Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson did not treat the music video as promotion. He treated it as film, and hired accordingly.

The people he brought to a three-minute format read like a studio call sheet. John Landis, fresh from An American Werewolf in London, turned Thriller into a fourteen-minute horror short. Martin Scorsese shot the eighteen-minute Bad in the disused mezzanine of a Brooklyn subway station. John Singleton came to Remember the Time straight from Boyz n the Hood. Spike Lee, who approached Jackson about the song himself, filmed They Don't Care About Us in the old centre of Salvador and in a Rio favela — over the objections of state officials who feared the footage would scare off tourists. Ghosts was directed by Stan Winston, the creature builder behind Terminator and Jurassic Park, from a script by Stephen King.

The craft ran deeper than the marquee names. Colin Chilvers shared an Oscar for making Christopher Reeve fly in Superman before he engineered the anti-gravity lean in Smooth Criminal — with piano wire, the same trick he had leaned on all through the seventies. Vincent Paterson choreographed Beat It and Smooth Criminal, then directed Blood on the Dance Floor himself. Steve Barron lit paving stones under Jackson's feet in Billie Jean. Jackson had grown up on stage as the youngest of the original Jackson 5 — later The Jacksons — and he came to approach a camera the way he approached a stage: as something to be blocked, lit and rehearsed.

Before Thriller, a music video was a performance clip made to fill airtime. After it, it was a shooting schedule.