Tony Mitchell | Through the Shattered Lens

It’s about time I got to a music video that lead to the PMRC. It may not look like one that would, but it did.

At the beginning of the book, I Want My MTV, there’s a whole chapter about the issue. The authors start off by talking about Tipper and her daughter’s experience watching Hot For Teacher. According to the book, her daughter said the following:

Mom, why is the teacher taking off her clothes?

I would love to know if that was Kristin Gore considering she went on to have a career in comedy. She and Tipper even played on a Diva Zappa comedy single. Frank Zappa having testified at the congressional hearings over this stuff. Although it sounds like it was Sarah LaFon Gore Maiani judging by her age when she saw the two videos.

On another occasion, Gore and her six year old saw Tom Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More” video–some other parent, having gone through the “Hot for Teacher” incident, might have learned a lesson and banished MTV from the home–and the girl was “disturbed,” Gore said, “because the last scene showed [an actress] turning into a cake and being sliced up.

I have feeling the authors of the book think this is ridiculous.

In September 1985, Senator John Danforth, also married to a PMRC member, convened a congressional hearing to discuss the excesses of rock music in the age of cable TV. And that is how the Commerce Committee of the 99th Congress of the United States, like millions of other Americans, watched “Hot for Teacher” and Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Going to Take It” when they should have been working.

You got me as to what bothered them with We’re Not Gonna Take It, considering it’s a song about civil rights and standing up for what you believe in. At least with Hot For Teacher you could make the reasonable argument that while harmless entertainment, it should be aired when a six-year-old isn’t likely to stumble across it. I’m really glad we live in a time when music videos aren’t taken down from YouTube for explicit content. Oh, right, that happens.

Anyhow, lets talk about the video, including some bits from Alice herself, Wish Foley (Louise Foley).

Here’s the genesis of the video according to Tom Petty:

Dave Stewart and I wrote and produced “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” We were talking about the video while we were in the studio, and he said, “I’ve always wanted to be the guy sitting on a mushroom with long nails and a hookah. You know, like in Alice in Wonderland.” And I said, “That’s it. We’ll do Alice.”

Thus, Dave Stewart got his wish:

Tom Petty: We didn’t use any special effects. Everything that’s big was big, and everything that’s small was small. It was a two-day shoot, and each day was fourteen hours, way into the night. Even for musicians, those were challenging hours. But we knew while we were doing it how shit-hot it was.

I don’t want to copy the entire section on this video, so here are the highlights:

Wish Foley: When I went to the audition, there were fifteen or twenty girls coming in at the same time. They were models, in skimpy leather outfits with short skirts. Boobs everywhere. It was kind of gross; they would stand in front of a mirror and do their “come hither” look. And here I am, dressed up like Alice in Wonderland.

She was 21. She had done a bunch of commercials along with some TV work. She says she had been the original Joanie (Happy Days), but that after they shot the pilot, she was told that she looked too much like Cindy Brady. It’s funny that after this video, Foley went on to work on Disney productions such as Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), and Hercules (1997). She was also in the movie, Harper Valley P.T.A. (1978) before going on to do this video.

Harper Valley P.T.A. (1978, dir. Richard C. Bennett & Ralph Senensky)

Jeff Stein: We built a giant teacup out of an aboveground pool.

Jeff Stein: The doughnut was a giant inner tube. I asked for the water in the teacup to be warm, and it wasn’t. She was in cold water on an air-conditioned stage for quite some time, and never said anything. When she came out, she had hypothermia.

Wish Foley: If you look closely, you can see me shivering. They bundled me up and shoved me into an emergency-wash shower.

Tom Petty: For the last shot, where we cut a piece of Wish’s body and eat, we had a giant cake made in the shape of her body, and Wish slipped her head from underneath. That must have been uncomfortable as hell. There was only one cake, so we had one take to get it right.

Wish Foley: When people said that the cutting of the cake promoted cruelty to women, I had to laugh that people took it so damn seriously.

Jeff Stein: I was cited by a parents-teachers organization for promoting cannibalism.

It amazes me that this video was swept up in that whole thing. It’s a trippy music video based on a book that has been adapted into everything from an X-rated musical to a Goodtimes animated cash-in movie to an official Disney version.

I think my favorite part about this whole PMRC thing comes from Dee Snider. He both testified, and played himself in the VH1 movie about it called Warning: Parental Advisory (2002). In an interview, he said that he didn’t have a problem with there being a label on albums to tell parents about the content. He thought that was reasonable. He wasn’t happy about the way they were going about it. A bunch of wives of congressmen getting their husbands to hold sessions on the evils of music, which forced people like Snider, Zappa, and John Denver to have to come and testify in front of Congress about music and censorship.

John Diaz was the producer.

Tony Mitchell, Kathy Dougherty, and Peter Cohen did “special effects” for the video, according to mvdbase–despite what Tom Petty said about them not using special effects. They were probably the people responsible for creating the things, and that one special effects shot at the end.

Enjoy!

30 Days Of Surrealism:

But behind the scenes, it was more like Face Without Eyes. I’m not abridging this story. Thank you Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks for writing the book I Want My MTV. Also, thank you John Diaz and Billy Idol for sharing this story.

John Diaz: On “Eyes Without a Face,” I brought in Tony Mitchell as DP–that was one of the first videos he shot. David Mallet directed, and David always shot in 16mm. I said, “I don’t care what else you do, but we have to shoot this in 35mm and Billy has to look like a beauty queen.”

Billy Idol: The video was super-important because we had large hopes for “Eyes Without a Face.” We poured into it not only ideas, but also money and time. For three days, I didn’t see anything but dry ice, smoke, fire, and naked bodies. We hardly slept.

John Diaz: Bill Aucoin brought some new contact lenses for Billy. I said, “You can’t give them to Billy, they might redden his eyes during the shoot.” Well, he gave them to Billy. David Mallet liked to use lots of dry ice in videos. So Billy was laying in dry ice for quite some time, and he was really tired, and his eyes dried out. The contact lenses fused to his eyeballs.

Billy Idol: We’d been up all night finishing the video and got straight on a plane to do a gig in Arizona. It was boiling hot so I laid down on the grass outside the venue, and when I woke up, a sheriff was standing with his gun drawn. I’d never really had a gun barrel in my face.

I almost couldn’t think because of the pain in my eyes. I’d fallen asleep with my contact lenses in, and they were dried from being on set, then on an airplane. I said, “I’m with the band that’s sound-checking inside that building.” My eyes were tearing, pouring water. So we go inside and the sheriff made my road crew line up. He said, “Who is this?” And they said, in unison, “The boss.” So he left me alone. Then they had to take me the hospital because I’d scraped the cornea so badly. I had my eyes bandaged for three days, until the cornea grew back. It was stupid, really. But I wasn’t thinking too much, I was just trying to get the video done.

According to the authors of I Want My MTV, during this period, “the average budget had been $30,000 to $40,000, but videos now became more sleek and elaborate–and so grueling that three different people went temporarily blind.” This wasn’t even the only time somebody went temporarily blind on a Billy Idol video.

Stories like this are something to keep in mind the next time you see a music video you love that isn’t in IMDb. People temporarily lost the ability to see in order to get these made. So, submit.

Enjoy!

30 Days Of Surrealism: