After the passing of Michael Jackson last week, Tom DeFeo aka "The Godfather of FANGORIA" (our owner & president) asked me to post a copy of our SCREAMOGRAPHY episode featuring John Landis. With last night's news that Dimension might be remaking AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, the episode certainly seems hauntingly timely.Presented below is the full, 54-minute episode of FANGORIA's SCREAMOGRAPHY: JOHN LANDIS, along with a text transcript featuring Landis on Jackson.The segment on AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF begins around the 23 minute mark, with the segment on THRILLER beginning around 37.
Transcript: THE MAKING OF MICHAEL JACKSON's THRILLER (at 37:00 in the video):
NARRATOR: Landis' next project was for the small screen and starred The King of Pop...
JOHN LANDIS: THRILLER cost about $600,000 which at the time was huge because the average rock video cost between $50K and $100K, and we made one for $600K. But it cost 600 for a lot of reasons. For instance, the average rock video was just the length of the song, three minutes. And, you just played the song and people lip-synced to it. THRILLER was a theatrical short. It was two reels, so it was 14 minutes long. We shot Union - most videos were shot Non-Union - this was shot as an I.A. picture. We had union makeup artists, union dancers, PLUS I took the original song "Thriller" - the original tracks, which was like a 38-track song and broke it down and re-cut it to be almost like 12 minutes long. And then Elmer Bernstein wrote music, and then we did a theatrical mix. This is something most people don't... we'll I don't know if this matters, but a movie mix is different than a video mix. A video mix is you play the record - a movie mix is mixed to picture, meaning that when you see a movie musical, if someone is closer to the camera he's louder, or she's louder. Instruments, if you cut to the string section, the string section comes to the fore. So it's mixed to picture, as opposed to mixed for a record.
So THRILLER, it's not really fair to compare it to the other videos from the time because we were so much more ambitious. We were "making a little movie". That was our whole approach. Plus, it was intended to be a theatrical short. It played with FANTASIA in Los Angeles, and again when you ask "how did it happen?" - that was a total accident. That was a vanity video. Michael Jackson had made BILLIE JEAN, and BEAT IT - those two videos were hugely successful, directed by Bob Giraldi - and THRILLER the album was the number one album, and the biggest-selling album of all-time, for over a year. It had dropped down to number six, and it was over essentially, and it was on it's way down. So he called me, and he had seen AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON and he wanted to turn into a monster. That was his contribution, he wanted to morph. So I brought in Rick Baker and we talked about it, and I wasn't interested in doing a rock video. These are essentially commercials to sell songs, so I suggested "let's make a theatrical short." So going in, CBS Records told us to go fuck ourselves, and Walter Yetnikoff said "get outta here!" and they wouldn't give us any money because they just assumed this was on it's way down, and "why throw good money at it" because it wasn't going to make them anymore money. But Michael wanted to do it, so he was gonna put up the money and I said "Don't put up your own money, that's wrong" and it was George Folsey who suggested that we shoot us shooting it. And, that MAKING OF THRILLER was 45 minutes long, and the video was 15 minutes long, so together it's an hour so we can sell it, and we sold it to Showtime. It was one of the first cable TV events. MTV went insane when we sold it to Showtime. They said "How can you do that to us?" and we said "Ok, you want it? Buy it!" so they paid some money, and we got money from Showtime and MTV and that's how we financed it. We used to call THE MAKING OF THRILLER "The making of Filler" because it had to be 45 minutes. That's why everything is in it. I owned 'WEREWOLF, so there's pieces of 'WEREWOLF. He owned CAN YOU FEEL IT? so we put CAN YOU FEEL IT? Everything we could throw in there. Home movies? We put them in there.
It turned out very well, but it was nobody's plan. It did a lot of things. THE MAKING OF THRILLER created the whole "making of" business, which is now a business. The biggest impact THRILLER had was that the record went back to #1 - that was a big deal and showed the huge influence that these things could have Internationally. Two, a guy named Austin Furst, who had a company called Vestron Video called me and said "I'd like to release THRILLER and THE MAKING OF THRILLER as a home video" and I said "Yeah, but it's airing for free on television." This was at the time when home videos cost $80-$90 - and the creation of things like Blockbuster and Mom & Pop Video Stores came about because to buy a movie then was $80-$90 bucks so no one would by them, but they'd rent them. So selling these things, they'd be sold to stores to rent and that's why they were so expensive. And he came up with the idea - Austin told me the term and it was the first time I'd ever heard it - to "Sell-through." So it was low-budget, $19.95 which was enough that you could actually buy it. That then went out and sold over a million copies which at the time was HUGE! So it really created the home video business. Now, you go out and buy a DVD an for $5 you can own a new movie. It's really a HUGEly influential thing, THRILLER - but not by design. It was all accidents coming together.
NARRATOR: Landis soon found out that working with Michael Jackson was unlike any filmmaking experience he's ever had.
JOHN LANDIS: When we made THRILLER, working with Michael was like The Beatles. You know, when John Lennon said that thing about "we're more popular than Christ", I totally understand what he was talking about because being with Michael at that moment was incredible. People would see him, and they would faint, or women would have orgasms - I'm not kidding - people would be overcome. It was amazing. The only time in my entire life when I've ever been truly terrified. It sounds funny, but you're rarely scared in your life, and the only time I was really terrified... right after THRILLER came out, Michael and my wife, and baby daughter... we went to Disney World in Florida, and I have this picture in my library of Michael and I and Mickey Mouse - and we went to take this picture by the castle, and there was this lawn that was about 20'x20' and had this little rope chain around it like a bank, and the photographer was there and Michael and I and Mickey came through these underground tunnels where you come "up", and within minutes there were 5,000 people there around us. They were screaming and I thought, "they're going to eat us." I was just terrified, and Mickey was like "Get me outta here!" We were scared to death, and it was like "Oh my God, someone is going to die." And Michael was just like (waving) "Hi, how are you?" and it didn't phase him at all. Miraculously, this Cadillac Limousine just appeared out of nowhere, and I still don't know where it came from. They took us and threw us in there and then the people went on the car - it was really scary.
I find it interesting, as I've worked with Paul McCartney, and Michael Jackson, and The Blues Brothers, and David Bowie, and a lot of people that have gone through that experience, and man I think it's difficult to remain sane under those circumstances. When you see what happened to Elvis - I mean, I understand it, but with that level of stardom, and that level of celebrity, it's a miracle if you can make it through it with any sense of sanity after that.
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