I Want My MTV (44 page)

I played the gorilla. If there's a gorilla suit on set, I'm in it.

We had Kerry King from Slayer, who played the guitar solo. Rubin wanted Kerry to appear to be fifty feet tall, like David Fincher later did on the “Love Is Strong” video for the Rolling Stones. The Beasties weren't pleased about that, because then Kerry is exalted in the video and they were just the putzes. They were miffed. But I think they were missing the joke. See, the bloom was off the rose by that point. The good feeling that was on the set of “Fight for Your Right (to Party)” was not there on “No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn.” We got through it, but it was a tough set. I could feel the tension.

 

ADAM HOROVITZ:
Rick Rubin was into metal and classic rock. None of us were into that, and he was always pushing this metal thing on us. He had us wearing metal wigs and outfits, and that was supposed to be funny. I didn't know anybody who dressed like that. It just wasn't what we were into.

 

RIC MENELLO:
At one point, Rubin wanted me to get involved with a David Lee Roth video. His offer was “You work for free, I'll put you up at a nice hotel. You can eat great food and I'll give you a hooker.”

 

ADAM DUBIN:
I always give the Beastie Boys a lot of credit, because nobody in the record business, even people who knew them, would've given you two cents for their chances down the line. Everybody thought they were a one-hit wonder, certainly a one-album wonder. But they were smart guys.

 

FAB 5 FREDDY,
Yo! MTV Raps
host:
LL Cool J's “Going Back to Cali” is one of the best hip-hop videos. It was cinematic, and it felt like the song.

RIC MENELLO:
“Going Back to Cali” was supposed to look like a French New Wave film, 1960s art-house cinema. Not Truffaut, I hate Truffaut, more Claude Chabrol, Godard, Antonioni. Also a little Fellini—I watched
8½
and stole two shots from that. The video has a lot of stern, rigorous imagery, overheated.

 

RICK RUBIN:
It was meant to be like a European art film, almost like a James Bond film, as done by Antonioni. It shows that good taste can translate to the mainstream. You don't have to dumb down something good, if you expose it the right way.

My role on set was usually supporting Menello—or yelling at Menello, depending on what was going on.

 

RIC MENELLO:
I told LL Cool J, “This is not a video. This is a movie. You're a movie star.” Rick Rubin got upset about the shot where LL's hand goes over the girl's stomach, 'cause it was his girlfriend, Melissa Melendez. She was a porn actress. Very nice girl. Since I didn't drive, she drove me everywhere.

The theme was alienation and sterility. It was about hot people looking at each other and not seeing each other. The girls all like LL, but he rejects them. “I'm so bored”—that's the Antonioni influence. I shot two people up against a wall: LL and Martha Quinn, who I'd been good friends with at NYU. He looks at her, she looks away; then she looks at him and he doesn't look at her. Camera pans up the wall. That's a quote from an Antonioni movie called
The Passenger
, except they're in bed and it's Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider.

 

MARTHA QUINN:
Blink and you'll miss me. My boyfriend during most of my MTV years was the cinematographer for that video. You can barely see me, but it did give me a heavy amount of street cred.

 

RIC MENELLO:
The cinematographer was Adam Kimmel, who has since shot
Capote
and
New Jersey Drive.
He used to come visit Martha when she lived at the NYU dorm. I kept pushing Kimmel to make the first part of the video look sun-baked, and I told him to overexpose the opening shots. Kimmel later took as much credit as possible for the look and shots, which were mine. He got a blow job from some hot blonde who was an extra. She drove him to the transfer, so we could look at the footage, pulled over to the side of the road, and suddenly went down on him. He told me the whole story. This is typical. Cinematographers get all the ladies.

It turned out that one of the girls we signed to dance was underage. We'd done low-angle shots of them dancing on phone booths, which look great, and she was incredible. She was wearing a miniskirt, and she's like, “You can't see my panties, can you?” And I'm like, “No.” But actually, I could. Little polka-dot panties. Her mother threatened to sue, so we edited part of her out. Rubin was like, “Can you cut her completely out?” I said, “No, she's too good.”

 

 

 

 

VIDEO DIRECTORS WERE UNSUNG, UNSUPERVISED,
and probably underpaid. Most loved their jobs. A few were miserable, but continued nonetheless. There were no union regulations to dictate scheduling, so they could march a crew like Napoleon's army, advancing past bravery into foolishness. Their names were rarely mentioned: George Michael and Guns N' Roses thanked their directors when accepting Video Vanguard awards at the VMAs, but Madonna and David Byrne didn't. Michael Jackson thanked his fans, but not any of his directors.

David Fincher—the greatest video director of his era—grew up in Marin County, California, and lived two doors from
Star Wars
and
Indiana Jones
creator George Lucas, which made Fincher feel that Hollywood was nearly his neighbor. At nineteen, he began working at Lucas's visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic. “Then all of a sudden there's this thing called MTV,” he later said, “and I'm going, Fuck, I know how to do that.” Fincher worked on a grand scale (as he did later in his films
Seven
,
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
, and
The Social Network
) and gave his videos a European stylishness, as though he was always filming in the lobby of a boutique hotel, though he was also slyly funny in a way that anticipated his movies. In Paula Abdul's “Cold Hearted Snake,” he made a video about making a video—a computer plays a prerecorded track as Abdul auditions a routine for stuffy record-company geeks, one of whom looks alarmed when told the video will be “really, really
hot
.” “Yeah, but tastefully,” an underling quickly adds. “It's tastefully hot.” Fincher exploits seminaked dancers and close-ups of brassieres to his advantage, while making fun of an industry that's built around the exploitation of seminaked bodies and close-ups of brassieres. He made sexy and smart indistinguishable. He also shot Madonna crawling on her hands and knees, and drinking from a saucer of milk. But before Madonna, he had to work his way up from the bottom—which in this case, meant Rick Springfield.

 

SIMON FIELDS:
Video budgets started to blow up around '86. When MTV paid fees to the record companies, they started to spend more money. In the meantime, MTV got bigger, their distribution grew, they had more power. Everything got bigger and bigger.

 

JOHN DIAZ:
In 1985, a successful music-video director might earn somewhere between $100,000 to $125,000 in a year. Same for a top producer.

 

JEFF STEIN:
We did very well. The director got 10 percent of the budget, but I was also a profit participant in the production companies. There were signing bonuses and so forth.

 

CURT SMITH:
Most video directors are big and brash and larger that life. They need to control the set, so they tend to be loud, they scream at people, they can be abrasive and pushy. I guess that's how they get things done.

 

DAVID MALLET:
A director has to be slightly bossy if he's going to direct anything, doesn't he?

 

DANIEL KLEINMAN:
I'd gone to art school, not film school, so for me, music videos were a fantastic training ground. The music itself was secondary to me. Which is a bit selfish, but I saw videos as a means to an end, which was learning the craft and experimenting with different film techniques. I tried my best to make them as brilliant as I could, but whether they helped make a record a hit was a matter of indifference to me.

 

AIMEE MANN:
You get assigned a director, and you try to have some say, and then you're steamrolled. It's not fun. It doesn't feel good. It's awkward. You know it's not going to look great. It's also way out of your hands, and everybody's putting pressure on you to go along with it, and it could not be less comfortable, and could not be less of an artistic representation of you.

BOB GIRALDI:
Directors get uptight, no question about it. I yelled at the talent, the crew. I remember shooting Jermaine Jackson's “When the Rain Begins to Fall” in Italy. The Italians said to each other, in Italian, “If that director yells at me one more time, I'm going to kill him.”

 

MEIERT AVIS:
It was very competitive between directors. You'd be bidding on a job, and you'd know exactly who you were bidding against. I've never seen directors palling around with other directors. It's war.

 

MATT MAHURIN, director:
You'd get a call for a video and they'd say, “Oh, you're up against a couple other directors.” You'd send in a treatment, then get a phone call: “The drummer's girlfriend didn't like it.” Or, “Oh, we never called you? We shot that video two weeks ago.” As a director, you had all this responsibility, but zero power.

 

SOPHIE MULLER, director:
To this day, I have never gotten a job by writing a treatment. The only time I get a job is if I talk to an artist, and they say, “I wanna work with her.” I don't like the competition. It's horrible, and there's no other situation like it, where you work to come up with an idea and don't get paid for it. The treatment is the hard work, the filmmaking is the easy bit. No matter what your body of work is like, you have to compete for the job. That doesn't seem right to me. Even now I'm like,
How did this happen? Where's our union?

 

TIM NEWMAN:
You couldn't get any closer to being in a band than being a music-video director. You're sort of the extra member of the band. It was a wonderful job.

 

JEFF STEIN:
At that time, I don't think there was a better occupation on this planet than being a music-video director. The only thing better would be being a rock star.

 

ANDY MORAHAN:
A director typically earned 10 percent of the video budget. But when a video grew from three or four days into seven days, the director was the only person who didn't get paid extra.

 

ANTON CORBIJN:
I never took 10 percent. I had a fee. Whether that's 20 percent of the budget or 5 percent of the budget, it was a set fee.

DOC McGHEE:
There's a saying: “You never get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.” I believe a video director was more influential to the success of an artist than the producer of the record. And it's standard to pay royalties to producers, but not to video directors. If I had been repping Wayne Isham and about five other ones, they would've gotten royalties. Record companies are as cheap as they get, and artists are maybe even cheaper. And managers are the cheapest of the three, so just by the food chain, directors got fucked.

 

JEFF STEIN:
Music videos were the bastard offspring of the hideous music business and the heinous movie business. And music-video directors were the crazed midwives that brought that mutant howling into the world.

 

TAMRA DAVIS, director:
It's embarrassing, how many videos I made—somewhere between 100 and 150. Sometimes I'll see videos I did, and it's like guys I slept with that I have no memory of.

 

JEAN-BAPTISTE MONDINO:
I used to spend two weeks with a musician, to come up with an idea for the video. And little by little, videos became like an industry, so they were calling you, “Could you do a video next week with this artist from London who's coming to LA?” I was saying, “But what am I going to do with somebody I don't know?” When I was making three videos, the other guys were making fifteen. Everybody was in a hurry.

 

PAULA GREIF, director:
Cutting Crew, I don't even remember that video. That's so awful, but I heard their song “(I Just) Died in Your Arms” on the radio the other day and thought,
I think I did the video for this.
Couldn't even remember what it looked like.

 

MEIERT AVIS:
Making videos is a horrible pastime. I'm serious. It's about the most difficult thing you can possibly do. It's grueling. It's physically hard. You've got to make four minutes of material in a day's worth of shooting, which is a lot of productivity. The stress is high. Then you've got band issues to deal with, and record company issues. It's extremely unpleasant. Half the time you don't know what you're doing, but you have to pretend you do, because everybody has to believe there's a plan and an outcome in mind. You have to create that belief, even if you don't believe it yourself.

JEFF STEIN:
It was a great excuse not to have to work for a living. I had the world's greatest crew. There were a lot of beautiful girls. We traveled all over the world to exotic locales. Worked with influential people. And created a new form of entertainment that rocked the world.

 

LOL CREME:
The producers are the unsung heroes. Lunatics like me or Brian Grant would phone up and say, “I need four dwarves and a rhinoceros,” and no matter what you asked for, it would be there. The producers, these women—it was almost exclusively women—they were unbelievable.