Word: videos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...BEHIND-THE-SCENES DOCUMENTARY VIDEO...
...space case could see that at this tender point in their gestation, videos are a hyper hybrid of commercials, cartoons, concerts and selected short subjects. Record executives look for the high road but follow the hard line. "Rock video is terrific," says Gil Friesen, president of A & M Records, "but it is the music itself that creates the excitement, whether the music goes out over MTV or radio. Music is the ultimate power." John Kalodner of Geffen Records agrees: "Rock video isn't the art form. Rock video markets the art form...
...videomakers tend, with suitable modifications for ego, to go along with this sort of businesslike evaluation. Simon Fields, head of the Los Angeles branch of London's Limelight Productions, has produced more than 300 videos, and says, "We have to remember we are making a sales tool. These are little commercials. It is our job to make an artist look good." Even so, the skill of the videomakers often seems secondary to the music they visualize. Says Mallet: "You can make a good video of a bad record, and it doesn't do a thing...
Videomakers loot every resource for visual vocabulary. A random selection of a dozen clips could easily show influences as diverse as René Magritte and Orson Welles, The Road Warrior and The Three Stooges. Videos are often just as frenetic on the screen as on the sound track. Directors scrape and scramble to pack in the imagery, like so many soda jerks trying to push a quart of French vanilla into a pint container. "The problem is compression," says Julian Temple, who has made some 60 videos, including a current dazzler of the Rolling Stones' Undercover of the Night...
...Videos often seem just as plentiful and, comparatively, just as costly. Their average budget is about $20,000 to $40,000, and the majority are shot in a day or two. That sort of speed, and per dollar value, has its appeal for such film makers as John Landis, Mike Hodges and Bob Rafelson, who have worked within the slower, costlier Hollywood system. Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Poltergeist) shot Billy Idol's Dancing with Myself in two days, edited it in a week, and saw it on the air two weeks after that. "You can have...