I Want My MTV (46 page)

 

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 on ‘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.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

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 woman 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.