Origins
In the summer of 1983, Thriller had begun to decline in sales. Walter Yetnikoff and Larry Stessel answered calls throughout the night from Jackson. "Walter, the record isn’t No. 1 anymore," Yetnikoff recalls Jackson saying. "What are we going to do about it?" 'We’re going to go to sleep and deal with it tomorrow,'" Yetnikoff remembered answering. Jackson manager Frank DiLeo first mentioned the idea of making a third video, and pressed Jackson to consider the album’s title track. "It’s simple—all you’ve got to do is dance, sing, and make it scary," DiLeo recalls telling Jackson.
In early August, John Landis was contacted by Jackson to direct. At the time, commercial motion-picture directors did not direct music videos, but Landis was intrigued.
Read more about this topic: Michael Jackson's Thriller
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
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“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?””
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