In an interview to TODAY, director John Landis told a little more about how the famous Thriller video was created:
Basically, it started only with an exciting young singer with a song and a desire to be a monster in his own video.
“It was nobody’s brilliant idea,” John Landis told TODAY.
Landis took the job because he saw it as a chance to resurrect a genre that had once been a Hollywood staple.
“It was a great opportunity to bring back the theatrical short.”
Michael Jackson had done a couple of videos himself but the videos were made to sell records. When he decided he wanted to do “Thriller,” the album had already been out for nearly a year, and it had already become the biggest-selling album of all time.
The video Landis envisioned was going to be nearly 15 minutes long — and expensive. But Landis said it didn’t cost as much as many claim it did cost. Although it was much more than the average music video at that time did cost - which was about 50.000:
“It’s always exaggerated. It ended up costing $500,000 — still an enormous money at that time for that kind of thing.”
“Nobody would give us the money, because the album had already been so successful. Michael said he would pay for it. But I wouldn’t let him. He was still living with his parents in Encino behind a supermarket.”
George Folsey, Landis’ partner in the venture, then suggested that while doing “Thriller” they also film a 45-minute documentary, “The Making of Thriller.” They could sell it as a one-hour theatrical feature. They approached Disney Studios, which agreed to release it for a limited engagement in Los Angeles theatres. At the same time, they decided to take it to a venue no one else had ever considered as a market for a music video.
“We sold that hour to a brand-new thing called cable television and the Showtime network, which at that time had only 3 million homes. They paid a quarter of a million dollars for the rights to show it exclusively for, I think, 10 days.”
When MTV saw it, they called Landis.
“MTV went crazy – ‘How can you do that?’ We said, ‘OK, you give us money.’ And they gave us another quarter of a million to show it for two weeks, and that was our costs.”
It was such a hit that CBS decided that it was the most brilliant idea ever, distributing the video for all of its affiliates to air for free.
“For a while there, you couldn’t turn on the television without seeing ‘Thriller.”
The album that had supposedly sold every copy it could shot back to the top of the charts, nearly tripling its previous sales.
Again from out of the blue, Landis got a call from Austin Furst, who had a video business called Vestron. Furst said he wanted to buy the rights to put “Thriller” out as a “sell-through video.” Landis had never heard the term before, and Furst explained that he would sell it directly to consumers at a relatively affordable price: $24.95. At the time, home videos were shown on the still-new technology of video tape. But a movie typically cost between $80 and $100. Consumers weren’t going to pay that much, so mom-and-pop operations sprang up to buy the videos and then rent them out. Furst’s idea was to produce large quantities of the film and sell it directly. Landis said he couldn’t imagine many people wanting to buy a video that had gotten such extensive play on tv. But it would turn out that more than 10 million people wanted to own it!
The most famous recent incarnation of “Thriller” is the Filipino prison production which has been a huge hit on YouTube:
“The Filipino prison is wonderfully crazy. But people all over the world perform the ‘Thriller’ dance at weddings, at quinceaneros, at funerals, at bar mitzvahs. It blows me away.”
Source: TODAY, MJFC-USA
