I Want My MTV

by Craig Marks

  Peter wanted to work with a British animation studio called Aardman. Another friend turned me onto the Quay Brothers, and I loved their work. I threw them together and came up with a new way to do animation. Not to get too technical, but I shot a blueprint for the video on an old Beta machine that let you advance, or reverse, frame by frame. The words to the song and the time code were prominently displayed, so at any given time, the animators could tell right where they were. No one had ever thought to do that. The Quays were twins and animated like one mind with four hands. As I saw them constructing a locomotive that circled Peter, with bits of cotton for smoke, I was impressed.

  I got the idea for the dancing chickens during a trip to Harrods, the department store in London, where they had every form of fowl that existed. Poor Nick Park, from Aardman, was working with the chickens. We didn’t have enough time or money to build armatures, which are metallic mechanisms you insert into the thing you’re animating. Instead, we did it the poor man’s way and put aluminum wire into two chickens. That shot took longer than expected, and we were all about to puke. Nicky said, “Would it be all right if they don’t perform the dance you described and instead do a minuet?” I said, “Yes, just get it done and get the stench out of here.”

  Upon the first meeting on “Sledgehammer,” I learned that one of Aardman’s team of workers had just lost his brother. I explained to him that when I was nineteen, I’d severed my right hand, mid-wrist, in a spectacular car wreck in which I rolled a van end over end five times, into the bottom of a ravine. After climbing out of the van, my right hand was attached only by a skin flap. Arcs of blood shot nearly four feet, coming from my radial and ulnar arteries, as my hand and fingers dangled. I had been premed, so I reached inside my wrist, found the arteries, and pinched them off. I was in Loveland Pass, Colorado, and had to climb a mountain and hitchhike to a hospital, where I was clinically dead from loss of blood. I flew out of my body, saw my whole life, and headed to a luminous, sparkly door. Just as I reached the door, I heard the words “We’ve got him,” because I’d been shocked back to life. After eleven operations in less than a year, I was the only person in the world with a complete set of silicone-dacron plastic tendons which work. I used to wear a shiny high-tech glove made from fabric engineered by NASA, because I had chronic coldness in my undervascu-larized hand. The car wreck gave me a belief in some form of continuation of consciousness beyond death. I told this story to comfort the guy who’d lost his brother, and I vowed to include something about my “seeing the light” in the video we were going to make.

  Mid-shoot, the chief cinematographer and lighting director David Sproxton rigged a Christmas-tree “suit” for Peter to wear. He put it on and danced around in a wild herky-jerky motion. We thought he was goofing off, but we realized that Peter was being electrocuted, so I put the idea aside. Later, David discovered that Scotchlite tape, when illuminated with a small light source just above the camera, shows up very brightly. Peter agreed to go overtime and everyone cut up tiny pieces of Scotchlite and covered everything, including Peter. I believe a big reason for the success of the video, aside from the silliness, was that end shot, which took it to another level. This was all done in one week flat. Simply put, we arrive as a random speck out of the random cosmos and there is where we return, with some fun and some work in between.

  SIMON FIELDS: Stephen Johnson was crazy, but fun. He had a bad back, and he was taking painkillers. He was paranoid. He’d directed some episodes on the first season of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and he kept talking about how Pee-wee’s management was trying to drug him and take control of the show.

  STEVEN R. JOHNSON: The year “Sledgehammer” won all those Video Music Awards, they structured the show so that I didn’t get to say one word of acceptance. I think they realized they couldn’t have directors being idolized as well as music stars. So they’d just announce, “Okay, and another award for Stephen Johnson.”

  The “Sledgehammer” video flung me into worldwide notice, which I didn’t want. I was overwhelmed with offers. Kids would look me up in the phone book and drop off presents—like sheets of windowpane acid, something I’d given up by 1970.

  JIM YUKICH, director: The Genesis video “Land of Confusion” was enormously popular on MTV, and we were up for something like seven Video Music Awards that year. Stephen Johnson and “Sledgehammer” won every award.

  GEORGE BRADT: While I was doing music research, the best “testing” artist of all was probably Phil Collins. Research showed that viewers never got tired of his videos, so they were played regularly, months or even years after they were hits. Phil Collins’s management actually called MTV and asked us to play his videos less.

  PAUL FLATTERY: I’ve done twenty-three videos for Phil Collins and about fifteen for Genesis—we never once had a contract between us. Just a handshake agreement on the budget. They never, ever stinted. Which didn’t mean they didn’t complain. If you look at “Land of Confusion,” which is their favorite video because they didn’t have to be in it, you’ll notice Tony Banks playing a cash register. That’s because he was always complaining about how much videos cost.

  JIM YUKICH: There was a big TV show in England called Spitting Image, with life-size puppets. I mentioned to Phil’s manager, Tony Smith, that we should use the puppets for a video. It took a while to get the Spitting Image creators, Peter Fluck and Roger Law, onboard. For “Land of Confusion,” each puppet cost $10,000 to make. Not just the Genesis puppets, but the Reagan puppet, the Michael Jackson puppet, the Gorbachev puppet. And there had to be five different Reagans: one with the president’s brain missing, one where he was crying, and so on. They were so big, we needed two guys to operate each one.

  The video was very politically charged. But the only image that caused a stir was the pope puppet playing bass. Tony Smith called and said, “Can we back off on the shots of the pope? We don’t want to piss off the Catholics.”

  PHIL COLLINS: The only Grammy Genesis ever won was for the “Land of Confusion” video. Which, it’s worth noting, we weren’t even in. “Sledgehammer” won all the VMAs that year. That was a trailblazing video. No one had seen anything like that. Ours was more blatantly humorous, and Peter’s was more artistic. I still have one of the Phil Collins puppets at home.

  Chapter 27

  “THERE I AM, WITH MY RACK”

  THE RISE OF THE SUPERDIVAS, MALE AND FEMALE

  VIDEO DIRECTORS NO LONGER CAME FROM THE ranks of the outcasts—fashion photographers, including Terence Donovan, Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Rebecca Blake, Herb Ritts, and Stéphane Sednaoui, entered the field. They were accustomed to working with models, and their work tilted videos in the direction of Vogue fashion spreads. “I love music that is like perfume sprayed into a room,” Mondino said. For Heart, this aesthetic meant discomfort and shame. For Robert Palmer, it meant the instantly iconic “Addicted to Love,” which was a satire, but also a pure embodiment, of video’s obsession with looks.

  MARTY CALLNER: In Heart’s “Never” video, which was very successful, I featured Nancy Wilson, who had never been featured in a video before. Everybody told me how much they loved her tits in that video.

  ANN WILSON: That was his niche. Marty was a princess.

  NANCY WILSON: There I am, with my rack. I got relegated to the bombshell department in videos. It’s a blessing and a curse at the same time. Everybody was like, “It’s sexy! Sexy! Sex-ayyy! Sexy’s good!” Videos were instrumental in giving us a second career, after the late ’70s. I realized it had gotten completely out of hand one day when I was in a store and someone said, “I love your videos. Do you really play guitar, or is that a prop?”

  ANN WILSON: When I watched them objectify Nancy, it broke my heart. When they loaded her into a harness with her guitar and shoved her off a cliff in the “Never” video, I burst into tears and had to leave the room. Each video had to outdo the last video. “Alone” was really over-the-top. Marty Callner got Nancy to ride a horse. It was a pretty obvious idea—get a wom
an to straddle something, with her breasts bouncing.

  NANCY WILSON: It seemed like everybody else got to make cooler, more artistic videos than we did, like the Police, or the mind-blowing stuff Peter Gabriel was doing.

  ANN WILSON: It hurt our feelings, and we felt jealous. The guys didn’t have pressure to be sex kittens.

  SINEAD O’CONNOR: There was a great band called Heart—I used to love this band—and they had a singer who was quite overweight, who in videos they shot only from the neck up. Prince’s sister, Tyka Nelson, made a great fucking record called “Marc Anthony’s Tune.” She was an enormously fat woman, and her label insisted she become skinny if she was going to get on MTV. So a) there were no black people on MTV, and b) there were no fat people.

  MICK KLEBER: Ann Wilson’s weight was a big issue. People had this perception of what she looked like from the “Magic Man” era, when she was slender. And now that she wasn’t, each video presented a challenge. There were a lot of different tactics that were used, with technology and lighting. You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that we were sort of hiding her in different ways.

  On one shoot, David Mallet blasted a huge amount of backlight and had reflective panels sewn into the sides of her dress, so the light would blow off and create sort of an artificial waist. In other clips, they stretched the video in post-production to make her appear slimmer. As for me, I’d been in the Marines before working for Capitol, so I said, “Why don’t we just get her in shape?” Her management were insulted that I would suggest that, even though they were keeping her in full-length coats and shooting her from the neck up. They would rather spend $100,000 extra in video production costs to hide her weight instead of putting $35,000 into fitness.

  ANN WILSON: The videos were stretched at the request of management. I never liked it. I’ve always felt that the effort to disguise a flaw is worse than the flaw. And I had to answer questions about it; if you didn’t look like a porn star, everyone was like, “What’s wrong?” People said horrible things about me.

  DOMINIC SENA: I was doing a video for Anita Baker, and we made sure she picked out the wardrobe she wanted to wear. A few days later, we were shooting some other footage while she got ready, and they came to me and said, “She doesn’t like her wardrobe.” I said, “She liked it a few days ago when she picked it out!”

  “Well, she doesn’t like it now and she doesn’t want to shoot.” My stylist frantically made some calls—it was Sunday, no less—and got designer shops to open. She came back with racks and racks of the hippest, coolest clothes, gathered in a few hours. Anita went through all that stuff, and didn’t find anything she wanted to wear. It turned out that she felt fat and didn’t want to go in front of the camera. So I never shot a single frame of her.

  ANN CARLI: We signed Samantha Fox—she was one of the biggest Page Three Girls in England. Page Three Girls pose topless in the Sun. She was fairly young, and extremely buxom. RCA wanted to do pinup calendars and take a real skanky approach. I wanted her to be more of a girl next door, so that was a big fight. Ultimately, I was right—guys liked her videos and girls bought her records.

  Samantha was a great girl. But she would drink early in the day. She wanted champagne right from the beginning of the day. I made sure her drinks got watered down. At one video shoot, she was constipated. She was bloated and wearing a midriff costume. I had to get a doctor. This is kind of a disgusting story. I don’t want to know what the doctor did, but the problem was solved.

  JEANNE MATTIUSSI: Barbra Streisand tortured me on a daily basis. She used to call at the crack of dawn. She was intent that she belonged on MTV. The directive to get her “Somewhere” video played came from the top, from Walter Yetnikoff and Al Teller. Walter used to call me the “dago broad on the West Coast.” That’s the only sign I had that he knew who I was. And Al threatened me if I didn’t get the video on MTV.

  RONALD “BUZZ” BRINDLE: The song was not an MTV song. It was a Barbra Streisand song. Dom Fiorvante was one level above Garland and I was sitting in Dom’s office when he was on the phone with Walter Yetnikoff. All I could hear was f-words. I guess Barbra was emphatic in terms of her desire to get a video on MTV.

  DAVID MALLET: Everybody around her was terrified of Diana Ross. I didn’t know that, so when she asked me, “What are we going to do for the video?” I said, “I’m going to dress you in a wig and make you look like an idiot, like you did on a ’60s TV show.” There was a terrible silence in the room. And she said, “Oh, I like that. I’ll do that.” There’s a scene in “Chain Reaction” where she crawls on the ground, that’s always a good thing to do when you’re desperate. She had a huge hit, and it was regarded as a seminal video.

  PETER BARON: Whitney Houston was the first breakthrough for Arista Records at MTV. We didn’t spend a whole lot of money on Whitney’s videos; she didn’t have the charisma and personality of a Madonna or Prince. She was a churchgoing, gospel-singing teenager who rarely left the house. And she had two old Jewish managers—one named Gene Harvey and the other, I’m not making this up, named Seymour Flics. They were two alter kockers who didn’t know anything about videos. Clive Davis was barely involved. He didn’t even have a TV in his office for the first five years of MTV.

  I went to to England to supervise “How Will I Know.” The day before the shoot, my phone rings, and it’s Don Ienner, who was a VP at Arista. He says, “Peter, we need a favor with Whitney. I’m going to have Tommy Mottola call you.” I said, “Fine.” Ring, ring. “Peter, how you doing, I hear great things about you.” I was like, Oh, that’s a setup. “One of my dearest friends is in England, and I was wondering if there’s a way you could hook up”—he used the phrase hook up—“an introduction between him and Whitney. He’s in the UK working on a movie called The Mission.” I said, “Well, who is it?” He said, “It’s Robert De Niro.”

  Two seconds later, ring, ring. “Hey, Pete, it’s Bob De Niro. What are you guys doing tonight?” When I told Whitney, she dropped a fork out of her hand. And said, “No fucking way,” or something along those lines. “He’s really been coming after me. He keeps sending me flowers and calling my dad.” So I had to blow off Robert De Niro. He said, “Maybe tomorrow night?” I go, “Yeah, maybe.” And he called me the next day and about three or four more times, before he understood that it wasn’t going to happen.

  CLIVE DAVIS, record executive: Whitney was so young and fresh and beautiful in “How Will I Know.” That video took her album to a different level. We’d established a good base at R&B radio with the first few singles, but “How Will I Know” established Whitney as a star.

  BRIAN GRANT: Women always looked good in my vids. That reputation followed me around. Some directors just didn’t put a lot of effort into it. Russell never got women, because he never spent any time making them look good. Also, I always operated the camera myself, because I felt it was crucial to make them feel safe and comfortable. There’s a close-up in Whitney’s “How Will I Know” video where she looks absolutely stunning. You become a still photographer for a short period of time, and it’s just you and the artist. It becomes very personal.

  MARTY CALLNER: I saw situations where one shot would make a star, like with Susanna Hoffs and “Walk Like an Egyptian.” That thing she did with her eyes made her a star.

  SUSANNA HOFFS, the Bangles: We used Gary Weis because we’d been huge fans of the Rutles movie he codirected. It was a two-day shoot in New York. You really felt like you had arrived when you had a two-day shoot. Part one was a live performance in some warehouse filled with contest winners from a radio station. The DP was using a long lens way back in the crowd. There was a close-up on me toward the end of the video, when I sing my section, but because the camera was so far away from me, I had no idea how close up it really was. Back then, when we performed live, I’d pick a friendly face in the middle of the crowd and then someone to my left and someone to my right, and I would sing to them, using them as focal points. That’s what I was doing in that part of the
video. I wasn’t aware it was such a tight shot. People always ask me, “Were you trying to do something with your eyes there? Was that a thing?”

  TONY WARD: If you’re a model and you’re working in music videos, you’re an extra—just cheap talent, a nobody. They moved you around like cattle and sometimes worked you twenty-four hours straight. It was quite murderous.

  MAK GILCHRIST, model: When you do music videos, you usually get pages and pages of production notes, detailing what emotions and feelings you should be conveying. With Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love,” there was a paragraph on a single sheet that said, “Look like showroom mannequins. Easy on the personality, girls, we’re selling sex here.”

  JULIA BOLINO, model: When I did “Addicted to Love,” I’d never heard of Robert Palmer. I was eighteen—I’d been modeling for two years—and I was more into Blondie and people like that.

  MAK GILCHRIST: I was twenty-one and had to be persuaded to do it. Music videos were something you did on the side from your modeling career. “Addicted to Love” was shot in a basement studio in London. I got paid a quarter of my normal day rate.

  JULIA BOLINO: When we got to the set, the director, Terence Donovan, told us each to pick an instrument. I happened to pick lead guitar. I’m glad I didn’t pick drums. Poor Kathy Davies, she didn’t get much screen time. Then we went into hair and makeup, which took quite a long time as you can imagine. The makeup was ladled on. I could barely talk because my lip gloss was so heavy.