I Want My MTV

by Craig Marks

  JOHN SAYLES, director: The mandate I got from Springsteen was “I’ve made one of these videos and it did its job. And this song needs something gritty.” I was able to say, “Well, I do gritty.” I shot it in 16mm, so it would have a little bit of grain. I said, “Let’s include some concert footage and some documentary stuff of images that are suggested by the song.” So artistically, it was a kind of free association on the images from the song. Not the Ronald Reagan version of the song, but the song the rest of us heard. The character in the song is talking about tough things. There’s pride in it, and stubbornness, and disappointment.

  We shot in a Vietnamese neighborhood in LA, we went down to the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey, where Bruce started, and shot there. Ernest Dickerson, who had already shot for Spike Lee, was our main guy, and for the concert stuff we shot in LA, I used Ernest and second camera was Michael Ballhaus, who later shot Goodfellas and a few other films for Martin Scorsese, and shot most of Fassbinder’s movies.

  We said, “Bruce, we’re going to shoot you in concert, do you want to lip-sync?” And he said, “God, I hate to lip-sync, especially with this song.” So he wore the same outfit every night for three or four nights, and I got a bunch of different camera angles. If you look at the video, a couple things are slightly out of sync. At one point, he turns away from the microphone and his voice stays right there. Whatever its technical roughness—some of that was on purpose, some of it was the best we could do—it kept that emotion.

  So it is gritty, and it is kind of guerrilla filmmaking. The cutting is more frenetic than other rock videos, there aren’t any dissolves, and you keep coming back to the concert footage and Bruce’s energetic performance. It was right about the time that Ronald Reagan had co-opted “Born in the U.S.A.” and Reagan, his policies were everything that the song was complaining about. I think some of the energy of the performance came from Bruce deciding, “I’m going to claim this song back from Reagan.” He made it mean something.

  JON LANDAU: When John Sayles did “I’m on Fire,” Bruce’s confidence level was high enough for him to try some acting.

  JOHN SAYLES: He was going to play a character from one of his songs, and not Bruce Springsteen. It’s a short song, and the intro we did, before the music starts, makes it a normal-length video. I wanted to give him an entrance. I figured, in the context of the song, he should come from underneath a car with a little grease on him. It’s the car Suzanne Somers drives in American Graffiti. You never see the woman he’s talking to, but you know she’s a classy dame. The two characters know it’s going to be a big mistake if they get together, but the sexual longing is there and they can’t ignore it.

  For the next video, “Glory Days,” Bruce had a basic idea about a character who’s a mix between the guy telling the story and the guy he’s telling a story about, the guy who can’t stop talking about his baseball days. That’s the bittersweet part of the story. My first question was “Bruce, can you pitch?” He said, “Well, we get to do more than one take, right?” His pitching was okay. When we shot that sequence, we placed a big board behind home plate, with a cutout for the lens, and the DP was looking over the board. I said, “Put a helmet on.” The first pitch, boom, hit right off his helmet. There’s a cutaway shot of him toeing the mound, and Bruce said, “Oh shit, I don’t want to endorse the sneakers.” He took some dirt and rubbed it on the sneakers.

  Making the video was complicated by how famous Bruce had gotten. When our little caravan was going to find the ballpark, there were radio-station helicopters following us. “They’re heading left on Route Three . . .” There was a big crowd outside the bar where we were shooting the band, so we pulled a car up and my assistant editor ran out with his coat over his head, so people would follow him and we could take the band out through another door.

  JON LANDAU: The most important component of the success of Born in the U.S.A. was the quality of the songs. Second was the tour. We played to five million people on that tour. If it wasn’t the biggest tour of all time, it was very close. It was a magic time for us. Everything we did worked. The videos were a component, too, but I don’t think any of us who worked on the project would say that the videos were the key element.

  SHARON ORECK: The first video I was hired to work on was Sheila E.’s “The Glamorous Life.” I was immediately drafted to go to a meeting with Prince on the Warners lot in West Hollywood, to discuss important things about the video. Mary Lambert was introduced and told everyone what she had in mind. She said, “We’ll shoot performance footage, and she’ll be bathed in colors and light, and she’ll look stunning, and we’ll also do a little narrative and Sheila will explore her sexuality and life and love . . .” It was mostly horseshit—that’s what you did, you said this kind of stuff. When she was done, everyone was like, “It sounds great.” And then, quietly, almost in a whisper, Prince said something that sounded like “Sheila should have drumsticks on her.” But no one could hear him. The table went silent. Steve Fargnoli, Prince’s manager, who’s this super-handsome Italian guy, huddled with Prince and said, “Prince says Sheila should have drumsticks on her pants.” And they got up and left. Prince was there for ten minutes.

  After he left, I was like, “Do they mean real drumsticks taped on her pants?” We figured out that he meant fabric drumsticks sewn into the pants. And of course, Jeff Ayeroff from Warner Bros. said, “Mary, she better not be wearing fucking drumsticks on those pants.” We’re like, You tell him! That’s how things worked around Prince. No one ever said no to him. And she ended up with drumsticks on her pants, I’ll tell you that. They were the silliest pants I’ve ever seen.

  MARY LAMBERT: I met Prince when I was hired to do Sheila E.’s “The Glamorous Life.” He had two stylists named Louis and Vaughn. When I was introduced to them, it looked like they’d made their entire wardrobe out of chenille bathroom rugs and toilet-seat coverings. They were the most bizarre clothes I’d ever seen. The weirdest thing, though, was that they designed a wardrobe for Sheila E. that could barely fit a Barbie doll. They were itty-bitty-teeny-weeny. She’s small and thin, but these clothes weren’t going to fit anybody. On the day of the shoot, she tried them on and couldn’t even get her legs in them. They had to put extenders in the pants. We never did zip them up.

  SHARON ORECK: When we cast “Glamorous Life,” we hired a really handsome black guy to play Sheila E.’s love interest. A short while later, we heard back from Simon Fields that Prince’s camp didn’t like him, and we couldn’t hire him. Mary Lambert said, “Why don’t they like him? Is he too tall? Too short?” And finally Simon said, “They don’t want a black guy.” We were like, “What are you talking about? She’s black!” We were told they wanted the record to cross over, so there needed to be a white boyfriend. Mary and I were appalled.

  SIMON FIELDS: I produced most of Prince’s video between 1980 and 1990. He hardly talked to me for the first year; he was very shy. Then he grew to trust me. Which sometimes meant having to fire directors before they’d even started. We’d fly in a director and Prince would whisper in my ear, “Get rid of him.” So I would, and Prince would direct the video himself.

  I hired Larry Williams to direct “When Doves Cry.” Before the first shot, Prince said to me, “He doesn’t have to be here.” So I gave Larry some magazines and he sat outside and did some reading.

  SHARON ORECK: Prince was cuckoo paranoid. When I produced “When Doves Cry,” I didn’t know what the concept was until the day of the shoot. The director, Larry Williams, had worked with Prince on some still photographs. I’m like, “Well, what do you want me to do as the producer?” He said, “Just get a stage, a crew, a bunch of cameras, a bunch of smoke, and some doves.” A crapload of smoke, and a crapload of doves. The day before we’re going to shoot, I was told, “Paint a room purple and get a bathtub and some candles.” And the bathtub wrangler had to get three bathtubs, so Prince could choose. We were finally told that Prince would be in the bathtub naked, then crawl around on the floor. The
day of shooting, he got there six hours late. He’d tell Steve Fargnoli to put this here and that there, then Steve would tell Simon Fields, then Simon would tell me, then I would tell someone else. At one point Prince told Steve, “Tell Simon to get me a pair of woolen underpants.” So we got him this teeny-weeny size of long underwear. He had the wardrobe person snip them down into a tiny little banana hammock for him, and then dye it purple. And that’s what he wore when he was in the bathtub.

  LISA COLEMAN: Prince basically directed all of his videos. He’d get help from people on the technical side, but he didn’t let anyone else have creative control. It was part of his megalomania. He didn’t trust other people to translate his vision.

  RANDY SKINNER: I was editing a Prince video with Albert Magnoli, who directed the Purple Rain film. All of a sudden, Albert says, “Prince is coming.” The rule was, Don’t look at Prince, don’t talk to Prince. So I huddled in a corner thinking, Oh God, what do I do? He came in, walked right up to me, said “Hello,” and put out his hand. I was thinking, Oh shit! Do I look at him, do I shake the hand, do I not shake the hand? So I shook the hand. And he was lovely, actually.

  LISA COLEMAN: “When Doves Cry” was the first time the band had to perform choreographed dance steps. Prince tortured us in rehearsal. He said, “Everybody come to the front of the stage. Let me see you walk.” And of course, he started making fun of us. “That’s not sexy. You don’t have a sexy walk.” I said, “Let me see you walk.” And then he walked like George Jefferson. Total swagger.

  HOWARD WOFFINDEN, producer: I was dispatched from Limelight to Minneapolis, where Prince was rehearsing for a tour, to meet with him about a video concept. I sat in the arena watching rehearsals for three days before somebody came and told me, “You should go home now.”

  SIMON FIELDS: For “Raspberry Beret,” we filmed a whole video, then Prince got a Japanese animator to do a completely different video and we mashed the two up. He would mess with directors. He would give them the impression that they’d be in charge of the video, then halfway through he’d go, “Thank you,” take what he liked, and edit it himself.

  LISA COLEMAN: Here’s a good piece of trivia: Pat Smear from Nirvana and Foo Fighters was an extra in “Raspberry Beret.” I met him years later and he said, “I’m such a huge fan, I was in the video.” Look closely and you can spot him, in the front.

  DAVE GROHL: That’s when Pat had dreadlocks all the way down to his butt. He gets to the auditions at a rehearsal space in Los Angeles, and everyone has to do a synchronized dance. Pat can’t dance. So they sent him home. He starts walking down the hallway and hears, “Hey you!” He turns around and there’s this big bodyguard standing next to Prince. And Prince whispers in the bodyguard’s ear. The bodyguard says, “You can stay. He likes your hair.”

  HOWARD WOFFINDEN: A few of us traipsed to Prince’s house in LA about 11 A.M. to meet with him about a video. Someone lets us in and we’re sitting in the living room, waiting. Eventually Prince comes in, dressed in silk pajamas, with a blue stiletto on his right foot and a yellow stiletto on his left foot. He sits down and we launch into our spiel. He listens politely for a minute and says, “Uh, hang on.” He disappears for another thirty-five minutes or so. Again, he wanders out, and now he’s got the blue stiletto on his left foot and the yellow stiletto on his right foot. He sits down and says, “Now, what were you saying?”

  SHARON ORECK: There was a story told at Limelight about an early Prince video. Supposedly, there was a shot where Prince wanted doves released into the air, but the production manager decided not to work with an animal trainer because it was too expensive, so he bought some doves from a local pet store. When it came time to throw the doves into the air, he literally threw them from the stage, and they were immediately sucked into a giant fan, chopped up, and then sprayed around the room and all over the band. That was one of the first rock video legends.

  MICHAEL ANTHONY: The Van Halen approach to videos was, like, this is the party, you’re in our living room, come on in and join the party.

  PETE ANGELUS: I’m not sure I ever understood why it was necessary for Van Halen to fly across the stage while drinking beers in “Panama.”

  MICHAEL ANTHONY: They said, “Mike, why don’t you go first?” They strapped me in a harness under my clothes, and it was totally—how would you say?—I mean, it almost castrated me, the way it was wrapped around my legs and groin. My nuts were, like, in a vise. These straps were coming right around my ball sac. As soon as I did it, then you got Al swinging and drinking a beer, and Eddie swinging while Al and Dave yank on him.

  PETE ANGELUS: The harness didn’t fit Mike very well. I wasn’t doing any testicular inspections, but I do remember him gripping his groin and complaining.

  RANDY SKINNER: The director who started out on “Hot for Teacher” ended up not finishing it. Things weren’t going the way the band wanted, and Pete was a little bossy, so he took over.

  PETE ANGELUS: I had an idea to have young kids portray the four band members. Once the kids spent a little time with the band, they started to assume different personalities. It was weird. Like, the little Alex became very argumentative and difficult to find on the set. The little Edward was shy, and of course the little Dave started running his mouth. I also had an idea of seeing the band members thirty years later, based on their personalities. Alex, that was a no-brainer: He was a gynecologist.

  MICHAEL ANTHONY: The kid who played me looked pretty similar to me. The kids who played Eddie and Dave, they wore wigs. I think Alex had his guy drinking a Schlitz Malt before the end of the shoot. When the teacher jumps on the desk and whips off her dress, the little kids were hooting and hollering. We said, “Just go for it, guys. You’re going to enjoy this.”

  DONNA RUPERT, model: I was first runner-up in the Miss Canada 1981 pageant, then I moved down to LA and signed with the Wilhelmina modeling agency. I lived in a motel on Sunset Strip for a month, until I could find an apartment. It was a sleazy business, but I was too naive to know how sleazy it was. I did forty or fifty national commercials, from Camay to Toyota to Tab, and the agency almost didn’t let me do the Van Halen video. They said, “It’s not a good image for a model to do a rock video.”

  At the audition, there were five of us standing there for what seemed like forever, turning around in our bikinis, in a room with Van Halen and the director. I thought, Kill me. I can’t believe I have to do this.

  MICHAEL ANTHONY: The thing I’ll never forget about that day is, I got up early, and my wife got up along with me, and my oldest daughter, Elisha, was conceived that morning.

  PETE ANGELUS: We had a great time casting the women. I’d love to tell you there was some talent or skill that went along with it, but there wasn’t. We spent a day looking at women in bikinis. A few years later, I read in Fortune about some billionaire who had accomplished many things, and he said the only thing he hadn’t done was to be the casting director in a Van Halen video.

  DONNA RUPERT: This is something I don’t think anybody knows: There are two girls, two blond teachers, in the video. I was the one wearing a tiara and dancing with David Lee Roth. There’s a second girl, who drops to her knees on the desk, wearing a white wife-beater, and does the stripper dancing—that wasn’t me. But it transitions quickly to me again, so you think it’s me through the whole thing.

  I think I made $2,500 for the video.

  MICHAEL ANTHONY: In the final scene, all the kids come out of school and jump in Dave’s hot rod. And Dave never could drive a car that well. Sometimes I feared for my life because he just could not drive. They got in the hot rod with him, and he took off and almost crashed the thing. It was like, “Oh my God! Dave is going to kill these kids!”

  PETE ANGELUS: At the time, there was a lot of choreographed dancing on MTV. It was kind of appalling that everybody had dancers. We felt it would be humorous to have Van Halen do their own dancing. The worse it got, the better. Alex was having a lot of difficulties. I said, “Let’s do another take,”
with the intention of seeing how bad it could actually get.

  MICHAEL ANTHONY: One of the dancers in “Beat It,” the white guy, he choreographed the little dance moves we did. Alex Van Halen, he’s the drummer, he’s gotta keep the beat, he’s the guy with perfect rhythm—but if you watch the video, he’s a half beat behind everybody else. I remember him asking me to help him with his dance steps minutes before we did it.