NPG2045 said:

4bjb said:

NPG2045 said:

http://www.salon.com/books/memoirs/index.html?story=/books/feature/2010/05/25/interview_sharon_oreck "Video Slut": The mother of the '80s music video Sharon Oreck is the woman behind some of the era's most iconic images -- and, boy, does she have stories to tell. Over the past few decades, Sharon Oreck has played mom to a sizable contingent of '80s music royalty. When a passel of cops showed up on the set of Madonna's "Just Like a Prayer" video, thinking the 20 petroleum-soaked flaming crosses made out of asbestos were part of a hate crime, she was the one who had to convince them otherwise. When the local pet trainers ran out of white doves before the shoot of Prince protégée Sheila E's "Glamorous Life" video, she used gray homing pigeons shellacked with a white substance used by mature men to cover their bald spots. And when Michael Jackson was offended by an alleged offer of oral pleasure from Naomi Campbell on the set of the aptly named "In the Closet" video, it was Oreck who had to soothe egos all around. Oreck's new memoir, "Video Slut," tells the story of how she went from being an unwed mother, cut off by her middle-class family, to a hotshot video producer in the golden age of MTV. (Subtitle: "How I Shoved Madonna off an Olympic High Dive, Got Prince in a Pair of Tiny Woolen Underpants, Ran Away From Michael Jackson's Father and Got a Waterfall to Flow Backward so I Could Bring Rock Videos to the Masses.") Over the next two decades, she went on to produce more than 800 videos, including some of the most iconic of all time: Prince's "When Doves Cry" (working with Prince, she writes, was "a drag, a bore, and a disappointment"), Suzanne Vega's "Luka" (they wanted something "kinda up" about child abuse, and the team delivered) and Janet Jackson's "Nasty" (in which patrons at a nearby transvestite bar, enraged by not receiving a sufficient fee for being extras, decided to take off their panties and cancan through the official dance sequences, thus freaking out the cops, who subsequently called a SWAT team, starting a near riot). Looking back, the '80s seem like a golden age of music video. Did that seem true at the time? People keep telling me over and over that their childhoods were really affected by music videos. I was at a club in Argentina with 25-year-olds and they were all like, "You did Sheila E 'Glamorous Life'! Oh!" We did not have any idea that it was perma-fodder. We just thought, "Oh, it's like newspaper work. You write it, and then the next day, you write something else." But because of the Internet, it will live forever. I think that people look back at it and think of it as a golden age. And the reason for that is it was a free time. You could do anything. Nobody was micro-managing it; no one was paying any attention to it. No one was managing what was being seen; it was not p.c., it was not corporate-approved; it was just what people really wanted to do. MTV is over now, in terms of music programming. That's why it was a golden age; because there is no more music programming. There is no age at all. Your first work as a producer was on Sheila E's "The Glamorous Life" when you were 29 years old. Was it typical at the time to have a young woman working as a producer? In the music video world, there was no standard at all. Nothing was typical because there was no industry until 1982. When I entered it, it was still pretty much the Wild West. When I went in and declared that I made 10 percent of the budget, that is not the industry standard, believe me. I would never pay anyone that much money. But I just didn't know you couldn't ask for that. So they gave it to me. Did that Wild West atmosphere allow MTV to be more free in the kind of music it promoted? When I started working in the music industry, the only thing going was radio and radio stations were very segregated in terms of whether they played white or black music. You either had urban music or you had pop music or you had rock music. When MTV began, it was designated as a rock-pop venue and there was an unofficial policy not to play urban music -- to the point that when I was working with Sheila E., when we cast her boyfriend, the guy that's supposed to get with her in the car, we cast a black guy, and they told us we couldn't use him. We had to use a white guy. And I was like, "But she's ... black." Everyone will deny it came from them, but they wouldn't put it on MTV. They would say it wasn't "crossover." Then all of the sudden, kids started to say, We want to see rap music. The gradual takeover of rap music on MTV changed the way America saw music. I believe it changed the way that you integrated the youth of America. That's the first time you really saw mass idol worship of black artists combined with black athletes. I do think it had an impact.

Was Prince a "bore" because he kept things strickly on a business level? or is it cuz she wanted to feel "special"? It strange how always something negative when folks expect more but get less or just what they deserve....business is business!

I read the book, (well the Prince chapter at the bookstore). It's actually pretty funny and snarky. She explains Prince's management team at the time laid some groundrules before the shoot to the effect of:

1. Don't talk to Prince

2. Don't look at Prince

3. Don't ask why you can't talk to or look at Prince.

4. Dont' ask why you can't ask why

If anything, Prince's old mgr comes across as rude and paranoid in the book. She does say during the shoot she had to communicate video ideas to Prince through other people. And her young kid wasn't welcomed on the shoot because Prince was convinced the child was an industry spy trying to steal his music, even though the single for "When Doves Cry" was already out.

Her description of the Revolution members during the "white room" shoot made me giggle: "One guy inexplicably dressed as a surgeon, one guy inexplicably dressed as a pirate, one guy inexplicably holding a mirror and two beautiful lesbians dressed up as surprise!...two beautiful lesbians."