I Want My MTV

by Craig Marks

  The girl with the long wig who looked like a mermaid? Not only did I pick her, I dated her. The girl I thought had the best ass of all had a banana skirt on. She’s only in the video for a couple of seconds because she was shy. She was like, “Most people tease me for my butt.” I said, “Well, they won’t after this song, baby.”

  Once the video went to number one, MTV got complaints and decided to show it only during the evening. They said it offended a lot of people. I thought my career was over. The record company was like, “This is great!”

  ANN CARLI: We were thrilled when Will Smith got a show on NBC, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. But I wasn’t surprised. You could see it had to go that way. Rap was becoming undeniable. The rise of hip-hop and its infiltration into the mainstream has a little to do with why we elected an African-American president.

  Chapter 40

  “EGO-FUCKING-MANIACS”

  MICHAEL BAY, CHER, AND ALL 9:08 OF “NOVEMBER RAIN”

  AT FIRST, VIDEO DIRECTORS HAD ENTERED AN UNSURE, unestablished, underfunded industry. A few years later, when Russell Mulcahy and Steve Barron began making feature films, it altered the industry—now, young directors saw music videos as an elevator to Hollywood, a faster and more certain route than starting with a career in costume design (Joel Schumacher), acting (Peter Bogdanovich), stand-up comedy (Woody Allen), or directing softcore porn (Francis Ford Coppola).

  While he was a film student, Michael Bay “knew exactly what I was going to do,” he’s said. “I was going to do videos—that’s when videos were fun.” Two weeks after graduating in 1988, he had a $165,000 budget to return Donny Osmond to stardom. Instead, the video made a star of Bay, who became the biggest action director of all time. The loud-and-large fireball mentality he brought to Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon, and Transformers was evident even on MTV, where he ushered in a new era of excess. “This guy had a plane crash in a music video,” Will Smith—whom Bay turned from a video star into a film star, in Bad Boys—once said. “I was like, Damn.” Bay’s trilogy of videos for Meat Loaf included, in addition to the plane crash, a girl getting hosed down while washing a red convertible and wearing a sheer dress, a girl in a bathtub, the same girl in bed with another girl, a motorcycle, another motorcycle, a helicopter, a graveyard, a medieval mansion, Jack Daniel’s, gangbangers, an exploding jukebox, an exploding TV set, and Angelina Jolie. Axl Rose probably saw this as one-upsmanship.

  Bay has never believed in understatement—as a fifteen-year-old intern on Raiders of the Lost Ark, just two years out of Hebrew school, he met Steven Spielberg and announced that he thought the film “was going to suck.” Bay refers to himself as “a frank guy,” and success has not made him falsely modest. After starring two Transformers films, Megan Fox described him as behaving “like Hitler,” which is unfair—Michael Bay would never do anything as small as invade Poland.

  MICK KLEBER: Capitol had just signed Donny Osmond, and we put out his first “adult” album, Soldier of Love. Although Donny was one of the most unlikely MTV artists imaginable, they agreed to support a “Sacred Emotion” video if it worked for their audience. My objective was to erase the perception of Donny as a cheesy pretty boy. A talented young woman named Paula Walker started to make a great video featuring a troupe of exotic models in haute couture lingerie.

  Donny’s manager came in from Utah with a colleague who was introduced as a production adviser. The adviser said, “I know sexy, and this isn’t it.” I said, “You’re an expert on sexy?” He said, “I’m a Mormon with six kids. We have more sex with beautiful women than anybody.” Things got tense enough that I had to cancel the shoot. Now I had half the original budget to work with. I thought that it was going to take a miracle to bring back Donny Osmond.

  And then I thought, That’s what this video has to be about. It has to be about a miracle. So I came up with this idea of making it rain in the desert. We’d do a version of the barn-raising scene in Witness, but make it sexy, with hot guys and girls; they’d build a stage and then it would rain. After about a week of being turned down by different directors, I looked through my pile of demo reels, and liked one from this kid at the Pasadena Art Center. So I brought him in, gave him the treatment I’d written, and asked if he could do it for $120,000. He said, “We’ll make it work.” They went off and shot for three days in the Arizona desert.

  The next Friday, Donny was on The Today Show to sing “Sacred Emotion,” and they played a little of the video, which wasn’t finished yet. When I got to work, my message book was filled with people wanting to know who directed the Donny Osmond video. And by the end of the day, Michael Bay was signed to Propaganda.

  ANNE-MARIE MACKAY: The work was beautiful. We signed him immediately to Propaganda.

  JONI SIGHVATSSON: Michael Bay was polarizing. Anne-Marie said, “I found this guy who did a great video for Donny Osmond.” And we’re like, “Anne-Marie, are you insane?” We thought we were much too cool for Donny Osmond. The video wasn’t to everyone’s taste—it was sleek and commercial—but I was amazed by the technical proficiency. I knew Bay was going to be a big.

  ADAM HOROVITZ: When the Beastie Boys moved to LA and signed to Capitol Records, they had a huge party for us on the roof. We thought, This is great. The label loves us. The next day, the label president gets fired.

  The new president is this motherfucker named Hale Milgrim. He’s in charge when Capitol puts out Paul’s Boutique, and nothing is happening with our record. We go to see Milgrim, the dude’s got a mini-ponytail and a brand-new tie-dyed Grateful Dead shirt. Classic look. He said, “I know you worked hard on this record, but I’m pushing the new Donny Osmond record right now, so you guys have to wait till next time.” We’re like, “Wait—Donny Osmond? From the Osmonds?” And he was dead serious. I remember that Donny Osmond video. It’s Donny Osmond out in the desert, and he’s trying to do Michael Jackson dance moves. That shit sucked.

  JOHN BEUG: Michael Bay did a couple of videos for me. I don’t think I was particularly encouraging to his career, shall we say. He did a Chicago video, and I told him I wasn’t blown away by his talent, which he reminded me of at the Pearl Harbor premiere ten years later.

  TARSEM SINGH: Michael Bay was in film school with me. We had an assignment to do a video to anybody’s song; most people used Tom Waits, something like that. But Michael Bay cut his reel to Berlin’s “You Take My Breath Away.” It moved his soul! It was shit, but it moved his soul! When people say he sold out, I say bullshit, because he’s true to himself. When you see a Michael Bay film, you might say it’s the biggest piece of shit, or the most brilliant and successful film, but you see him.

  ALAN NIVEN: Michael Bay: That’s the only fucker I ever fired off a video shoot. Mick Kleber introduced Michael to do a Great White video, “Call It Rock n’ Roll.” And the collection of women Michael turned up with at the shoot was totally over the top. He spent more of the day chasing hemlines with his lens than he did shooting my band. I called Capitol and said, “I’m about to fire your goddamn director.” Capitol drove out to the shoot in a panic, because they wanted to keep their relationship with Michael. And Kleber and I finished the video. So when I watch Pearl Harbor, I do quietly smile.

  GREG GOLD: Whenever Michael Bay was casting a video, you’d pull up to Propaganda and see beautiful girls lined up outside the building. They were usually, uh, endowed. He never grew out of that.

  LIONEL RICHIE: Michael Bay directed “Do It to Me One More Time.” That video had two amazing—no, three amazing—girls. It’s the only shoot I’ve ever been on where the entire crew showed up early.

  DOMINIC SENA: Michael Bay was the first guy beyond the original founders who was invited to join Propaganda. David Fincher and Michael were not each other’s biggest fans. David was not fond of Michael’s work. They were oil and water. They never spoke to each other. They were highly competitive and preferred not to associate. Which remains true to this day.

  HOWARD WOFFINDEN: I got on well with Michael. But he was as ex
citable then as he is now. He could get volatile with people for no good reason. He was charismatic, though, and well connected. His dad was rich, and he seemed to know every person in LA.

  Michael was a sponge, which drove everybody at Propaganda crazy. He would grab all the directors’ show reels and spend his night watching everybody’s videos. A couple of weeks later, those same scenes would come up in his videos. I used to think of him as a re-imager—he would find images in people’s reels and breathe new life into them. Michael would add a sexy, voluptuous girl and you’d think, Oh my god, she’s getting hosed down—and it’s windy as well!

  RICHARD MARX: Every once in a while, my kids go, “Wait a minute. You did a video with Michael Bay?”

  KIP WINGER: After the “Hungry” video, I was like, “I want the next video to be like a Coke commercial.” We hired Michael Bay to shoot “Can’t Get Enuff.” He was like the young David Fincher, and at the time, Fincher was the guy. Michael Bay walked in to watch our rehearsal, and the first thing out of his mouth was “This is going to be rough.” He really didn’t care about the band—it was the Michael Bay show. Visually, it’s by far our best-looking video.

  DENNIS DeYOUNG: “Show Me the Way,” my favorite Styx video, was directed by Michael Bay. He’s a serious dude; he has a very low humor threshold. Given his track record since, you would never believe that he directed that video. All I can say is, if you want to be enormously successful in the film business, come to me first and do a video.

  VANILLA ICE: Michael Bay directed “I Love You.” Ugh, I hate that song. Charles Koppelman, the president of my record company, said, “We need you to do a slow song.” And I was like, “I really don’t want to do that, man.” And he’s like, “Here’s a couple million bucks, now do us a slow song.” I said, “When do I go in the studio?”

  JULIANA ROBERTS: I loved Michael. He was totally hyper. And he kind of worshipped David Fincher. We’d always crack up, because Michael would follow David around the Propaganda offices.

  JONI SIGHVATSSON: Fincher and Bay became adversaries. It wasn’t spoken, but it created a great deal of tension. Fincher was sophisticated. He was inspired by great photographers such as Robert Frank and Horst P. Horst. Bay was a technical genius like Fincher, but he had the mind of a teenager. His sensibility was juvenile.

  JEFF AYEROFF: Michael Bay was known as “the little Fincher.” That’s how he was pitched to me. They said, “He’s not as artistic, but he’s got drive, he’s gonna chew through everything.” He did the Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself” for me at Virgin. He was an ego-fucking-maniac.

  JERRY BRUCKHEIMER: We used a lot of MTV directors to make our films, Michael Bay being the premier one. When we were looking for a director for Bad Boys, we saw his commercials and his videos. Besides being a phenomenal shooter, we loved Michael’s sense of lighting and his sense of humor. Whatever he did had a wink and a smile. He’d done an excellent Donny Osmond video, and that was another thing that helped sell him to us.

  CHYNNA PHILLIPS: We made “You Won’t See Me Cry” with Michael Bay. He’s a great director, but he went for the sexy lingerie look, which was a mistake. Management felt we needed to be more sexy, instead of wearing jeans all the time. We were already extremely successful, so why were we changing our image?

  MEAT LOAF: I asked David Fincher to direct “Anything for Love.” I gave him the whole Beauty and the Beast premise, and Fincher said, “Ah, I love it.” And he gave me a budget of $2.3 million. I said, “I-I . . .” I stuttered. And he goes, “Let me try to rework the budget.” So he came back a few days later and gave me a budget of $1.7 million. I said, “David, we don’t have that kind of money.” And Fincher said, “Well then, get Michael Bay.” That’s the last time Michael Bay was the cheaper option.

  JONI SIGHVATSSON: Fincher was very expensive. He and the label were at an impasse over the Meat Loaf video, so I said, “Why don’t we just give this to Michael Bay?” Fincher gave it to Bay, we ended up spending $750,000, and it was a seminal video. Michael directed, and it was David’s concept. That was the first and last time Fincher and Bay collaborated.

  BRIAN GRANT: Once the four of us at MGM got quite successful, we grew into a massive company. We made five feature films—Sid and Nancy was the first. Then the stock market crashed. We were highly leveraged, and when the banks panicked and pulled the money, the whole company collapsed. Within a week. By then, the baton had been passed, to Propaganda in particular. They were the next generation.

  ANNE-MARIE MACKAY: There was a tremendous meeting of the minds between Madonna and David Fincher. She’s very well read, and she came to the table with a lot of references and ideas. It was Madonna who came up with the Metropolis motif for “Express Yourself,” then the set designer, Vance Lorenzini, ran with that and built the incredible sets.

  RANDY SKINNER: “Express Yourself” was a four-day shoot. If my memory serves me, it cost $1.7 million.

  PAULA ABDUL: I was saving money from my choreography to make demos. Janet Jackson was the one who kept saying, “You can do this.” And I’d say, “Eh, I’d better stick to my day job.” But she encouraged me. The bottom line—and I’ve always known this—is that I may not be the best dancer and I’m not the best singer, but I do know how to be a brilliant performer.

  DANIEL KLEINMAN: Paula choreographed a few videos I’d done, and she wanted me to direct her first video, “Knocked Out.” We were quite good mates—we’d gone on a few dinner dates—but frankly, I didn’t like the song. Paula wanted the video to focus on the choreography, so I tried to film the dancing in an interesting way, which I don’t think I did. Quite rightly, Jeff Ayeroff hired David Fincher to do her next video.

  PAULA ABDUL: I loved making videos. Loved, loved, loved it. MTV and music videos were a huge reason I got signed, and why I became so popular. My videos were everything. Even when I was collecting demos, I was putting together the videos in my head.

  JEFF AYEROFF: When I left Warners to become co-president of Virgin Records, I hired David Fincher to do Paula’s videos. The first one, “The Way That You Love Me,” was only okay. For the next one, I said, “Make it black-and-white. Highly graphic, stylized, and make her look fucking great. Have Arsenio Hall do a cameo in it. Figure out something.” That’s where “Straight Up” came from. It became the biggest video of the year.

  PAULA ABDUL: Jeff had already signed me to Virgin Records, so the deal was that I’d choreograph a video for David Fincher, and David would direct “Straight Up” right after that. At first I was so bummed that David wanted to do “Straight Up” in black-and-white Super 8. I was like, This is my big chance! I do color videos! I think the main reason he shot in black-and-white is that it doesn’t cost as much as color, and he wanted to bank the difference. But of course, it ended up being a brilliant move. “Straight Up” was career-defining, it was style-defining—everything about it helped define me as an artist. And obviously, David turned out to be a genius.

  JONI SIGHVATSSON: We all thought Paula Abdul sucked. Ayeroff had been good to Fincher, and David’s a very loyal person.

  PETER BARON: I played David Fincher the Aerosmith song “Janie’s Got a Gun,” which no one outside the offices had heard yet. I said, “David, I want you to do this video.” I pressed play again and he listened for a couple of minutes and said, “Okay, this is what we’re going to do. The first shot’s going to have yellow police tape, rippling in the wind . . .” He already had a visual of how to start the video.

  JOHN TAYLOR: To me, David Fincher was not a video pioneer. By this point, video had gone corporate. I would guess that the budget for “Janie’s Got a Gun” was the total of our first eight videos.

  PETER BARON: I walked into David Geffen’s office and said, “I need $400,000 for ‘Janie’s Got a Gun.’” He said, “You have a director?” I said, “I’ve got David Fincher.” He said, “Go make the video.”

  JULIANA ROBERTS: “Janie’s Got a Gun” was the first video I worked on that seemed like a movie.

&nbs
p; GARY GERSH: Around ’89, we really got on a roll at Geffen, from every angle in our company. Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses, Cher: We didn’t spare any expense when we were trying to get it done.

  JOHN KALODNER: Marty Callner directed Aerosmith’s “Love in an Elevator” and Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time.” He was incredibly expensive. When Marty wanted a $10,000 light, and there was only one in all of Hollywood, he got it.

  MARTY CALLNER: On “Love in an Elevator,” I worked Aerosmith for thirty-five straight hours, and then they had to wait around for three days while we set up the final shot. They were already pissed at me. We set up an outdoor elevator in Santa Monica, and there was a long line of chicks waiting to get in the elevator with Steven Tyler. You know, love in an elevator! The producer had obtained a permit, but instead of writing that we’d finish at 1 A.M., he mistakenly wrote 10 P.M. So at ten, as I’m ready to do the final shot, they shut us down and said, “If you roll a foot of film, we’re putting you in jail.” The band didn’t talk to me for months.