Marty Callner, director of comedy specials and music videos, dies at 78
Mr. Callner, who preferred to stay in the background but was far from shy, 'might be the most successful director you have never heard of,' Jason Zinoman of The New York Times wrote in 2022.
One day in the early 1980s, Mr. Callner had an epiphany. While watching television at his home in Beverly Hills, he found himself enraptured by a music video. It was Kim Carnes's 'Bette Davis Eyes' — and he couldn't take his eyes off it.
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"I said, 'This is unbelievable,'" he recalled on the "HawkeTalk" podcast in 2021. He called it "the most artistic and entertaining thing I've ever seen" and recalled thinking, "I've got to go do this."
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MTV was then in its early days. But Mr. Callner was willing to give up his lucrative work on comedy specials at HBO for the creative rush of making music videos.
In a meeting with Ahmet Ertegun, the chair of Atlantic Records, Mr. Callner was given a choice of three bands to make a video with. He chose the heavy metal band Twisted Sister, and in 1984 he turned the group's song 'We're Not Gonna Take It' into a funny cinematic story of teenage rebellion.
In the video, a guitar-playing boy (played by his son Dax) sends his angry father crashing out of a window after he declares — in Mr. Callner's voice-over — 'I want to rock!'
"However much Marty got paid, it wasn't enough," said Rob Tannenbaum, who wrote "I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution" (2011) with Craig Marks. "He made Twisted Sister."
Mr. Callner spent more than a decade making memorable videos for, among others, Pat Benatar, Bon Jovi, Alice Cooper, and ZZ Top. The 18 videos he made for Aerosmith included 'Sweet Emotion' and 'Dream On.'
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For the video for her hit song 'If I Could Turn Back Time,' Cher performed on the battleship Missouri amid hundreds of deliriously happy, hat-waving sailors in 1989. Mr. Callner persuaded her to straddle a cannon, a choice he explained by saying, 'We're getting as phallic as you can possibly get.'
For most of the video, Cher wore a body-hugging black catsuit with mesh-filled cutouts, which she designed herself.
During a rehearsal, Mr. Callner said, the Navy's liaison to the production was nervous that if Cher wore the outfit for the shoot, he would be punished by being sent to the Aleutian Islands. He told Mr. Callner that she couldn't wear it.
'I said, 'You go tell her she can't wear it,'' Mr. Callner responded. The liaison backed down.
Martin Henry Callner was born Aug. 25, 1946, in Chicago, and grew up lower-middle-class in Cincinnati with his mother, Etheljane (Hirsch) Callner, after his father, Barnard, left the family when Marty was 2. Eight years later, after Barnard Callner's death, his family, which had real estate wealth, embraced Marty as the last of the Callner line. He spent his summers with relatives in Chicago, mostly with an aunt and uncle, until he was 18, surrounded by fine art.
He attended three colleges, including the University of Kentucky, but he preferred partying to studying and he did not graduate. He later recalled that his creativity was unlocked when he was 19 or 20 and took a trip on the psychedelic psilocybin.
He did not find an outlet for his newfound creativity until his mother, who worked at TV Guide, suggested that he interview at a television station in Cincinnati in 1969. Hired as a prop man, he was immediately mesmerized by the studio atmosphere. He quickly became the director of several shows.
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But he left after a few years when the station manager refused to give him a raise — because, Mr. Callner said, he had left-wing politics and long hair.
After being hired to make commercials in Cleveland, he left to direct Boston Celtics basketball games for the Boston station WBZ-TV. In 1975 he joined HBO, then a new cable channel, and established himself as a director of comedy shows with "An Evening With Robert Klein," HBO's first stand-up special.
Mr. Callner's incorporation of backstage footage, and his use of five cameras to capture the feel of Klein's live performance, were called 'innovative' by Times critic John O'Connor.
That plaudit led to a lucrative deal with HBO to direct a series of stand-up comedy specials starring, among others, Williams, Carlin, and Steve Martin. He was also a co-director of 'The Pee-wee Herman Show' (1981), a more adult-oriented early version of the hit children's series 'Pee-wee's Playhouse,' with its star, Paul Reubens.
'I learned that comedy directs me,' Mr. Callner told the Times. 'If a comedian is doing something physical, it better be a head-to-toe shot. If he's making a poignant point, it better be on a close shot. It was reportage.'
At HBO, Mr. Callner also directed coverage of the Wimbledon tennis tournament; concert specials starring Liza Minnelli, Paul Simon, Diana Ross, and Stevie Nicks; and a filmed version of the revival of the Broadway musical 'Camelot,' starring Richard Harris, in 1982.
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After many more years of directing music and comedy programming, Mr. Callner conceived the HBO football reality show 'Hard Knocks,' which has followed one NFL team during the preseason since 2001.
His idea was to follow rookies during the preseason as they try to make the team. An in-season version of the series was recently added.
"Everyone wants to go inside the locker room and see what happens when guys get cut," he told the sports and pop culture website The Ringer in 2022.
Ross Greenburg, the former president of HBO Sports, said in an interview that the network and NFL Films quickly expanded the concept so that cameras followed not just the fate of the rookies, but also stories about the development of the upcoming season's team and veterans who are at risk of being told they are not wanted. Mr. Callner did not have an operational role in the series but he was an executive producer who won two Sports Emmys.
In addition to his son Jazz, from his marriage to Aleeza (Zelcer) Callner, who also survives him, Mr. Callner is survived by his daughter Tess Levi, from that marriage; his sons Dax and Chad, from his marriage to Jan Mussara, which ended in divorce; a stepdaughter, Lin Swenson; a stepson, Oriel Zelcer; and eight grandchildren.
In 1998, Mr. Callner directed Seinfeld in a live HBO special 'I'm Telling You for the Last Time,' from the Broadhurst Theater in New York.
"Once the show starts, I'm taking the lights down to black," he told the Times before the telecast. He added, "There's nothing worse than a comedian looking out at a lighted audience."
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He learned that lesson from directing a Steve Martin stand-up show in 1976.
"I had the lights up and cut around," he said. "His agent came up behind me and whispered in my ear: 'Cold and dark. Comedy's cold and dark.' I chose not to listen to him. Steve Martin informed me later I had made a mistake."
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But while Biggs's mobility and jab were often cited as the tools necessary to beat Tyson, no one really expected that much of the erstwhile Olympian, who had already endured at least one cocaine rehab. Beyond that? George Foreman, retired for a decade, had just embarked on what seemed a circus-like comeback. Cruiserweight champion Evander Holyfield was talking about eventually moving up, though his chances as an undersized heavyweight seemed fanciful and owed mostly to the success of Michael Spinks. Spinks was seen as the only truly interesting fight for Tyson. The real question, then, was for Tyson himself. What would his long reign signify? How would he compare with his predecessors? The question had less to do with his actual self than with his persona. Jack Dempsey, who had ridden the rails as a boy, came to personify the Roaring Twenties. Joe Louis was pressed into service as a shining example of American democracy on the eve of World War II. Just the same, there was a reason that the photograph of Rocky Marciano ruining Joe Walcott's jaw had assumed a place of such reverence, along with the Christ heads and centerfolds, in Italian social clubs and barbershops across America. Finally, there was Ali, whose mythic self had evolved into several incarnations, each one bigger than the last. Garry Wills once called Ali 'catnip to the intellectuals.' And it felt like Joyce Carol Oates began in a similar vein with Tyson in Life. Her note on Tyson as 'a psychic outlaw' feels like warmed-over Mailer, while her notion of Tyson as perhaps 'the first heavyweight boxer in America to transcend issues of race' seems hopeful but naive. Still, she made explicit what had been hiding in plain sight: 'He is trained, managed and surrounded, to an unusual degree, by white men.' That these white men had given Tyson, quite intentionally, a kind of Good Housekeeping seal of approval led to another of Oates's keener observations, in a subsequent piece that year for the Village Voice: 'For all his reserve, his odd, even eerie combination of shyness and aggression, his is a wonderfully marketable image.' Consider that Ali in 1979 — not yet retired but a beloved global icon, managed to get an endorsement for d-CON roach spray. But Tyson at a mere twenty-one — in addition to being HBO's 'walking billboard' — already had deals with Diet Pepsi, Eastman Kodak, and the Japanese brewer Suntory, as well a groundbreaking agreement (negotiated, like the others, by Cayton) with Nintendo for Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!, a video game that would sell more than two million copies in its first year. Cayton even thought to trademark Tyson's very Rocky-like nickname, Iron Mike. Perhaps, then, Tyson's true meaning had to do with his value as a commercial touchstone. But playing the pitchman — at least as his handlers had scripted the role for him — required some image scrubbing. 'To overcome the stigma attached to Mike's juvenile delinquent past,' recalled Cayton, 'we arranged for Mike to make a commercial on behalf of the New York City Police Department and an anti-drug commercial for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mike also did a commercial for the Internal Revenue Service and for United Cerebral Palsy. Each commercial was designed to foster the image of Mike as civic-minded and law-abiding.' 8 Mike Tyson on the cover of Ring Magazine in November 1987. The Ring Magazine via Getty Imag And, in a very particular way, whiter. 'In the way he's been handled,' noted The Ring's Jack Obermayer, 'it's almost like he's a 'white hope' in a Black man's skin.' Of course, the selling of Tyson began with the fairy tale of 'Cus and the Kid.' He had lived, essentially, in an all-Black world until D'Amato and his minions 'saved' him, in part by segregating him. He then attended mostly white schools and learned his craft in a mostly white gym above a small-town police station. His trainers were white, as were his patrons and even his cornermen, cut man Matt Baranski, and bucket man Lott, who'd now remind Tyson, per Jacobs's instructions, to remove his blingier pieces of jewelry before being interviewed on camera. Tyson, like Floyd Patterson before him, had been taught obedience in matters of commerce but had begun to bridle at the way he was being monetized. All those 'Just Say No'-style PSAs made him feel like 'a fake f–king Uncle Tom n—a' and 'a monkey,' Tyson writes in his biography Undisputed Truth. *** Nobody transcends race, not in America. But Tyson's racial predicament — or his cultural one, depending how you parse it — was distinct, and connected or perhaps conflated with his old neighborhood. 'Jimmy and Bill were intent on stripping away all the Brownsville from me,' he writes in that same passage. 'But Brownsville was who I was … Everyone knew I was a criminal. I had come from a detention home. Now all of sudden I was a good guy?' Something in Tyson would always romanticize the Street and judge himself more harshly than his contemporaries who hadn't had the benefit of an old man to save and rehabilitate them. Whatever Tyson had accomplished, he still wondered how it would play back home. That he no longer had a Brooklyn address didn't mean he'd ever left. Or ever would. 'To be honest,' says Lennie Daniels, one of his early sparring partners and among the very few Black men he met in Catskill, 'I don't know if he ever was happy being away from it.' That summer, Lori Grinker finally prevailed on him to do a shoot back in Brownsville. They left from Lott's apartment in Midtown. Tyson wore all white but for the geometric print on his T-shirt and his gold watches — a thin Cartier on his left wrist, a Rolex on his right. Grinker's photographs of that day seem straightforward enough: Tyson at the barbershop; Tyson signing autographs for the admiring children gathered around his blue Rolls-Royce; Tyson in sunglasses, resplendent in his white ensemble, sitting on the hood of the car, set against a pocked and weedy lot, greeting old friends like supplicants. 8 Mike Tyson, sitting on his new Rolls Royce, visits friends in Brownsville in 1987. Lori Grinker/Contact Press Images More remarkable, in Grinker's recollection, was an encounter on the drive out. Halfway across the bridge — either Williamsburg or Manhattan, she doesn't recall — a woman pulled up alongside the Rolls and handed Tyson a slip of paper. It was her daughter's phone number. Nothing unusual in that — except for the question it provoked. 'People who see me in this car, what do they think?' Tyson asked Grinker. 'That I'm a drug dealer?' The streets of Tyson's childhood had only become meaner and more deadly in his absence. The introduction of crack cocaine in the mid-eighties changed the culture of crime. Crackheads re-upped more frequently than heroin junkies. On the supply side, all those stickup kids from Spofford were bosses now. Or they were dead. Crack democratized the gangster life. You didn't need a French Connection or a made man willing to sell you kilos on consignment. You didn't need some weathered Sicilian to 'open the books' or get you a union card. There weren't many freer markets than the one for crack. All you needed was some cocaine, baking soda, a 9-millimeter automatic pistol or an Uzi, and enough balls to hold your corner. This was a new kind of Murder, Inc., and everyone seemed to be in the line of fire — not merely bystanders, innocent and otherwise, but also witnesses, potential witnesses, protected witnesses, even cops. I remember stories of teenage gangsters who had prepaid for their funerals, that they might go out with the proper pomp and respect, like something out of a vintage mob movie. Perhaps the stories were only apocryphal. But they had the ring of truth, or rather, in places like Brownsville and East New York, the ring of cinematic reality. By now, Al Pacino's Scarface had become a kind of documentary, a how-to primer on being a gangster. In the Seventy-Fifth Precinct, mothers put their children to bed in bathtubs, fearing stray shots that came through the windows after dark. *** On just such a night in the summer of '87, the blue Rolls made an encore appearance in the neighborhood, rolling up Sutter Avenue from Brownsville to East New York, past the beleaguered Seventy-Fifth Precinct toward the Cypress Hills projects. It had to be around 10:00 p.m. 8 Mike Tyson tries on a new outfit while shopping in Atlantic City in 1987. 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Tyson even went so far as to bankroll one old friend's crack operation: 'Five thousand here, twenty thousand there, just so that he didn't have to work for someone else. I wasn't a partner and I never wanted any return from my investment.' 'He wanted to be like us,' Gibbs says of Tyson. 'Mike wanted to be down.' And he was. The era had its own signposts, its own distorted frame of reference: the glorification of gangster pictures, Mafia tropes, and automatic weapons. More important, though, was its soundtrack. Tyson was in Spofford when he first heard 'Rapper's Delight.' Hip-hop quickly evolved from mere braggadocio to a reflection of life on the streets. He was sequestered in Catskill when Grandmaster Flash released 'The Message,' a percussive allegory about a stickup kid turned jailhouse punk and found hanged to death in his cell. 'Those was our people — all the criminals and thieves,' Tyson would recall of the genre's early years. 'We all listened to hip-hop: the moneymakers … the killers the robbers. All the f–king street urchins. We all listened.' 8 Mike Tyson poses for a portrait in 1988. The Ring Magazine via Getty Imag By 1987, the vernacular and imagery had changed again. Boogie Down Productions released Criminal Minded, a seminal hip-hop album that featured KRS-One and Scott La Rock (who'd die by gunfire just weeks after the Tyson-Tucker fight) with an arsenal on the cover. References to Uzis and 9-millimeters became common, including the inaugural hit from Public Enemy, eponymously titled 'Public Enemy No. 1': 'I'll show you my gun, my Uzi weighs a ton / Because I'm Public Enemy number one.' Gibbs remembers the cut fondly. It was a Friday on D block, eighth floor of the Brooklyn House. 'Yo, Glaze,' inmates started yelling, 'did you hear that?' Walter 'King Tut' Johnson — also from Cypress, famous for robbing at gunpoint three hundred members of his own mother's church — had called into WBLS during Mr. Magic's Rap Attack and dedicated the song to Gibbs. Coincidentally or not, the single also contained hip-hop's first lyrical reference — as best I can tell — to Tyson: 'I can go solo, like a Tyson bolo.' *** Never mind that neither Chuck D nor anyone else had ever seen Tyson throw a bolo punch. Tyson had now entered the zeitgeist in a way that hadn't been scripted by a white man. For a couple of years, Tyson had been promised as a successor to Dempsey, Louis, and Marciano. Surrounded by white ethnics in his camp, he was seen as safe. But Public Enemy — whose logo featured a man posing B-boy style in the crosshairs of a rifle scope — was not. 'Here's a rap group that doesn't aim to — or have a chance of — crossing over,' Daniel Brogan wrote in the Chicago Tribune. 'They're raw and confrontational, just the sort of thing that frightens programmers of every ilk.' Or would it? Hip-hop would change the market itself. Hip hop wanted a Sonny Liston. Whatever Tyson looked like to network executives or that guy with a VFW cap in the Latham Coliseum, he was something else entirely refracted through the prism of hip-hop. 'The moment was right for Tyson just like it was right for Dempsey,' says Merchant. 'Dempsey didn't become the Jack Dempsey of story and song until after World War I. Then a heavyweight champion suddenly materializes from our Wild West, with that rip-roaring style, fighting in places like Montana. There's a metaphor in there somewhere. But the same way all the dots connected for Dempsey, they connected for Tyson with Black inner-city culture. The street guys adopted him. They got Mike Tyson.' America was at the cusp of a bull market for bad guys. Merchant didn't comprehend this so fully at the time — nor did anyone at HBO. Ditto Jacobs and Cayton. 'They wanted me to be a hero,' recalls Tyson, 'but I wanted to be a villain.' There was only one man who had any real feel for what Tyson actually wanted, or how it would play. 'Don King,' says Merchant. 'King sensed Tyson could be bigger than big.' Mark Kriegel, a former sports columnist for the New York Post and the Daily News, is a boxing analyst and essayist for ESPN. He is the author of Namath: A Biography, Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich and The Good Son: The Life of Ray 'Boom Boom' Mancini.
