I Want My MTV

by Craig Marks

  FREDDY DeMANN: The “Like a Prayer”/Pepsi episode was quite dramatic. I arranged for Madonna to do a commercial for Pepsi featuring “Like a Prayer.” She was to receive $5 million, and Pepsi was going to premiere the commercial and the song during The Cosby Show, which was the number one show on TV. Meanwhile, Madonna had cut the “Like a Prayer” music video with Mary Lambert, which was much darker than the Pepsi commercial. She kissed the feet of a black saint; I knew that would offend the Pepsi people, and when they got wind of the video, they said, “Send us the video!” I didn’t want to send them the video. And I didn’t. The commercial ran, then MTV premiered “Like a Prayer” the next day. And of course Pepsi immediately pulled the commercial and never aired it again. The controversy got phenomenal coverage. I loved every minute of it.

  LEE MASTERS: Freddy DeMann showed me “Like a Prayer,” and I said, “Freddy, Pepsi is gonna go nuts.” He said, “Wh-what you do you mean?” He was all innocent. Of course that’s exactly what happened. Which I believe Freddy knew all along. I think Freddy was so smart that he had this figured out from the get-go. He didn’t care about the money from Pepsi. He did it for the publicity.

  FREDDY DeMANN: Madonna loved racy. When MTV saw “Justify My Love,” they said, “We can’t play that.” My comment was, “Great, we’ll sell it on our own.” We did, and we did quite well on it. The publicity generated by them not playing it was great for business.

  TONY WARD: When Madonna and I started dating, we watched a lot of old Italian movies—Fellini, Rossellini, the Pasolini movie that’s got the shit eating. I don’t know if she would agree, but I would say the idea for “Justify My Love” came from me. She was editing Truth or Dare, and we talked about sexual scenarios, being voyeuristic. Seeing two girls make out, that made her excited.

  JEAN-BAPTISTE MONDINO: We don’t see ass and tits in “Justify My Love”—maybe a little bit, but this was not the point. The idea was simply that a woman is to be loved emotionally and sexually, at the same time. Most of the time, we think sex is something that is for the man. If a woman admits that she likes sex, we think she’s not a respectable person, which is completely stupid.

  When the day of the shoot arrived, I freaked out. I said, “Fuck, what am I going to do?” Because usually, you have a storyboard. All I knew was that at the start of the video, Madonna had a suitcase, and at the end, after some sexual experiences, she leaves the hotel completely happy. The kisses were real. We weren’t faking anything. I rented a hotel for two days and nights, and we shot nonstop. We didn’t use any lights, only the lights that were in the hotel.

  In a video, I like to reveal something within a person—I’m like a shrink. With Madonna, there’s no bullshit. So I learned things, while making videos. Not learning where to put the camera and how to become famous—this is a joke. But with Madonna, I learned to be honest, be clear, and not to lie—which is a big deal for men, because we are liars and cowards.

  ABBEY KONOWITCH: When I saw “Justify My Love,” I assumed Madonna was sending it to us for effect, and she had another version of it for television. And for the next twenty-four hours or so, Tom Freston and I tried to figure out what to do. She was our biggest star and we couldn’t play her new video. Not in our wildest dreams. I called Freddy DeMann and asked him what he wanted us to do. He said, “I want you to play it.” He never wavered from that position.

  LIZ ROSENBERG: Madonna said to me, “They’d never not run a Madonna video.” But she was wrong. Then we decided to sell the video in stores, and it was a huge success, and Madonna was called a “marketing genius.”

  JEAN-BAPTISTE MONDINO: Madonna made even more money from MTV’s stupid decision, and it made the video more famous, so it was good.

  RANDY SKINNER: All hell broke loose with “Justify My Love.” When they were finished shooting, I went to the telecine in Paris to pull twenty seconds or so of the video to send back to the States, because MTV wanted to start running promos. They got the footage, ran the promos, and then when they got the finished video, the shit hit the fan. Everyone at the label was angry at MTV for not airing the video, but certainly no one was surprised.

  ABBEY KONOWITCH: There was a moment when Madonna threatened to pull out of the MTV tenth anniversary special on ABC. She knew Michael Jackson was planning a huge performance, and in a head-to-head competition with him, the best she could do was a draw. A draw wasn’t good enough for Madonna. But I knew she’d do the show. Her absence would have been more notable than her presence. Which was the line I used with Freddy DeMann, and he told me to go fuck myself. She ended up delivering a brilliant three-minute monologue about the first ten years of MTV.

  DEBBIE GIBSON: The first time I met Madonna was at a fashion show, and she was going through one of her holier-than-thou moments where she had to act like a diva and be mean to people in public or her image would have been ruined. She totally ignored me. The second time I met her was backstage at a Vanilla Ice concert, when she was rumored to be dating him. This time she was relaxed and sweet and chatty. I guess the lesson is that you can’t act very cool at a Vanilla Ice concert.

  VANILLA ICE: The “Ice Ice Baby” video was made on a rooftop on Martin Luther King Boulevard in downtown Dallas. The building was abandoned, so we climbed the fire escape. I’d rehearsed the dance moves for two weeks, and I brought two changes of clothes. We didn’t have time to go to a gas station, so in the scene where I was rolling in the 5.0, I ran out of gas. I was being pushed by three of my buddies, out of frame. It wasn’t MTV who picked up the video first, it was The Box. So of course we kept calling The Box and requesting “Ice Ice Baby.” The video cost $5,000 and probably made $3 billion. Not a bad return.

  MTV had a lot to do with my success, but they made billions and billions of dollars on my videos. I figured there should be a mutual respect for that. But to them, we’re just products on the shelf. When everything in my life crashed and I was having hard times—I had a weekend that lasted a few years—I came on their show 25 Lame [a 1999 special where “Ice Ice Baby” was named the ninth lamest video of all time]. And they tried to humiliate me. I destroyed the whole set. It was real, it wasn’t staged. It got stupid crazy ratings. I probably made them another couple million dollars.

  MC HAMMER: I loved “Ice Ice Baby,” like everybody else. It showed that rap wasn’t limited to African-Americans. It was a direct reflection of the power of hip-hop, that a kid like him had grown up consuming enough hip-hop that he could perform it in a manner that was more than acceptable. He did a few of my dance moves in his video, and God bless him.

  VANILLA ICE: The Club MTV tour with Hammer and En Vogue was a wild time. When my song went to number one, Hammer was pretty pissed off about it. He moved my dressing room in the huge arenas to the bathroom.

  MC HAMMER: The video for “Too Legit to Quit” was a thirty-day project.

  RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: Yes, but it felt like sixty. The big thing was that we were doing two videos: “Too Legit” and “Addams Groove.” And with “Addams Groove,” we had to rebuild the sets from the movie, but they weren’t big enough, so we had to make them bigger. Then Anjelica Houston wanted to be in it, and she was going on holiday, so we had to build half the set and shoot her two weeks early. You couldn’t shoot two days in a row, because every day was an eighteen-or twenty-hour day. I mean, every single scene was bigger than the next. It was huge. And then, get this, Charles Addams’s widow, who lived somewhere in Switzerland, had total creative control. “Mrs. Addams didn’t approve it. Come up with something different. Oh, and you’re shooting tomorrow.” And remember, some of these videos came out in movie theaters, so you’re not shooting them for a thirty-two-inch CRT, you’re shooting them for an eighty-foot screen. “Too Legit” and “Addams Groove,” together, cost somewhere in between $4 and $5 million. But, you know, it was huge at the time.

  MICK KLEBER: “Too Legit to Quit” was based on a book I was reading, Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, about the structure of the monomyth that
supposedly was the basis for the Star Wars trilogy, and now virtually every movie in Hollywood. So we structured “Too Legit” on the typical hero’s journey, which in this case is Hammer being called by the mentor, James Brown, to retrieve “the glove,” which is obviously a reference to Michael Jackson. Then he and his dancers are transported in a flying globe to a concert hall. For one of the big auditorium shots, we actually had a crane on top of a crane. And sometime during that segment Hammer descends in an elevator into a fiery abyss, where he’s joined by more dancers. Eventually, we go back to the auditorium, where different celebrities flash the “Too Legit” hand signal on a big screen behind him, culminating, at the end, with Michael Jackson’s supposed gloved hand making the “Too Legit” signal. The sense of competition between Hammer and Michael at that moment was fierce.

  RUPERT WAINWRIGHT: Hammer wanted the opening scene to be him going into Hades and meeting James Brown. One small hitch: James Brown was in jail. When is he getting out? The day before our shoot. Okay, I don’t have much pull with the Atlanta Corrections Department, but I’ll do what I can to make sure he gets there on time. So Hammer goes, “Rupes, he’s the godfather of soul. I owe this man everything. Just send a private jet to pick him up.” So we send a private jet and James Brown comes with his wife, the one who sadly passed away under the knife doing like eight operations all at once.

  So then, James goes, “So, Rupes, I’m heading back on Friday, right? You still got the jet?” I’m like, “No, we’re sending you commercial, James.” There’s a pause. Hammer comes up to me afterwards and goes, “Get the jet back. Fly James back to Atlanta, but route him through Vegas and have the jet on standby for him all weekend” Only one? What happens if he doesn’t like the color of it? I’d constantly tell him, “The budget’s gonna be expensive, Hammer.” And he’d say, “Rupes, Rupes, Rupes, don’t worry about the money.” It was always, “Do it bigger, do it better.”

  MC HAMMER: It cost me over $1 million.

  MICK KLEBER: That album, I heard through the grapevine at Capitol, generated $44 million. I know we spent in the vicinity of $1.2 million of that on the “Too Legit to Quit” video. We felt that we were in head-to-head competition with Michael Jackson, who was doing “Black or White” at the time. We would get reports from the set of the Michael Jackson video: “He didn’t show up today. Now the budget’s up to $7 million.” And we were going, “Can that really be true?

  MC HAMMER: Michael Jackson was staying one floor beneath me at the Universal Sheraton while I was filming. Every day when I came home, I would yell to him through the floor: “I’m back, Mike! I’m telling you, you’re gonna love this video!”

  I put in a call to Michael, because part of the theme of the video was, I was going after the glove. It was tongue-in-cheek. When Michael called me back, it was 7 A.M. I said, “My wife is here, I’m trying to sleep,” and I slammed the phone in his face. Not for one minute did I think it was Michael Jackson.

  So the phone rings again and I knew it was really him. I said, “Michael, you’re the greatest dancer ever.” And he said, “Oh no, Hammer, you’re the best.” We compliment each other back and forth. So I said, “Michael, listen, I want you to look at my new video, I’m almost finished with the editing. If you don’t approve the whole theme, I’ll take it out.” He goes, “No, it’s okay. I like it.” I said, “You like it? You haven’t seen it.” He said, “I’ve seen it. I like it, MC.” And I started laughing. That’s the power of Michael Jackson: He had spies going in, putting my video on tape, and bringing it to him.

  MICK KLEBER: We did a lot of different versions of that video. There was an edited version, a sixteen-minute version that featured Jim Belushi as an anchorman, and an hour-long documentary video. It had a life force of its own.

  MC HAMMER: It had Milli Vanilli, Mark Wahlberg, Queen Latifah, Chevy Chase, Danny Glover, a who’s who of the music industry and actors. It had fifteen athletes who are today in the Hall of Fame.

  MICK KLEBER: We also did a video called “Addams Groove” for the Addams Family movie that used a computer-generated, 3D mapping of Hammer’s head. I don’t know that any music video had ever used that technology before. We cut off his head and the head would bounce around. A few months later, I went to his house and I saw the the gold-plated lavatories, and I thought, “I don’t know, I’m getting a bad feeling about this.”

  MARK PELLINGTON: I got out of MTV in ’90 as it started to become a global monster. I got the sense that the days of old were declining, and it was more focused on the business. It wasn’t just art and freedom and attitude and spirit; now sales and audiences were coming into play.

  ALAN NIVEN: I heard rumors of people buying BMWs off video budgets and hiding it in the numbers. There was a day where a lot of people harvested it for all they were worth.

  NICK RHODES: By 1990 or so, they stopped even inviting us to the VMAs. I was in LA and thought I would go, and they weren’t even interested in giving us tickets.

  MARK GHUNEIM: When I went to work at Columbia, New Kids on the Block was one of the first acts I promoted. MTV was not in love with this band. They didn’t care for that type of music. My pitch wasn’t, here’s great music and you’ve got to put it on. It was, here’s music that your audience needs to see, and I don’t care if you like it or not. You want ratings, play New Kids.

  TAMRA DAVIS: New Kids on the Block were the biggest band in America, and they no longer would talk with their label. There was no communication. The record company gave me a plane ticket and a backstage pass and said, “Go find them, talk to them, and see if you can make a video with them.”

  I started hanging out with them, listening to what they wanted to do. They were having a crazy time, sleeping with lots of different girls every night. I was saying, “You guys better have condoms.” They were totally unsupervised and had everything they wanted, as much as they wanted. Even the record company girls were trying to sleep with them.

  ALEK KESHISHIAN, director: When the Bobby Brown track “Don’t Be Cruel” came around, a lot of directors passed on it. That was my first video. I met Bobby, and when he finally piped in, he said, “In this video, I want to have a maid and a Mercedes.” Isn’t that brilliant? So the opening shot of “Don’t Be Cruel” is a Mercedes. The closest I got to the maid was putting the girl in a black outfit.

  LIZ HELLER: None of us had any idea of the electricity of Bobby until Alek started filming. That was Bobby’s first solo outing and everybody loved the track, but I don’t think anybody had any idea that Bobby was gonna turn it on like that until it happened.

  ALEK KESHISHIAN: Then they came back to me to do “My Prerogative,” and I said I would direct it only if Bobby did exactly what I asked him to do. Believe it or not, I thought, Why can’t we position him as kind of a black George Michael? Urban, but stylish and chic.

  I wanted him to wear a headpiece microphone, and Bobby goes, “I can’t wear that. That’s gonna ruin my hair, and my hair is my image.” I went, “Bobby, you don’t have an image. That’s why you’re wearing this headpiece mic. That’s gonna be part of your image.” “My Prerogative” was his breakthrough on MTV.

  BOBBY BROWN: I didn’t expect it—I prayed for it—but once it happened, it was heaven on wheels. The director, Alek, was a cool dude. We had a lot of fucking fun.

  LIZ HELLER: I had known Bobby since he was thirteen, and he was very difficult. When we were making “Every Little Step,” I needed to make sure he’d get on a plane and fly in to LA for the video. So I sent a guy who worked for me, named Abe. I had to go through this whole drill with Abe about how he was going to have to knock on the door and physically get Bobby out of bed, onto an airplane, and over to the video shoot. I don’t even know if Bobby knew for sure that he was going to be doing a music video. Abe started calling me every twenty seconds, because he couldn’t get Bobby out of bed. But finally Abe got him up and got him on the plane. Bobby came right to the video shoot from the airport. He had zero rehearsal. But it’s such a great p
erformance, especially if you realize the condition he was in. He just turned it on, did his takes, and left.

  BOBBY BROWN: For “Every Little Step,” they asked me to actually write out a script for the video. I was on tour. I said, “Script? Just give me a white background, spell out ‘Every Little Step’ in big letters, and let us dance.” That was the most popular video I ever did.

  ALEK KESHISHIAN: Bobby had such a raw talent, and once he trusted me, he let me style him and image him. By the time of “Every Little Step,” he didn’t even know what the concept was. He just walked out of the limo and I told him, “Here, put these clothes on.” I’d designed a black suit with “Bobby” written down the sleeve. He was like, “Wow, look at these letters.”