The Ultimate History of the '80s Teen Movie by James King

Author:James King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2019-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

Big Budgets, High Concepts

MTV goes mainstream; Absolute Beginners proves too much, too soon; Top Gun ruthlessly hits its target; and Back to the Future crowns Spielberg the king of Hollywood Inc.

If age makes some rebels, like Prince and Sean Penn, more single-minded then for others it represents a mellowing. In 1984 MTV became a publicly traded company; a significant move, making something that once boasted a youthful, underground mindset now seem all grown-up. While MTV’s earlier backers American Express and Warner Bros. had never exactly been bohemian spirits, as soon as what once seemed like authentic teenage rebellion hit the serious stock market, it lost a certain craziness.

Bob Pittman had nurtured the channel through its colorful and creative infancy: “We were a bunch of kids and when you are a kid, you are just completely sure that you are right. You are maniacal . . . someone would say, ‘Let’s buy a house and give it away in a contest.’ And it would be, ‘Hey, why not?’”462 But when the money finally began to flow into MTV, helped in no small part by the success of Michael Jackson and Flashdance, those kids had to quickly grow business heads.

As a sign of its increasingly mainstream status, MTV presented its first Video Music Awards that September, held at the historic Radio City Music Hall in New York and hosted by established thirty-somethings Dan Aykroyd and Bette Midler. The night saw both David Bowie and The Beatles honored with Video Vanguard awards for their pioneering work in the field, although what really got people talking was Madonna in her sexy wedding dress, jumping out of a cake and singing “Like a Virgin.” But not everyone was happy with how MTV had grown exponentially and caught the nation’s attention. Bleached British rocker Billy Idol463 found solo success after leaving his early punk band Generation X and heading to New York to record with Giorgio Moroder collaborator Keith Forsey. “White Wedding” and “Rebel Yell” were big video hits in 1982 and 1983 but Idol was annoyed to find the primitive and provocative spirit of early MTV disappearing when the mass market beckoned. “Suddenly you were competing on a level that was ridiculous. People like Michael Jackson moved everything up. Instead of $200,000 it was $2 million. It stopped the homegrown effect—it became video hell.”464

MTV began to court older viewers with its spin-off channel VH1 and then, in 1985, American Express left the set-up entirely, leaving Warner to soon sell everything off to the media conglomerate Viacom, a company that had made its name distributing CBS shows to local TV stations. Music videos had become pure mainstream, an integral—and showy—part of an album’s promotional campaign465 and now the young directors that had made their name via MTV found themselves either working with those significantly bigger budgets that Billy Idol despised or—ready or not—were seeing their short-form success rewarded with full-length projects.

Steve Barron had been at the top of the music-video game thanks to his iconic work

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