Lair of the Beast, or MTV v. Me

by John Moynihan

It was about a year ago that the first charnel winds began drifting down from 1515 Broadway. That's where the Beast lives. The MTV beast, that is. I got The Call in the editing suiting at Betelgeuse: The Maxx was months over schedule; as a result our production was canceled.

Well, actually the process wasn't that clean. Being The Beast they dragged it out as long and as painfully as possible, then said we were to blame. You see, it's really not their fault. Somewhere in their addled brain I believe they truly convinced themselves of that. Of course the fact that we didn't roll over and play dead was, in the Beast's view, an egregious crime on the level of Belerophon's hubris of riding Pegasus to Mount Olympus.

Sure, we were doing state of the art, full animation, digitally composed over elaborate stop motion backgrounds replete with multi-planes, focus shifts, layered shadows and kodaliths. But what we didn't do is shut up and quietly go away.

We paid off all the 70 or so New York City artists, inkers, painters, musicians and actors, as well as all the sound and post-production personnel, but declined to return our contractually secured budget. You'll never work for MTV again! roared the Beast. That quote, a verbatim outburst, is indicative of the Beast's attitude. They see themselves as 19th century robber barons who will brook no independent thought, who will show no professional respect or integrity.

And as for MTV's vaunted revival of animation in New York, apart from a few under-utilized artists in the Paramount Building, they do all their work in California and Korea, churning out poorly rendered monotonies that look like bad high school sight and sound exercise.

But they are, after all, the Mighty Caesers of American cutting-edge culture hey, just look at that groovy teen dating show! Indeed, one of the Imperial House said: John, you're a trip, and I'm tired of being on it. This coming from a Creative Director who had never heard of Di Chirico or Magritte.

Some of our work remains on Oddities: bastardized versions of the opening and closing credit sequences. To paraphrase Eric von Stroheim, reacting to the studio-butchered cut of his epic Greed it was like walking into a graveyard and seeing bits of a ravished corpse: a rib here, a shin bone there.

The Beast, as always, is a voracious devourer of whatever gets in its way.

John Moynihan, New York City