Video Slut
How I Shoved Madonna Off an Olympic High Dive, Got Prince into a Pair of Tiny Purple Woolen Underpants, Ran Away from Michael Jackson's Dad, and Got a Waterfall to Flow Backward So I Could Bring Rock Videos to the Masses
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
When video killed the radio star, Sharon Oreck was calling the shots.
Video Slut takes an irreverent look behind the scenes of the music-video industry during its eighties heyday. Oreck, one of the top producers of all time, bluffed her way into the business with no experience whatsoever and went on to produce more than six hundred video shoots with Madonna, Sting, Mick Jagger, Prince, and several members of the increasingly unstable Jackson family—not to mention a cadre of delinquent caterers, deranged interns, self-absorbed record executives, and malfeasant animal trainers.
Oreck also shares the at turns hilarious, biting, and poignant story of her origins as a single teen mother, disowned by her middle-class parents, and of her journey from welfare to kung fu movie sets to film school. She approaches her own delinquency and that of the superstars she encountered with humor and candor. The result is an acerbic but sympathetic account of the outrageous effects of fame, power, and money on people in the entertainment business. No one is spared, especially herself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Oreck is a producer of films, commercials, and videos. An Academy Award nominee for the 1984 short film Tales of Meeting and Parting, she entered the music video industry that same year. Steering her company, O Pictures, from 1984 to 2000, she made hundreds of videos with minor and major music makers, including Mick Jagger, Sting, Madonna, Prince, and Chris Isaak. Looking back, she covers her career in a breakneck, word-juggling style as she introduces the reader to such respected video directors as Herb Ritts and Mary Lambert: With her blonde, baby-fine locks and cornflower blue eyes, Mary was a hipster ultrafemme from Arkansas with a yielding, buttered grits accent that allowed others to view her as a wide-eyed doe while she ran them down with a ten-ton truck. Amid such multilayered metaphors, she tosses off occasional funny lines as she recalls talent tantrums, budget constraints, daily disasters, and production problems while intercutting her own personal peaks, such as having a child at age 16. Switching between past and present tenses, Oreck succeeds in documenting the milestone merger of music/film history in this entertaining memoir.
