Aerosmith

Aerosmith is where you can watch a music video do something a film could not.

In 1993 and 1994 the band released three clips directed by Marty Callner — Cryin', Amazing and Crazy — each featuring the same unknown teenager. Amy Heckerling noticed Alicia Silverstone in Cryin' on MTV, and cast her in Clueless. The video found the star; the film confirmed her.

Callner directed ten of the fifteen videos here, from Dream On and Sweet Emotion through the Permanent Vacation years to the 1993 run. But the band handed the camera to outsiders at the moments that mattered most. David Fincher shot Janie's Got a Gun in 1989 and built it as a short film about a killing — six years before Se7en, and long before anyone described him as an auteur. Michael Bay took Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees). Francis Lawrence shot I Don't Want to Miss a Thing at the Minneapolis Armory in May 1998, staging the band under NASA banners that drop mid-chorus to reveal a shuttle launchpad from Armageddon, with Liv Tyler cut in from the film — Steven Tyler singing over pictures of his own daughter, in a film whose soundtrack he was on.

Most bands of their vintage have a videography that documents a career. Aerosmith's changed things outside itself: an actress's, a director's, and for a while MTV's afternoon schedule.