless Nights,” we were in this horrible alley in downtown LA that Fincher had art-directed beautifully, with washer lines and clothing. I think it upset him when he had to shoot the actual performance.

  MICK KLEBER: I think I did the second-ever David Fincher video, for the Motels’ “Shame.” He grew up in northern California, lived a couple houses down from George Lucas, so as a young kid, he worked on Neverending Story. Look in the credits, you’ll see Dave Fincher in the visual effects department. I never saw anybody rehearse camera moves as much as he did. When you’re shooting models for Industrial Light & Magic, that’s what you do. You do it over and over, until you get it exactly right. Those videos for the Motels were very
stylish. He met Martha Davis’s daughter on the set, and they were an item for quite a while. They were a very attractive couple.

  MARTHA DAVIS: Fincher was hilarious, wonderful, funny, sweet. Just an absolute doll. My daughter Maria was doing my wardrobe. They were both born on 8/28, so it was the 8/28 Club. She was nineteen, and he was her first love. They were adorable. It’s too bad, because it didn’t end well.

  JEFF AYEROFF: This Motels video for “Shame” had billboards with images of Martha Davis that came to life. I was like, Who the fuck did this? I called Anne-Marie Mackay at Propaganda. She said, “Ah, you’ve got to meet this kid. His name is David Fincher. He never went to film school, he’s a genius!”

  The first video I had him do was for Christopher Cross, “Charm the Snake.” Christopher was a perfect example of “video killed the radio star.” He was a good singer, but he wasn’t very exciting visually. He liked driving Formula 1 race cars, though, so Fincher did a video that revolved around Christopher and race cars.

  RANDY SKINNER: We were all like, This guy’s really talented and he’s doing Christopher Cross? There were race cars and a snake. It didn’t go well.

  DOMINIC SENA: We’d heard of a young guy named David Fincher, who had done one Rick Springfield video and a television commercial with a smoking baby. Greg Gold and I went out for a drink with Fincher and said, “Maybe we should start our own company.” We discussed who would raise money, and we thought of Steve Golin and Joni Sighvatsson. They were associate producers on a movie called Hard Rock Zombies. That was their calling card. They asked if they could bring in Nigel Dick. And the six of us—me, Greg, David, Nigel, Steve, and Joni—founded Propaganda.

  BETH BRODAY: The guys who founded Propaganda were my guys. Joni was my producer. Greg Gold, Dominic Sena, David Fincher, they were my directors. But I’d had enough. I was burned out on videos, and I didn’t want to produce commercials, which was where things were headed. I said, “You know what, guys? I gotta go.”

  JONI SIGHVATSSON, producer: We started the company with $100,000: Steve and I invested our own money, and the other $75,000 came from people in the garment business. We all shared the same goal: We wanted to make movies. Music videos and commercials were a means to an end.

  NIGEL DICK: Steve and Joni said, “All six of us will be equal partners in the company.” I should have recorded that conversation, because that turned out to be a bunch of hooey. They said, “Don’t worry, our lawyers are working on the formal agreement.” After about eighteen months, I said, “Um, where’s my agreement? Because I’m hearing rumors that you’ve given a big chunk of the company to Fincher.” “No, no, no, no, no.” We all shared the same lawyer, so I had to get my own. I told him, “The agreement is that I get a sixth of the company.” He said, “You can’t have a sixth of the company, because there isn’t a sixth of the company left.” Here’s the huge lesson I took from my experience at Propaganda: GET IT IN WRITING.

  DOMINIC SENA: I came up with the name Propaganda. It was desperation, because Joni was starting to say, “Why don’t we call the company Blue Ice?” Fincher and I said, “We gotta come up with a better name than that.” I thought, That’s what we’re doing, we’re selling propaganda. David had a friend named Bobby Woods, and he came up with the Russian constructivist logo. We were very much into the idea of Propaganda being a collective.

  PAUL FLATTERY: The turning point for the video industry came when Propaganda was formed. Propaganda was the first company to sell the record labels a brand. A video wasn’t a David Fincher video, it was a Propaganda video. They had a level of financial backing no one else had, and they discovered great talent. They spelled the end for us.

  DOMINIC SENA: For the first year or so, Propaganda worked out of a loft that we shared with other companies. Finally, we hired architects and took over a warehouse in Hollywood as our headquarters. We installed a cappuccino bar, which was unheard of in 1986.

  As soon as one Propaganda director would finish a video, the other directors would check it out and you’d get feedback. It was very competitive. We always gathered around the cappuccino machine, sharing stories and picking each other’s brain. Editors and cameramen would hang out there. We were growing up and making mistakes and having breakthroughs together.

  JONI SIGHVATSSON: Our directors were the first generation to grow up watching MTV. They had film backgrounds. That’s what distinguished us from Russell Mulcahy and Julien Temple. Don’t get me wrong: Russell, Steve Barron, David Mallett, these were seminal video directors. But their stuff was dated by the mid-’80s. And if you look at their résumés, now they don’t compare to those of the directors that came out of Propaganda.

  ANDY MORAHAN: I won an MTV Best Director Award, but that didn’t count for shit at a commercial production company. They thought video directors were the bottom of the food chain. It took the Finchers of this world to change that perception.

  ANNE-MARIE MACKAY: David directed a Loverboy video, “Notorious,” that got a lot of commercial agencies interested. There were young men on the street, a beautiful girl walks by, a boy pretends to faint, and his friends catch him. The agencies looked at that and said, “Wow! This would be a good way to sell beer.” They were captivated by what they were seeing on MTV and they wanted to duplicate it. They wanted in on the youth market.

  DOMINIC SENA: If a music video cost $150,000, you’d make $15,000. Commercials were a quantum leap. One of my first commercials was a perfume ad with Liza Minnelli. They paid me $35,000.

  GREG GOLD: David broke us into commercials, because he was able to read that market. He was very supportive creatively. On the business side, though, he was tough and strong-willed. He knew what he wanted and stuck to his guns. There was no defense against him.

  PAULA ABDUL: On the set, David’s very meticulous, cool and quiet. He doesn’t raise his voice. He knows he’s good, so he doesn’t have to yell. He has an inner strength that’s very sexy.

  JEANNE MATTIUSSI: When I got to RCA, I weaseled Fincher into doing the Patrick Swayze “She’s Like the Wind” video, from Dirty Dancing. What a horrible song. I think that was the last time I worked with him.

  JEAN-BAPTISTE MONDINO: For me, David Fincher was the boss. He was the one. When you have a small budget, you have less pressure, and you can feel more free. But David could deal with pressure and be as free as if he was dealing with a small budget. He was not afraid to embrace big shooting. And graphically, his videos were incredibly well done.

  JEFF AYEROFF: Fincher was smarter than anybody I’d met in a long, long time. There were a few directors who were like that. Fincher. Mondino. Mark Romanek. And Stephen Johnson. Johnson was this Midwest whack job. His hand has been severed and sewn back on. He’d been addicted to painkillers, and who knows what else.

  JERRY HARRISON: David Byrne had directed two videos for our previous album. Tension started to rise up in the band, because we felt David was making a grab for excessive credit. I said to our manager, “We need to have equality in the band. This can’t be something only David does. Tell Warner Bros. they’re going to pay for each of us to direct a video.” Our budget was $35,000, but Warner Bros. secretly pumped more money into “Road to Nowhere.”

  STEPHEN R. JOHNSON: David Byrne was struggling to come up with an idea for the Talking Heads’s “Road to Nowhere” video so Jeff Ayeroff got us together. I think Jeff thought of me because David and I both wore button-down tab collar white shirts. The video concept was very collaborative. But the bizarre thing was that, when the band was about to arrive, David took all my storyboard pages and redrew them in his own hand, so the band would think he had done it all himself. I had a long talk with him later. I said, “You’re not one of those people, are you?”

  JEFF AYEROFF: The “Road to Nowhere” video turned out to be genius. There’s one section, about halfway through, where David is seated on a throne and wild stop-motion animation is happening all around him. I showed Peter Gabriel the video and said, “I want you to work with Stephen Johnson o
n ‘Sledgehammer.’” It turned out to be one of the great videos of all time.

  STEVE BARRON: Stephen Johnson’s “Sledgehammer” was amazing.

  STEPHEN R. JOHNSON: I didn’t even like the song, frankly. I thought it was just another white boy trying to sound black. But Peter Gabriel took me to dinner, got me drunk on wine, and I agreed to do it.

  I have a brain anomaly, and animation comes easily to me. We all have a retina-to-frontal-cortex connection that results in what is known as “persistence of vision,” which is usually a tenth of a second. It allows us to view a series of still images as a continuum of motion. I see discrete images at six times that, so I can see individual frames as they fly by. I also have an eidetic memory, more commonly known as a photographic memory. I try to avoid using this word—I grew to hate it—but I was deemed a genius.