I Want My MTV

by Craig Marks

  JOHN KALODNER: Cher was difficult to work with. So lazy and thoughtless. One of the biggest stars ever, and not a pleasure. When I approached her in 1987 to do a record, she said, “I don’t want to be a singer again.” I said, “I’ll pick the songs, I’ll pick the producers, all you have to do is sing.” I did everything for those records except sing them, and she never so much as gave me a thank-you. That was Cher. But “If I Could Turn Back Time”—the song and especially Marty Callner’s video—was incredible. It gave her career a whole new life.

  CHER, artist: John Kalodner really did believe in me when no one else did. David Geffen introduced us, and John told me he thought I should be making records, which I hadn’t done for many years. He was a fabulous record executive and gave me a lot of confidence. But about his comments: What is he, a fuckin’ ventriloquist?

  MARTY CALLNER: We were on the USS Missouri, making “If I Could Turn Back Time.” Cher asked me, “What should I wear?” I told her, “The last time I looked, you were Cher, so wear something outrageous.” Unbeknownst to me, she’d called her longtime costume designer Bob Mackie and had him design something special. Now we’re shooting the video, and my crew tells me, “The lights are ready, let’s do rehearsal.” Ever the dutiful director, I go to her Winnebago to escort her to the ship, and I open the door, and I’m in shock. She’s standing there in that fishnet body thong. I froze. I didn’t know what to say. And as I looked over my right shoulder as she was walking by me, I saw tattoos on her ass. And I said, “How clever. Tattoo underwear.”

  CHER: It was my design. Bob Mackie said, “Don’t tell anyone I designed that for you.” We shot for two or three days. I arrived in the night mist, in a coach and a big cape. I rode in a speedboat and had to climb a ladder in high heels, up the side of the ship, but they didn’t use that scene. The Japanese surrendered to the United States on that ship. All the sailors called me “ma’am.”

  MARTY CALLNER: So we’re rehearsing, and she’s straddling the guns, and all the commanding officers are whooping it up. We’re getting as phallic as you can possibly get. Our liaison from the USS Missouri was a guy named Steve Honda. The take ends, he says, “Marty, can I talk to you a second?” He says, “She can’t wear that. If she wears that, I’ll end up in the Aleutian Islands.” He was really adamant about it. So finally I said, “Look I’ll make you a deal. You go tell her she can’t wear it.” And he did not have the nuts to tell her.

  JOHN CANNELLI: I had a very good relationship with Cher. She used to pick me up at the office and we’d have ice cream at Serendipity. My dad passed away during the time I was dealing with her, and she talked to my mom on the phone and consoled her. On one of her tours, she actually sent a limousine for my mom to bring her to a concert.

  MARTY CALLNER: Initially, Abbey Konowitch and John Cannelli were over the moon about the video. When MTV aired it, they got tons of flack from the navy. Then they decided they would only play the video after 9 P.M. I took the position that the video with Cher on the battleship was good for the navy’s recruiting. They couldn’t really argue the point.

  ABBEY KONOWITCH: “If I Could Turn Back Time” was hugely controversial. Tom Freston and I decided to play the video only after 9 P.M. Tom said, “We need to have a public statement as to why we’re not playing this until after nine.” I said, “Why don’t we say, ‘Too much butt for the morning’ or ‘No butts about it.’” He goes, “You’re onto something. We can’t take ourselves too seriously. We’re just a music network.” We were under the gun, and I said the Yiddish word tush. And Tom, who was the furthest thing from a Jewish guy, says, “That’s it! That’s our position.” So when I went on Larry King to discuss it, I said, “She’s a big star, but it was just too much tush for nine o’clock in the morning.”

  CHER: It worked out well, because the controversy—which I didn’t plan—made more people want to see the video.

  JOHN KALODNER: Nobody was ever allowed to make a video on a United States naval ship after “Turn Back Time.”

  MARTY CALLNER: People always ask me, why’d you make the Cher video on a ship? I was looking for an interesting location. It was the same reason Bon Jovi went to the top of a mountain for “Blaze of Glory.” Because it was there.

  WAYNE ISHAM: People always want to know how much Bon Jovi’s “Blaze of Glory” cost. I’ll be honest, I don’t know. We came up with the idea of creating the last drive-in on earth, on top of a butte in Utah. So we helicoptered in our own drive-in screen, all the old cars and trucks you see, everything. Just getting all that shit up there was expensive. We even brought blenders with us, for margaritas. There’s a shot of Jon sitting and playing his guitar on the edge of a cliff. Doc McGhee was freaking out, going, “You’re gonna kill my artist.”

  DOC McGHEE: There was a thunderstorm on top of this butte, and Wayne tells Johnny to hang over a rock while he’s playing guitar. If he falls fifteen hundred feet and dies, then I lose my commission and have to walk home! So what do you think I’m going to say? Johnny’s hair was standing on end because of the electricity. He looked like Buckwheat.

  WAYNE ISHAM: If you look closely, underneath the ledge right next to Jon is a bottle of Cuervo. We spent the night on the cliffs of Moab in sleeping bags, woke up at sunrise, rode motorcycles, shot the video, made margaritas. That’s shit that you did. That was the life.

  CURT MARVIS: The Rolling Stones wanted to do a video to promote their Steel Wheels tour, and they brought on Peter Mensch and Cliff Burnstein as consultants. That’s how our relationship with the Stones started. Wayne Isham and I were in DC one week, getting ready for a video, and we got pretty wasted. We staggered back to our hotel at one-thirty in the morning and Peter said, “Keith wants to talk to you.” We walked into the hotel bar, which was closed to everyone but us.

  Keith starts, “You fucking bastards!” He found out we were charging $300,000 for this video, and he’s convinced that it’s way too much money. He said, “I’m gonna slit your throat, sonny!” and he took out his knife and brought it across his throat. Peter Mensch said, “Does anybody need a drink?” Keith said, “I want two Long Island iced teas.” Mensch goes, “Two? Why do you want two?” Keith said, “Get me two fucking Long Island iced teas!”

  So Mensch brings over the drinks, and Keith keeps yelling at us. He’s screaming, waving his arms around, and while he’s swinging his arms he hits one of the Long Island iced teas and knocks it to the floor. The glass shatters. He looks at Mensch and goes, “Now you know why I ordered two!”

  TONY DiSANTO: When Guns N’ Roses started getting some fame, we shot interviews with them at the Chelsea Hotel, and their energy was so I-don’t-give-a-fuck, so punk rock. When Use Your Illusion came out, the next set of interviews was with Kurt Loder in Axl’s beautiful LA backyard. His hair was blow-dried, his teeth were all perfect, and he looked like an angel. I was like, “Wow, they’ve sure changed.”

  ANDY MORAHAN: Two of Axl’s favorite artists were Elton John and George Michael. Which was bizarre. As a matter of fact, he hated most other rock bands. If you spoke to him about Van Halen or Nirvana, he’d be spitting feathers, but when it came time to talk about Elton John, he’d go all misty-eyed. One of his favorite videos was George Michael’s “Father Figure,” and he wanted to make some big, epic narrative-driven videos.

  DOUG GOLDSTEIN: After Axl fired Alan Niven, I walked into Eddie Rosenblatt’s office and said, “We’re gonna make an expensive video.” And he said, “Doug, we’re out of the video business with you. You pay for your own videos. We’ll front the money, but we’ll take it back, and then you guys own the rights to your videos.”

  ALAN NIVEN: The videos that were done under my watch totaled something like $500,000, of which half went into “Paradise City.” I was told it cost $1.25 million to shoot “November Rain,” which to me is a preposterous waste of money.

  STEVEN ADLER: I think that video would have been better if I was a part of it. But I’d been kicked out of the band for partying—and the biggest irony is
, I was partying with the guys in the band.

  DOUG GOLDSTEIN: The videos caused tension in the band. Axl would just not show up for a day of shooting, so it doubled the cost. He did that on every video. Everybody else in the band was upset about it, and Slash was the only one who spoke up.

  DAVE GROHL: When a musician starts to use the phrase “mini-movie” to describe a video, it’s time to quit. Some videos I enjoyed just because they were train wrecks, like “November Rain.” I looked forward to seeing that on TV because I didn’t need those nine minutes of my life anymore.

  DANIEL PEARL: Axl was as unreliable a person as you could possibly imagine, but at the same time he was a good benefactor. I did three big videos with Andy Morahan for Guns N’ Roses—“Don’t Cry,” “November Rain,” and “Estranged”—and each one cost over a million dollars, God bless ’em.

  DOUG GOLDSTEIN: Oh fuck. To be honest, I blank on the Use Your Illusion videos, because they all seem like the same video to me.

  ANDY MORAHAN: Axl had written a trilogy of videos based around a short story by his friend Del James. We made “Don’t Cry” the first video. Axl was undergoing regressive therapy, he’d gone through bouts of severe depression and wanting to blow his brains out, and his personal madness became part of the video’s story line. Izzy Stradlin had left the band, and the cracks were starting to appear—the trilogy was Axl’s way of saying, “I’m gonna take control here.” Before we started those videos, Use Your Illusion was up to about 8 or 9 million in sales. After those videos, it went up to 22 million.

  If I wanted to do a daylight scene, I’d have to keep the band up all night and shoot it first thing in the morning. They were like vampires. I had a day set aside for the graveyard scene. I had half of the LA County cemetery closed down, and a cortege and two hundred extras and four rain machines, and Axl didn’t show up until it was dark. That’s why the graveyard scene is at night.

  PETER BARON: Andy Morahan shot part of “Don’t Cry” on the top of the Trans-america Center in downtown LA. We had two helicopters. It was mayhem. We got in a lot of trouble from the city because we completely stalled traffic on a Friday night.

  ANDY MORAHAN: Stephanie Seymour and Axl were lovey-dovey on the first video. Stephanie had no shame in cuddling up to Axl in front of me and saying, “Hey Axl, why don’t you work with some really big Hollywood directors?” Thanks, Steph. Love you, too.

  PETER BARON: When the “Don’t Cry” shoot finally ended, I got on the freight elevator by myself to go down to my car. I press the button, and just as the doors start to close, who walks in but Axl and Stephanie Seymour. And they proceed to make out. I’m not going to say he was dry humping her, but he was dry humping her. He just did not care that there was someone else in the elevator. He was a rock star, and he was having a rock star moment.

  DOUG GOLDSTEIN: Their relationship was tumultuous. Axl loved that girl to death. I’d say Stephanie was the unstable one in that relationship. The first time I met her, she opened the door naked. She goes, “No, you can come in.” Sorry, gotta go.

  ANDY MORAHAN: We couldn’t figure out what we were going to do with Slash in “November Rain.” I said to him, “Wouldn’t it be cool if you walked out of the church into a completely different environment?” And he said, “Yeah, let’s go to New Mexico and do that.” So we did. Weirdly enough, Anton Corbijn was staying in the same hotel as us in New Mexico. I’d known Anton for a while, and I invited him to come to the shoot. After about a half hour he said to me, “Andy, this is incredible. You’ve got five cameras, cranes, helicopter, this big crew. Is this the whole video?” I said, “No, it’s about twenty-seven seconds of it.”

  I’ve had calls from Sofia Coppola’s people over the years asking to buy the original storyboards from “November Rain.”

  All three songs—“Don’t Cry,” “November Rain,” and “Estranged”—are overblown power ballads. And all three videos are crazy. It was like Spinal Tap with money. I still don’t know to this day why, in “November Rain,” you see only half of Stephanie Seymour’s face in the coffin.

  DOUG GOLDSTEIN: Axl jumping off the oil tanker in “Estranged,” that’s got to be the most extravagant thing I’ve ever seen.

  BILL BENNETT, record executive: I got a notice at work one day that Sunset Boulevard was going to be closed all afternoon for a video, and thought, Who the fuck would close down Sunset? Guns N’ Roses, that’s who, for “Estranged.” Their videos were late, bloated, and expensive. The band was so big, they did whatever they wanted.

  ANDY MORAHAN: By the time we got to “Estranged,” Axl had split up with Stephanie Seymour, and he said, “I never want a girl in a video again. I’d rather go out with a dolphin.” Which is why I put dolphins all over the video. I’ve been asked by students about the metaphorical imagery in those videos, and I’m like, “Fuck if I know.”

  Chapter 41

  “I WANT TO HAVE A NICKNAME”

  HOW MTV HELPED MICHAEL JACKSON ELECT HIMSELF “THE KING OF POP”

  “HERE’S A A UNIQUE ONE,” MTV’S MATT FARBER wrote in a November 1991 memo to staff. “We need to refer to Michael Jackson as ‘The King of Pop’ on-air.” This was not MTV’s idea—it was Jackson’s. That week, he was debuting an eleven-minute video, “Black or White” (his first with John Landis since “Thriller”), and any network that wanted the extravaganza had to agree to call him by the nickname he’d chosen. MTV was willing to do whatever was required to keep him happy. “I know this is a bizarre request,” Farber wrote apologetically, as he outlined a system for pleasing Jackson: Each VJ had to refer to him on-air as “The King of Pop” at least twice per week. Farber added one more instruction: “Please be sure to note which segments you do this in case we need to send dubs to the King of Pop himself.” Jackson had made MTV huge, and now he was monitoring the channel, to make sure they expressed their gratitude toward him.

  JONI SIGHVATSSON: Propaganda had a contract to produce all of Michael Jackson’s videos for his Dangerous album. In retrospect, the spiraling budgets weren’t healthy, and some of the work wasn’t great. I met Michael at Sound Recorder Studios in Hollywood. It was a Thursday. The meeting was supposed to start at 6 P.M., but Michael—and Bubbles, his chimp—didn’t arrive until eight. We started the meeting, and at eight-thirty Michael suddenly says, “Oh, we have to stop. The Simpsons is coming on.” We stopped the meeting and watched The Simpsons.

  JOHN LANDIS: Propaganda had a deal to make the videos for Dangerous. I got a call from Propaganda, asking if I would do “Black or White.” I said, “Listen, Michael owes me a lot of money from “Thriller,” so I don’t think so.” Michael called, and he kept coming over to my house, pleading, “John, come on, come on.” So finally I said, “All right. But I want to be paid weekly.” I got a lot of money to direct that, because the label and Propaganda were having terrible trouble with Michael—he wasn’t cooperating and he kept wanting to spend more and more money. I thought I’d be working on it for a month. It ended up being three months. By the time of “Black or White,” Michael was not entirely on this earth. My job on “Black or White” became clear: Try to make a video where Michael did not look too crazy.

  Michael kept wanting to add more and more scenes. He’d tell the production crew to get a Louma Crane and a Chapman Crane and a Steadicam, all this equipment. I would say, “Wait, what’s going on?” And they’d say, “Well, Michael wanted . . .” So I go to Michael and say, “Michael, why do you want all this?” “Well, maybe we’ll get an idea.” I said, “You’re spending several hundred thousand dollars, in case we get inspired?” I don’t know the exact total, but that video must have cost millions. There was one day when we had a lot of dancers on the set, and Michael didn’t show up. We’re all wondering, “Where the fuck is he?” Turned out he had gone to Toys “R” Us with Macaulay Culkin and they’d spent something like $50,000. It’s hard to spend $50,000 at Toys “R” Us.

  I thought for “Black or White” it would be neat to see human faces morphing into
one another. I went to a friend, John Whitney, Jr. His dad, John Whitney, Sr., was a fine artist who was basically the father of what we call CGI—computer generated imagery—and John Jr. owned the company that did graphics for the first computer-generated movie, The Last Starfighter. John sent me to a company called PDI, and PDI did it. It was very expensive—it cost $100,000 and took a month. I shot the live action pieces and then PDI morphed them. At the time, it was totally mind-blowing, because it was so seamless. Now, of course, you can buy the software at Best Buy and do it on your laptop.

  Ronald and Nancy Reagan came by to watch Michael make “Black or White.” We were on a stage in Hollywood, and Michael says, “John, would you like to have lunch with President and Mrs. Reagan today?” I said, “Absolutely not,” and went out for lunch to make sure we didn’t see them.