I Want My MTV by Craig Marks Page A

so our hotel room stunk like pastrami. We’d explain that we were starting a music channel and we’re gonna play videos, and people didn’t even know what videos were. It was a crazy pitch. We had, like, three videos we could show to people and say, “Here’s what a video is.” We were just idiots in hotel rooms.
    CAROLYN BAKER, MTV executive: We worked out of a hotel room with puke yellow walls. We were all tense and nuts, because we’d given up jobs, and what if Bob didn’t get the money?
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    JOHN SYKES: I went to work in a conference room with no windows and four phones. It was Carolyn Baker, Sue Steinberg, Steve Casey, and me. I asked Bob, “When do we start?” And he said, “Well, we don’t have money to start yet.”
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    BOB PITTMAN: The Warner Amex board of directors said no to the idea. They thought it was too crazy, too risky. Then Jack Schneider got us a meeting with Steve Ross and Jim Robinson and Lou Gerstner, the president of American Express. And we loaded it with some friends: Doug Morris from Atlantic Records, whom I’d known since I was a teenager in Detroit, when he had Big Tree Records, and Stan Cornyn from Warner Bros. Records. We played a videotape of what the channel would look like. We tried to make it very tame for them, and Jim or Lou said, “Oh that’s such noise. Terrible stuff.” And we’re thinking, Boy, you should see the stuff we’re really gonna play .
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    JOHN LACK: We were asking for $25 million, half from Warners and half from American Express. Ross turns to Schneider, the gray-haired guy, and says, “Jack, do you believe in this?” I fucking kicked Schneider hard under the table. He said, “Yes, Steve, I believe in it.”
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    JACK SCHNEIDER: The programming concept for MTV was very simple. It was radio with pictures. I spent my whole life working in radio and television at CBS. I knew what a radio station was: It was a microphone, a transmitter, and a stack of records. We were simply adding the video aspect to it.
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    STEVE CASEY: My first meeting was with Jack Schneider, the guy in charge of the company. He spent the entire meeting telling us it was not going to work. His exact words were that music and television were “an unnatural marriage.” I thought, What a hell of a pep talk .
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    LES GARLAND: Jack Schneider was great, he was the big papa, but he didn’t really get it. Putting people on TV with purple hair, he just thought it was silly.
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    JACK SCHNEIDER: I was never comfortable in my role at MTV. I was the only adult there. I was fifty-four. They treated me like the old man, which I was. I always wore a coat and pants that matched. I thought that was an appropriate uniform, and it always served me well. Those kids didn’t scare me. I was tougher, smarter, and more successful than any of them could ever dream of being. I had credibility. I had a presence, a maturity. When I met with Jim Robinson and Steve Ross, it was as equals. No, I wasn’t chief executive of Warner, but I knew people like Steve Ross and dealt with them all my life. I didn’t meet with Steve or Jim as a supplicant. I met with them as a peer.
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    JAMES D. ROBINSON III: We gathered in a conference room off of Steve Ross’s office. Jack Schneider opened up the meeting and turned it over to Bob Pittman. For twenty minutes, Pittman laid out the concept of how to build a music-video channel. Bob was articulate and clearly knew what he was doing. After his presentation, I said, “Where in the devil do you get your raw material?” And he said, “That’s not a problem. Every time a recording group creates a new album, they make these promotional films and give them away.” I said, “You mean you don’t have any cost of goods sold?” He said, “No.” I said, “Steve, you’ve got our $10 million.” It was literally as fast as