I Want My MTV (29 page)

FREDDY DeMANN:
I was blessed to manage two of the biggest and best artists of the twentieth century—Michael Jackson and Madonna. The camera was kind to both of them, and they loved the camera. Did MTV make them or did they make MTV? I think it was a happy combination. I owned the '80s.

 

CLIFF BURNSTEIN:
Things started to turn around in 1983. A more positive spirit enveloped the country, and that was reflected on MTV. The videos were flamboyant, over-the-top, happy, bright, colorful. 1983 was the year of
Pyromania
, Michael Jackson, the Police. These were all ten-million sellers. I think 1983 was really the beginning of the '80s, in many ways.

 

JOHN LANDIS:
“Thriller” made MTV. “Thriller” created the home video business. “Thriller” created so many things.

 

LEE MASTERS:
Bob Pittman came from a radio background, and radio formats tend to be very specific. One thing we learned, one thing Michael Jackson did teach us, was that MTV is not a radio station.

 

DONNA SUMMER:
Michael tended to be outside the box, and he was not going to allow anybody to constrain his creativity. He saw himself as more of an actor, in some ways. A musician, but also an actor. I mean, until today I don't think I've seen any more intensely passionate, well-directed videos.

 

USHER, artist:
His dancing was his magic. He was able to comingle current movement with a classic understanding of choreography. Michael Jackson made three different dance styles—jazz, hip-hop, and show—all work together. He wanted to know what the kids were doing in the street, but he also kept it theatrical, out of respect for dance tradition.

 

TONI BASIL:
When he danced, he looked like he walked on water. He took Fred Astaire footage and steps taught to him by street dancers like Casper and Cooley from
Soul Train
, who taught him the moonwalk, and made it into his own quilt. He's the greatest dancing pop star ever. Only Tina Turner and James Brown came close to the rank of equals.

 

MC HAMMER, artist:
“Thriller” blew the roof off. When Michael is dancing in the middle of the street, that was
West Side Story
, and then we had a horror film going on, too. That went beyond the song and gave a bigger vision than what we would have seen in our heads.

LIONEL RICHIE, artist:
When MTV started, it wanted nothing to do with black artists. They told me that my music didn't fit. I admit I was a little offended. MTV was such an innovative company, and I thought,
Wow, are we gonna miss out on
this? But then I gave them “All Night Long,” after Michael had broken down the door. And from then on I was on MTV.

 

JOHN TAYLOR:
For our first two albums, Duran Duran shot on video and worked very cheaply. After Michael Jackson, when American artists got a sense of the potency of a well-thought-out video, they started shooting on film, and everything became much more expensive.

 

RICK SPRINGFIELD:
Michael Jackson had taken hold of the video form and shown everyone what you're supposed to do with it. We all thought,
Oh, okay—dancing
. Thank God I only danced in that one video, “Affair of the Heart,” because it was abhorrent.

 

BRYAN ADAMS:
Michael's videos stand up today. The guitar bands suffered because they weren't innovative—just, you know, standing on a rock cliff with a wind machine blowing your hair.

 

JANET JACKSON:
My brother was always trying to do something different, fresh, exciting. Something that had never been done before. George Michael did a wonderful job at that. Madonna did a wonderful job, too. My brother, though, did it the best.

 

 

 

 

MICHAEL JACKSON WAS THE FIRST VIDEO ARTIST;
Madonna was second, and she's the one who created the idea that video could be a forum for provocation and exhibitionism. Who else could stir the Vatican to condemn a music video? After a few low-budget, undistinguished clips, she found her footing, in part by teaming with director Mary Lambert. Madonna filled the frames of her videos with images of burning crosses, interracial kisses, gay kisses, lavish jewels, crucifixes, wedding dresses, S&M toys, Keith Carradine, Danny Aiello, zoo animals, cleavage shot from above, and cleavage shot from below. Her appearance at the first Video Music Awards in 1984 was the award-show equivalent of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address—the ideal against which all successors would be measured. She treated MTV as her canvas and, later, her bitch.

But at first, her interdependence with MTV (“You believed in me when I was chubby,” she said in a filmed tribute to their tenth anniversary) was a source of contempt within the rock establishment. She, like MTV, was viewed as a passing fancy. “Madonna will be out of the business in six months,” a
Billboard
editor pronounced, because “her image has completely overshadowed her music.” This quote is the “Dewey Defeats Truman” of music video, disproven by Madonna's seventeen consecutive top ten hits. She did this not by making her image secondary to her music, but by combining them until they were inseparable.

 

LES GARLAND:
Freddy DeMann had managed the Jacksons and Michael, but he got fired by the dad, Joe Jackson. So Freddy wasn't really doing anything for about a year, if not more, and he was a good friend of mine. One afternoon he phoned and said, “Gar-Man? I got one that's gonna be huge. She's gonna be bigger than Michael.” I go, “Dude, you've got big balls. Big balls, Freddy.” “Trust me, Gar. Her name is Madonna.” He showed up a few days later and played her video, “Burning Up.” It sounded very disco to me. But all right, we'll put it on.

 

SUSAN SILVERMAN:
Madonna came into our office on a skateboard, all sweaty and dirty. I was like, “Shit, what's with this girl?” She went to see Bob Regehr—a big product manager at Warner Bros.—and left a note on his bulletin board that said, “Sorry I missed you, because I'm gonna be a star.”

 

BOB GIRALDI:
Freddy DeMann brought Madonna to my studio, and we talked about me maybe directing her first single. I said to Freddy, “I'm not sure she's going to amount to anything.”
Good job, Giraldi
.

 

STEVE BARRON:
I didn't like “Burning Up.” Not at all. But my partner, Simon Fields, said, “We've got to do this because it's Warner Bros. and they think she's gonna be massive.” I went to New York to meet her, begrudgingly, and showed up at an address in SoHo, which turned out to be a squat, basically. Madonna was scantily clad, working out to a massive disco track. She was charismatic. She kept putting her head down on the table and talking to me, very flirtatious, and that gave me the idea for the scene in “Burning Up” where her face is on the road, and the camera's really low and close.

 

JEFF AYEROFF:
I introduced Madonna to Steve Barron. I don't think that's one of his best videos.

 

GALE SPARROW:
“Burning Up” was too disco for MTV. Simon Fields arranged a dinner for us to meet her. Madonna wore a black
schmatte
, and it had green on it—I thought it was mold. She had on purple lipstick and was very sweet. A few days later, she called the office and said, “Are you gonna play my video?” I said, “It's not quite our format, but we'll play it.” So we played it at three in the morning.

 

STEVE BARRON:
Madonna had a fling with my partner Simon. Before we shot the video, she said, “Come on, we gotta go to Trashy Lingerie”—which was across from Simon's flat—“and get some stuff for me to wear.” So she tried on lingerie for us. “Do you like it?,” that kind of thing. A week after the video, I rang up Simon at his flat. He had an answer machine, and the message said, very English: “This is Simon Fields, leave a message after the beep.” But this one day, the voice on the machine said, “Hi, this is Simon's phone”—it was Madonna's voice—“if you're a guy, leave a message. If you're a girl,
fuck off
.”

 

SIMON FIELDS:
I had gone to London for the weekend, and I told Madonna she could stay in my apartment while I was gone. She changed my outgoing phone message to something crazy, like, “If you're a girl and looking for Simon, you can go eat pigeons on the roof.”

 

DANIEL KLEINMAN, director:
Simon Fields and I used to share a house together. Simon has an edge of wheeler-dealer about him, but he's also the most charming man in the world, which is quite a good quality for a producer. I had the looks and no charm, and he had the charm and no looks. I thought he had a face like the back of a bus. I mean, how he got Janice Dickinson into bed, I do not know. That was the end of our sharing a house together.

 

STEPHEN R. JOHNSON, director:
I used to say, “Simon Fields is a snake. But I want him to be
my
snake.” When I arrived at Limelight, I was made aware by Simon that he had slept with Madonna. Then I bumped into two more guys who said they'd slept with Madonna. One was her mixer, I think, and one was a record executive. At first I thought she was just anther floozy trying to fuck her way to the top. But I sat back and watched as she played them like a fiddle, and I realized she was a genius. She was using what she had and was getting way more out of those guys than a piece of tail.

 

SHARON ORECK:
When I got into the video business, I didn't actually know what a video was. I hadn't seen MTV because I was too poor to afford cable. I went to film school, then worked in the independent film industry, which prior to music videos was the only place you could get experience if you weren't in the union. It was all karate movies and horror films. Then in 1983, I produced a short film that got nominated for an Academy Award.

I kept getting phone calls from a friend of mine, a camerawoman who was working on a video called “Borderline” for some chick named Madonna. She kept calling with questions like “Where do you get a generator?” “How does film flashing work?” “What do you do when you don't have lights?” Basic film questions. I said, “What are you doing?” And she said, “I'm doing this thing called a video for Madonna.” And I was like, “Don't you have a producer? Don't you have someone who gets the stuff for you?” And she's like, “We do, but he doesn't know what to do.” So I said, “Well, I'll help you this time, but next time you should hire me, and I'll produce it.”

 

TONY WARD, actor:
Since I was a kid, when I first saw “Borderline,” I was really obsessed with Madonna. I was like, “That's my lady and I'm gonna be with her someday.” I knew it. But I wasn't obsessed with her music. I was into black music, and then Oingo Boingo.

 

MARY LAMBERT, director:
I studied film and painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late '70s. Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz of Talking Heads were two of my closest friends at RISD. After college, I moved to LA and got a job in the fledgling special effects business. I was on the fringes of the film industry, directing special effects commercials for washing machines, going to punk clubs, and making weird films. And then, in like, '82, I saw a music video: Rickie Lee Jones's “Chuck E.'s in Love.” I thought,
Wow, this is kind of like my films. I should do music videos
. I had no concept of the industry, actually. I thought I was going to be an artist and make short abstract films. I was really stupid.

I asked Tina and Chris if I could do a music video for them, which was “As Above, So Below,” for their other band, the Tom Tom Club. When I took it to Warner Bros. to show Jeff Ayeroff, he said, “This is great, but it's useless, because we're not promoting the album anymore.” But he did give me a job directing a video for a new artist named Madonna. She'd released a couple of disco-pop singles, and Jeff wanted to position her with a little more integrity and depth. He gave me the song “Borderline” and bought me a plane ticket to New York to go meet her. I had no idea what she even looked like. When I heard her music, I thought she was black.

First I had to track her down—this was before cell phones—and she wasn't easy to find. She was living in a bare-bones apartment on the Upper East Side. It didn't look like anyone lived there, to tell you the truth. There wasn't any furniture. But we hit it off. We bonded on the level of just being girls. I came away thinking that she was a piece of work, and that this was going to be fun. She had four or five different boyfriends at the time. One of them was a record producer, Jellybean Benitez, but he was really, really jealous of everybody. Of every
thing
. He was the prototype for Sean Penn. He was convinced that she was seeing other guys and that he wasn't going to be able to control her. And he was completely right, of course, on both accounts.

We talked for a couple of days about “Borderline.” She was really into Hispanic boys, and she wanted the video to be about having an affair with a cute Hispanic boy who was part of the street scene. She wanted to be involved in casting the cute Hispanic boy. She was going to be in LA, so we decided to make it into a real LA video. I knew the downtown LA area really well, because there were a lot of artist bars there.

There was no formula. We were
inventing
it as we went along. When I screened “Borderline” for Madonna's manager, Freddy DeMann, he was hysterical that I had combined black-and-white footage with color footage. Nobody had done that before. He made me screen it for all the secretaries in his office and see how they reacted, because he felt I had crossed a line that shouldn't be crossed.