The Full Story of Club MTV

A television truck parked on East 14th Street at four in the morning, and by noon a nightclub had been turned into a studio. Fifteen half hour shows came out of it in two days, and every one of them was finished before a single person danced. Then a punk band handcuffed the host on her own show, and the crew had to talk her into going back out to say goodbye to them.

Club MTV premiered August 31, 1987 and ran until June 26, 1992, taped at the Palladium nightclub in New York and hosted by Downtown Julie Brown. It grew out of her VJ shifts moving into city clubs, was directed by Milton Lage, and was shot at a punishing rate: 15 half hour episodes across a Sunday and a Monday. The archival record counts 1,245 episodes.

The show grew out of a night shift

Downtown Julie Brown was not hired to host a dance show. She was hired as MTV's sixth VJ, and the show assembled itself around her afterward.

"'Club MTV' was born a little later down the road," she told the Kickin' it Old School blog in 2011. "Once I had gotten settled, our crew decided to take my shifts out of the studio and on to the streets. One thing led to another, we started to do segments at night clubs around New York City. The Tunnel was a funky downtown club that was always on our list. From that 'Club MTV' was born."

By then MTV was branching well past VJ segments, and the people running it were building shows out of whatever the channel already had. Milton Lage, who had joined MTV in July 1981, weeks before it went on the air, and had worked his way from production assistant to director, got the call. He named the executive who made it in a 2022 interview on The Hottest Party On TV, a podcast hosted by Jeromme Graham that has spent years interviewing the show's dancers and crew.

"The executive producer at the time, Doug Herzog, gave me a call and said... we're talking about doing this dance show," Lage said. "And we think you'd be the perfect person to direct it." Herzog had joined MTV in 1984 and rose to oversee the channel's original programming.

The venue did a great deal of the work. The Palladium had been a 1927 movie palace on East 14th Street before Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, fresh from Studio 54, converted it into a nightclub in 1985, with the interior redesigned by the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki and commissioned artwork by Keith Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf and Francesco Clemente. It was already the most technically ambitious room in the city when the cameras arrived.

"The Palladium was such a fantastic venue," Lage said. He pointed to the wall of monitors as the thing that sold him, cutting edge in 1987 and unremarkable now, and to moving stage lights that almost nobody else was using yet.

Two pilots, or one

Here the tellings split, and they have never been reconciled.

The archival record says flatly that Kevin Seal hosted the pilot. Brown's version has the job nearly going to him and then being taken back: "Truth be known, they actually gave the pilot to Kevin Seal but thank goodness the top brass came to their senses and the show was passed on to ME! It was my favorite show ever. Even to this day."

Lage remembers a bake-off instead. "Yes, it was Kevin Seal and Julie Brown," he said. "I believe we shot... two pilots. And I believe Kevin Seal did one pilot and Julie Brown did the other..."

He was clear about why the decision went the way it did, and it had nothing to do with either performer's talent as such. "I just got a feeling that he was more like tongue in cheek when he was doing that, doing the pilot," Lage said of Seal, "that he didn't really take the show serious." Brown, a former disco dancing champion in England before MTV found her, took it entirely seriously.

That mattered because of what the host was expected to do. "Whatever dance shows that were out there was always by these middle-aged men who would host the show," Lage said. "None of them ever got out there and danced with the kids." Brown did, then turned to camera and talked. "Julie was... the perfect person to host that show."

Fifteen shows in two days

The number is the story, and two people who were there give it independently.

MTV's math came from executives who had not made television before. "A lot of the executives at MTV... came from radio," Lage said. "They really didn't have like a television background. So I don't know whoever crunched the numbers. They came up with, well, if this is going to be economically feasible, we have to do 15 shows in two days on a Sunday and a Monday, which nobody's ever done anything like that. Fifteen half hour shows in two days."

The load-in began after the club shut down for the night. A television truck pulled up outside the Palladium in the small hours of Saturday, the production crew came in around four in the morning, and cameras, monitors and Club MTV signage went up on a deadline. "And at 12 noon, we had to be ready to go."

Then they shot. "And then on Sunday, we would do seven shows, seven half-hour shows. And then on Monday, we would do eight half-hour shows. And everybody thought we were crazy, but we did it."

Lou Stellato, the show's writer and floor producer, gave the same figures in a separate 2022 interview, down to the split, and did not pretend to remember which day carried which. "Writing the scripts for 15 shows," he said of his own pre-production work. "And then, you know, we shot in two days, seven shows and eight shows or eight shows and seven shows. I forget." Once the floor was rolling it moved fast: "it took a half hour or less to shoot a show."

What made the pace survivable was that the crew was never in the room. The director and the other producers sat in the truck on the street. "They were in the truck outside on the street, outside Palladium," Stellato said, "because their job was to oversee the entire production, how it was going technically."

The show was finished before anyone danced

The most unusual thing about Club MTV is that it had almost no post-production, because the episode was built in advance and then performed against.

The method came from Joshua White, who had created the Joshua Light Show in the 1960s and spent that decade projecting liquid light behind rock bands. "What he had us do is we didn't do post-production," Lage said. "We would do pre-production."

The crew went into an edit room and laid the entire half hour onto a reel: the open, the music bed that would play under Brown's links, each video in order, the commercial breaks at full length. "So the whole show was pre-produced on a reel."

On the floor, that tape rolled and everyone chased it. "Julie knew she had 30 seconds to read. She couldn't go over. And if she went a couple seconds over, she would hear the video starting. So she knew she had to wrap it up." The breaks were counted down as though the show were live, because functionally it was. Stellato described the same thing from the floor: "It was basically assembled live... So the show was shot in real time."

The payoff was that the episode existed the moment they stopped. Fixes for a camera error or something inappropriate said on the floor got handled in the truck, in the 45 minutes or so between tapings, and a finished show walked out of the building. "And that was the genius of pre-producing the tape so that the show was like already built when we went in there," Lage said. "I don't think anybody else has ever done it like that."

It was also a step up in scale for him. VJ segments had been shot with two cameras. "When we did Club MTV we were working with six cameras including a crane."

"Wait a minute, there were scripts for Club MTV?"

The best-kept secret of the show is that it was written.

Stellato's job title was writer and floor producer, and he tells a story about how invisible the writing was. Years later, at a convention, a former Club MTV dancer was introduced to him as the show's floor producer and writer. "She said, wait a minute, there were scripts for Club MTV?"

"But yes, there were scripts," Stellato said. "But that's the beauty of Julie. You would never know there were scripts." He wrote to her voice rather than the other way round: "there were scripts, but I knew how to write for Julie. And I knew how she would make any kind of copy, her own."

The floor producer's other job was the host herself. "I would be glued to Julie and take her through the show," he said, walking her through where they were in the running order, who the guest was, what they were performing, and where she needed to stand. He was blunt about why that role exists at all. "Anybody that works with talent has to make sure they feel safe... And for Julie, her feeling safe was being able to laugh."

Her own account of the pace matches the strain, though not the arithmetic. "We would sometimes be shooting 10-15 Club MTV shows A DAY," Brown said in 2011, describing dancers who were "always ready to go when the red light came on" and never complained, while she sometimes did. Her catchphrase came directly out of that. "So instead of swearing when things got a little hairy or going wrong, if I wanted to let the director know, I would simply look right into the camera, smile and say 'Wubba Wubba Wubba'."

The format had more give in it than its reputation suggests. Lage pushed to widen what the show would play, and got there occasionally: he remembered a Ramones performance working completely, and wished the show had taken that kind of swing more often. The crew also once rigged the pre-produced tape so that the dancer cued to announce the first song named a Frank Sinatra number instead, then watched Brown's face while the floor gamely danced to it for a minute and a half. "But it just goes to show those kids would have danced to anything."

The night the format broke

In 1988 the Dead Milkmen were booked to perform "Punk Rock Girl." Three people who were in the building have described what happened, from three different positions, and their accounts fit together.

Stellato, standing next to the host, called it a booking that should never have happened. "It was a case of the wrong band on the wrong show," he said. "I don't know how that booking happened. And I understand, you know, they're a punk rock band. But what is a punk rock band doing on Club MTV?"

Christian Liendo, a dancer, was in the mosh pit that formed on the floor, and says it was not a production decision. "The mosh pit wasn't really planned. It wasn't something that MTV wanted to do. But it ended up happening." Things started raining down on the dancers mid-song. He picked one up and found it was a gummy worm.

Then the band turned on the host during the interview segment. As Liendo recalls it, someone was messing with her hair, another member handcuffed her, and someone threw a worm. Brown's own line about it, in the oral history I Want My MTV, is short: "The Dead Milkmen handcuffed me," she recalled. "I got a bit pissed about that."

From the floor producer's angle it was worse than the tape shows. "They had an image that they wanted to sort of portray," Stellato said, "and unfortunately, that image involved making Julie very uncomfortable... She didn't know they were going to do that." He was clear that the crew was blindsided too: "And so it was a little bit of a hijack."

What happened next is the part almost nobody knows. The show was on a schedule and the schedule did not care. Brown was upset backstage, and there was still a segment left to shoot with the band that had just done it. "We had to tape with them again because she had to say goodbye," Stellato said. She did it, and it does not read on camera.

Liendo, meanwhile, was certain everyone in the mosh pit was finished. "A feeling of dread came upon me," he said. "Because I felt anybody in the mosh pit was gone. And the fact that I got called back, I couldn't believe it." When Brown came back out to the dancers, he says, she settled it herself: "She allowed the show to go on. And we continued to go on. And she was good with us."

One footnote says something about how big MTV had become by then. Lage, the show's director, did not do that taping and had no idea who the band was. "I don't even know who the dead milkmen are," he said. By the late run his associate director, Beth McCarthy, was directing some episodes.

A separate incident at a Daytona Beach spring break taping ended the same way, faster. When a performing band's singer carried a local dancer offstage and a close-up showed she was crying, the production stopped the music mid-performance, and the band apologized to her.

Why it ended

The show did not die of low ratings, according to the man who directed it. Lage's recollection is that Club MTV pulled numbers the channel would envy now, "around or above a million viewers", and he is emphatic: "It was never a ratings problem. Club MTV used to kill in the ratings." Those figures are his memory rather than a ratings record, but nobody involved offers a ratings explanation.

His account is a management one. "There was a changing of executives. And I think the new executives, like, because they didn't come up with Club MTV, didn't feel like it was one of their shows, felt like they had to come up with their own thing."

Brown, telling it two decades earlier and without prompting from any of this, said the same thing in her own words. By the end she was no longer doing VJ shifts and was only shooting Club MTV, "that was my baby". Then: "New brass came on board and wanted to go in other directions. MTV had already moved into the new programming and I just did not have the wardrobe for it!"

The obvious alternative explanation does not survive the dates. The Palladium was not the reason: the club stayed open until August 1997 and was demolished in 1998, more than five years after the final episode aired on June 26, 1992. Lage made the point himself, that the venue was still standing when the decision came down, and the record backs him.

How the telling has grown over the decades

• 2011, Kickin' it Old School. Downtown Julie Brown gives the origin from the host's chair: the crew taking her VJ shifts into New York clubs, The Tunnel, the pilot that was handed to Kevin Seal and then passed to her, the "Wubba Wubba Wubba" origin, and her account of leaving when new executives arrived. Republished by Rediscover the '80s in 2020, which is how most people encounter it now.
• 2017, Slicing Up Eyeballs. The Dead Milkmen handcuffing resurfaces via the I Want My MTV oral history, with Brown's one-line reaction. For years this is essentially the whole public record of that taping.
• 2022, The Hottest Party On TV. The podcast opens the crew up. Milton Lage (January) supplies the production spine: Doug Herzog's call, two pilots, the 15-shows-in-two-days economics, Joshua White's pre-produced reel, six cameras, and the executive-change ending. Lou Stellato (March) reveals there were scripts at all, and gives the Dead Milkmen night from beside the host. Christian Liendo (May) gives it from inside the mosh pit.
• 2023, ongoing. Dancer interviews continue, and the 2021 anniversary event the podcast built around the show, held on August 31, quietly asserts the correct premiere date against a decade of pages repeating a wrong one.

The drift is worth naming, and there is a lot of it on this show.

The pilot has three versions: the archival record says Kevin Seal hosted the pilot, Brown says the pilot was given to Seal and then passed to her, and Lage says two pilots were shot with one host each. Nobody has reconciled them.

The taping rate has two. Brown says "10-15 Club MTV shows A DAY". Lage and Stellato, independently, both say 15 shows across two days, seven and eight. The crew's number is the one that matches the load-in schedule and the run of show, but her figure is what the days felt like from the middle of them.

And the premiere date has been wrong online for years. This page says August 31, 1987, which is the archival record's date and MTV's own press timeline. The competing "September 1985" comes from the blog's editorial framing around the Brown interview, not from anything she said, and IMDb carries a 1985 start too. The people who made the show corroborate 1987 without being asked: Lage dates his directing run from the 1987 launch, and dancers cast for the pilot place it in the summer of 1987.

The honest bottom line

Club MTV was cheap television. It was fifteen interchangeable half hours banged out over a weekend in a rented nightclub, built on a pre-recorded reel so nobody had to edit anything, staffed by teenagers who were paid in exposure and danced to whatever the music department sent over, including songs they audibly groaned at. The format was borrowed wholesale from shows that had been running for decades. Almost nothing about it was original except where it was pointed.

But that is also the achievement. Somebody worked out that a dance show did not need a studio or a middle-aged host behind a podium, that you could put a camera crane in a real club on 14th Street and let the person introducing the records dance in the middle of the floor. It ran five years, and every dance show that came after it on that channel was measured against it, usually unfavorably by the people who made this one.

Sources

• Kickin' it Old School, interview with Downtown Julie Brown, originally published April 6, 2011, republished by Rediscover the '80s, January 3, 2020.
• The Hottest Party On TV, episode 12, interview with Club MTV director Milton Lage, host Jeromme Graham, January 13, 2022. Quotes transcribed from the episode audio.
• The Hottest Party On TV, episode 19, interview with Club MTV writer and floor producer Lou Stellato, January to March 2022 run, published March 10, 2022. Quotes transcribed from the episode audio.
• The Hottest Party On TV, episode 30, interview with Club MTV dancer Christian Liendo, May 26, 2022. Quotes transcribed from the episode audio.
• Slicing Up Eyeballs, "The Dead Milkmen make a mess of 'Club MTV'", May 11, 2017, quoting the oral history I Want My MTV by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum. Brown's handcuff quote is reproduced from that outlet's citation of the book, not read from the book directly.
• Wikipedia, "Club MTV" (premiere and finale dates, episode count, network and venue record, cross-checked; its premiere date cites MTV's own archived press timeline).
• Wikipedia, "Palladium (New York City)" (venue history, 1985 conversion, 1997 closure, 1998 demolition).

More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: American Bandstand in the 80s and the full story of Remote Control.

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