I Want My MTV (76 page)

 

JOEL GALLEN:
I produced MTV's tenth anniversary special for ABC. We had all the biggest stars participating from different locations: Madonna, George Michael, Aerosmith, R.E.M., and celebrities doing the introductions: Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise, Cher. Madonna didn't want to perform, she wanted to do a monologue. Typical Madonna. And Michael Jackson closed the show. He did two songs at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica: “Black or White,” with Slash, and “Will You Be There.” After that, we had twenty-four hours to edit Michael's performance. That was it. And Michael came into the edit room and sat with me for all twenty-four hours. There was a moment where he wanted a certain edit, and I said, “Michael, if we do it that way, your mic will be in your right hand in the first shot and then in your left hand the next.” And he said, “But the children will think it's magic.”

LARRY STESSEL:
Michael called me one day and said, “I want to have a nickname, like ‘The Boss' or ‘The King.'” I said, “Well, Bruce Springsteen is ‘The Boss,' and Elvis Presley is ‘The King.' You can't be the King because you'll never live it down. The press will rip you apart.” But Michael would not let this go.

He hired his own personal publicist, Bob Jones. And one day, Bob issued a press release announcing that Michael Jackson was the King of Pop. Michael went rogue on us. And sure enough, he got slammed. Everyone laughed.

 

STEVE ISAACS:
The VJs got a memo that instructed us to refer to Michael Jackson as the King of Pop. There was a quota—we had to do it at least twice a week for two weeks. But what I love is, that memo came out in a
Rolling Stone
article soon after. And who used to be a writer at
Rolling Stone
? Kurt Loder. From what I understand, he blew the whistle on that memo and gave the story to
Rolling Stone
.

 

ADAM CURRY:
We were doing a Michael Jackson Weekend. We taped it on Thursday, and that night I got a call that we had to rerecord all the segments, because we didn't refer to Michael as the King of Pop.

 

KEVIN SEAL:
I was genuinely appalled when we were directed to always refer to Michael Jackson on-air as the King of Pop. It didn't seem effective. If you tell everybody they have to love this guy, why would they love him?

 

 

 

MORE AND MORE, MTV GREW TO LOOK LIKE
CLUB
MTV
. Metal, rap, and alternative rock had individual shows, tucked away late at night. For the other twenty-two hours of the day, MTV played the hits, especially videos that incorporated old-Hollywood conventions, like dancing and glamour. MC Hammer replaced Run-DMC. Vanilla Ice replaced Beastie Boys. Dance routines gave video directors another way to display body parts. Academics had previously taken interest in the medium, and now that interest bloomed—with MTV in an exhibitionist stage, scholars heatedly debated video's relationship to materialism and female objectification, leading to articles like “Sex as a Weapon: Feminist Rock Music Videos” and “Temporary Insanity: Fun, Games, and Transformational Ritual in American Music Video.” As a prelude to the debut of
Total Request Live
in the late '90s, the Top 40 was aimed right at the hearts of young girls.

 

DOMINIC SENA:
When I started working with Janet Jackson, she was in Michael's shadow and was looking to break out. She was still living at her parents' house, and Michael's stuff was everywhere: glass cases filled with memorabilia, gold records, all that. We talked for a while, and she took me out to this small house in the backyard that had been built for Michael. Inside was a candy store, a garage-size structure that was filled with aisles of candy. She said, “Help yourself.”

 

JANET JACKSON:
I knew who I wanted to direct “Rhythm Nation,” that was simple: Dominic Sena. After working with him on “Let's Wait Awhile,” I absolutely fell in love with him. He would get so excited and so expressive with his hands— I can see him right now—and he'd put his hair behind his ear with his finger. Dominic understood story, and he could put onscreen, from front to back, the whole picture you had in your head. The foggy, smoky street and the dark, black-and-white tone, that was all intentional. When you've done a lot of videos, it can be difficult to keep it fresh and new. You have to try something you've never done, in fear of looking like something you've already created.

 

DOMINIC SENA:
I'd done a couple of videos for Janet—“Let's Wait Awhile” and “The Pleasure Principle”—before
Rhythm Nation
. We'd gotten along really well and they got a lot of airplay, and then Janet and her boyfriend Rene Elizondo wanted to do a short movie. We incorporated three or four songs into a thirty-minute film. It was a big deal at the time; they spent something like $1.7 million on this film to promote
Rhythm Nation
.

We shot “Rhythm Nation” at this old electrical plant in Pasadena. I had found a wonderful setting in the bowels of the basement, with all these pipes and steam. So we moved the cameras down there, and the crew was getting ready when somebody said, “Listen, the dancers don't want to dance down here.” I said, “Jesus Christ, what do you mean? We can't afford to lose three or four hours of shooting.” He said, “There's asbestos everywhere.” I went downstairs and the whole crew was wearing white gas masks. The signs were so corroded and dusty that at first nobody had bothered to clean them off. But they said, WARNING: ASBESTOS.

 

JANET JACKSON:
A lot of times, I would see a commercial and wonder,
Who directed that?
I saw a commercial Peter Smillie had done, and it had a whimsical feel. I loved the tones and the cinematography, how it was edited. Peter had never done a video before, and I think he was a little nervous. He did “Escapade,” which has a mischievous feel to it. A lot of that had to do with it taking place at night. The hours were very long, but you're not thinking about that when you're a kid.

“Alright” pays homage to a lot of the great stars from the old musical era, the days of bright yellow zoot suits. I wanted Gene Kelly to be in the video, and he told me, “Janet, I just don't dance anymore. I'm too old.” But we had Cyd Charisse, the Nicholas Brothers, and Cab Calloway. Julien Temple, who directed, loved color, and “Alright” is very vibrant. He loved to make the camera move and travel. We were transporting you to a completely different place and time.

 

DOMINIC SENA:
After I'd done the
Rhythm Nation
videos, I got a call from Pia Zadora's people. Pia was this very sweet C-list actress who married an extremely wealthy older man, Meshulam Riklis. She was pursuing a music career, and they asked me to shoot a video for a song called “Heartbeat of Love.” I thought,
Thanks, but no thanks
. Then they said, “She'll pay any price.” So I figured I could make a down payment on a house,
and
try out film techniques I'd been wanting to learn. I wrote the biggest, most expensive video I could dream up, and the concept included every possible thing I wanted to do: I used a snorkel camera in one scene. It was an $800,000 video, and I don't think it ever got a single play on MTV or VH1. The husband was a nice guy, but he got visibly upset when he turned up at the shoot and saw hunky shirtless male dancers groping her. We had to back off some of the more sexy stuff until he left.

 

JANET JACKSON:
I was so used to being a tomboy, covered from head to toe, and I told Herb Ritts I wanted to do something different for the last video from
Rhythm Nation,
“Love Will Never Do.” I said, “I want to even wear a dress for this one.” And he said, “Just wear some jeans and a little top. And maybe a blond wig.” I was comfortable with the jeans, but with the top half, I never wore something so tiny in my life. And I didn't have on a bra.

 

CHRIS ISAAK:
Herb Ritts called and said, “We can try to go for a big name for the ‘Wicked Game' video, or if you don't mind I would like to use this girl, Helena Christensen.” I'll put it this way: I was not unaware that she was a good-lookin' woman. She was cordial, but we were making a video. People say, “Oh, you guys were really making love on the beach.” It's a nice fantasy. A lot of the reason we held on to each other is because she was freezing. Look at her skin—she's covered in goose bumps. They kept trying to make us look wet, and they were throwing buckets of cold ocean water on us, so we'd glisten. Her hair was covering her nipples, and that was all that was covering them. They put double-stick tape on her nipples, then put her hair over her nipples, and of course it would come loose. The only way to cover her for the video was for me to hold her against me. At least, that's the story I told the judge.

I like the fact that I don't get the girl. She's not kissing me, she's kind of ignoring me through the whole video and that matches the song, which is, you know, “I'm in love with you, but you're playing with me.” When I saw the video, I said, “MTV's not going to play it. I don't think it's sexy enough.” I remember that comment because it was so stupid.

 

CINDY CRAWFORD:
British
Vogue
had done a cover with five girls on it: me, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, and Naomi Campbell. George Michael got fixated on that idea for his “Freedom '90” video; it had to be those same five. We shot it with David Fincher, over a weekend in London, and somehow they corralled us all.

Jake Nava, who directs a lot of music videos, recently told me he was working with Beyoncé and they tried to replicate the shot of me in the bathtub. He was like, “How did you
do
that?” Well, there was no water in the tub. I was sitting on an apple box, to lift me up, and I had glycerine all over me, to look wet. Was it comfortable? Models don't ask themselves that question. If you're not passing out, it's comfortable.

 

ADAM LEVINE:
My first masturbatory fantasies were to videos on MTV. I was obsessed with music at an early age, and I was also getting sexed up at a young age, because every image on MTV at that point was highly sexual. God, Billy Idol's “Cradle of Love” video killed me. There's one scene where the woman is crawling on the floor—it's just epic. I jerked off to that video so many times!

 

ANNE-MARIE MACKAY:
“Cradle of Love” was interesting, because Billy had broken his leg in a motorcycle accident, and that's why the concept of him appearing as paintings on the wall came into being. He couldn't perform, so David Fincher came up with a way of basically posterizing him.

 

BILLY IDOL:
I'd been in this horrible motorcycle accident that crushed my right leg, from the knee down. How were we going to do a video when I wasn't mobile? David Fincher had an idea for a really long time, that a young girl would come to a nerd's house and seduce him to a record. It was fantastic, because I could narrate the video from these pictures on the wall. And then Fincher threw in the girl doing sexual somersaults on the bed. A load of guys love that video.

 

BETSY LYNN GEORGE, actress:
I wasn't a flashy, big-boob Hollywood girl, and I don't even know if David Fincher liked me. The casting director said I wasn't his first pick, and I'd need to put on a push-up bra. I was skinny and didn't have much of anything.

There's a scene where I crawl across the floor, which I didn't know I had to do. The first couple of times I did it, I could see David getting frustrated. He said, “Crawl like you want it,” or something like that. I cried after I did the scene, because I felt so embarrassed.

David was very specific in the bedroom scene—he wanted me to go completely wild, as if I was dancing alone in my bedroom. The choreographer said, “Do some acrobatics on the bed.” I was a competitive gymnast for many years, and I'm very flexible.

 

BILLY IDOL:
I went out to dinner with the actress from “Cradle of Love.” She came out in sandals. That just put me off completely. Especially because I was in leather trousers.

 

BETSY LYNN GEORGE:
We went to a little Italian restaurant, and he didn't like my shoes. Then we went up to his house and sat by the pool. When I said it was time for me to go home, Billy was very cordial: “Okay, we'll take you home.” His assistant said, “You're not staying? Why aren't you staying?” It was like
every
woman stayed and spent the night.

After the video was released, Propaganda got a letter from a mothers' group that wanted to see a copy of my driver's license, because they thought I might be under 18.

 

JOHN DIAZ:
In 1982, MTV banned Billy's “Hot in the City” video, mainly because we'd put Perri Lister up on a crucifix. But they put “Like a Prayer” in heavy rotation, with a burning cross. It was simply because Madonna was their golden girl.

 

ANN CARLI:
I was in the MTV office the day they got the Madonna video for “Like a Prayer.” Abbey Konowitch played it for me and goes, “I don't know what we're going to do with this.”

 

JUDY McGRATH:
To me, playing “Like a Prayer” was braver than playing something that's sexually provocative. That was a transformative video. It pushed buttons on race, religion, sex, burning crosses, making out with Jesus. I loved it.

 

MARY LAMBERT:
Madonna enjoyed controversy, and so did I. I grew up in Arkansas, at a time when there was a lot of racial tension and violence, and it was really offensive to me. One of the reasons I used a burning cross in “Like a Prayer” was to force people to deal with that image I grew up with.