I Want My MTV (73 page)

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.

 

 

 

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 excitable 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 g
uy. 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.