Marty Callner, a pioneering director of comedy specials who set the template for the style at HBO within the Nineteen Seventies earlier than happening to make music movies infused with humor throughout the early heyday of MTV, died on March 17 at his dwelling in Malibu, Calif. He was 78.
His son Jazz Callner stated the trigger was not but identified.
Over a half-century, Mr. Callner labored with among the largest names in common tradition, together with Jerry Seinfeld, Madonna, Robin Williams, George Carlin, the Rolling Stones and Chris Rock.
Mr. Callner, who most well-liked to remain within the background however was removed from shy, “is likely to be essentially the most profitable director you will have by no means heard of,” Jason Zinoman of The New York Occasions wrote in 2022.
Someday within the early Nineteen Eighties, Mr. Callner had an epiphany. Whereas watching tv at his dwelling in Beverly Hills, he discovered himself enraptured by a music video. It was Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes” — and he couldn’t take his eyes off it.
“I stated, ‘That is unbelievable,’” he recalled on the “HawkeTalk” podcast in 2021. He known as it “essentially the most inventive and entertaining factor I’ve ever seen” and recalled pondering, “I’ve acquired to go do that.”
MTV was then in its early days. However Mr. Callner was keen to surrender his profitable work on comedy specials at HBO for the inventive rush of constructing music movies.
In a gathering with Ahmet Ertegun, the chairman of Atlantic Information, Mr. Callner was given a alternative of three bands to make a video with. He selected the heavy metallic band Twisted Sister, and in 1984 he turned the group’s tune “We’re Not Gonna Take It” right into a humorous cinematic story of teenage revolt.
Within the video, a guitar-playing boy (performed by his son Dax) sends his indignant father crashing out of a window after he declares — in Mr. Callner’s voice-over — “I need to rock!”
“Nonetheless a lot Marty acquired paid, it wasn’t sufficient,” stated Rob Tannenbaum, who wrote “I Need My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution” (2011) with Craig Marks. “He made Twisted Sister.”
Mr. Callner spent greater than a decade making memorable movies for, amongst others, Pat Benatar, Bon Jovi, Alice Cooper and ZZ Prime. The 18 movies he made for Aerosmith included “Candy Emotion” and “Dream On.”
For the video for her hit tune “If I Might Flip Again Time,” Cher carried out on the battleship Missouri amid a whole lot of deliriously pleased, hat-waving sailors in 1989. Mr. Callner persuaded her to straddle a cannon, a alternative he defined by saying, “We’re getting as phallic as you’ll be able to presumably get.”
For a lot of the video, Cher wore a body-hugging black catsuit with mesh-filled cutouts, which she designed herself.
Throughout a rehearsal, Mr. Callner stated, the Navy’s liaison to the manufacturing was nervous that if Cher wore the outfit for the shoot, he could be punished by being despatched to the Aleutian Islands. He informed Mr. Callner that she couldn’t put on it.
“I stated, ‘You go inform her she will’t put on it,’” Mr. Callner responded. The liaison backed down.
Martin Henry Callner was born on Aug. 25, 1946, in Chicago, and grew up lower-middle-class in Cincinnati together with his mom, Etheljane (Hirsch) Callner, after his father, Barnard, left the household when Marty was 2. Eight years later, after Barnard Callner’s loss of life, his household, which had actual property wealth, embraced Marty because the final of the Callner line. He spent his summers with kinfolk in Chicago, largely with an aunt and uncle, till he was 18, surrounded by nice artwork.
He attended three faculties, together with the College of Kentucky, however he most well-liked partying to learning and he didn’t graduate. He later recalled that his creativity was unlocked when he was 19 or 20 and took a visit on the psychedelic psilocybin.
He didn’t discover an outlet for his newfound creativity till his mom, who labored at TV Information, instructed that he interview at a tv station in Cincinnati in 1969. Employed as a prop man, he was instantly mesmerized by the studio ambiance. He shortly grew to become the director of a number of exhibits.
However he left after just a few years when the station supervisor refused to present him a elevate — as a result of, Mr. Callner stated, he had left-wing politics and lengthy hair.
After being employed to make commercials in Cleveland, he left to direct Celtics video games for the Boston station WBZ-TV. In 1975 he joined HBO, then a brand new cable channel, and established himself as a director of comedy exhibits with “An Night With Robert Klein,” HBO’s first stand-up particular.
Mr. Callner’s incorporation of backstage footage, and his use of 5 cameras to seize the texture of Mr. Klein’s stay efficiency, had been known as “progressive” by the Occasions critic John O’Connor.
That plaudit led to a profitable take care of HBO to direct a sequence of stand-up comedy specials starring, amongst others, Mr. Williams, Mr. Carlin and Steve Martin. He was additionally a co-director of “The Pee-wee Herman Present” (1981), a extra adult-oriented early model of the hit youngsters’s sequence “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” with its star, Paul Reubens.
“I realized that comedy directs me,” Mr. Callner informed The Occasions. “If a comic is doing one thing bodily, it higher be a head-to-toe shot. If he’s making a poignant level, it higher be on a detailed shot. It was reportage.”
At HBO, Mr. Callner additionally directed protection of the Wimbledon tennis event; live performance specials starring Liza Minnelli, Paul Simon, Diana Ross and Stevie Nicks; and a filmed model of the revival of the Broadway musical “Camelot,” starring Richard Harris, in 1982.
After many extra years of directing music and comedy programming, Mr. Callner conceived the HBO soccer actuality present “Exhausting Knocks,” which has adopted one N.F.L. staff throughout the preseason since 2001.
His thought was to comply with rookies throughout the preseason as they attempt to make the staff. An in-season model of the sequence was just lately added.
“Everybody desires to go contained in the locker room and see what occurs when guys get minimize,” he informed the sports activities and popular culture web site The Ringer in 2022.
Ross Greenburg, the previous president of HBO Sports activities, stated in an interview that the community and NFL Movies shortly expanded the idea in order that cameras adopted not simply the destiny of the rookies, but additionally tales in regards to the growth of the upcoming season’s staff and veterans who’re prone to being informed they aren’t needed. Mr. Callner didn’t have an operational function within the sequence however he was an government producer who received two Sports activities Emmys.
Along with his son Jazz, from his marriage to Aleeza (Zelcer) Callner, who additionally 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 resulted in divorce; a stepdaughter, Lin Swenson; a stepson, Oriel Zelcer; and eight grandchildren.
In 1998, Mr. Callner directed Mr. Seinfeld in a stay HBO particular “I’m Telling You for the Final Time,” from the Broadhurst Theater in New York.
“As soon as the present begins, I’m taking the lights all the way down to black,” he informed The Occasions earlier than the telecast. He added, “There’s nothing worse than a comic searching at a lighted viewers.”
He realized that lesson from directing a Steve Martin stand-up present in 1976.
“I had the lights up and minimize round,” he stated. “His agent got here up behind me and whispered in my ear: ‘Chilly and darkish. Comedy’s chilly and darkish.’ I selected to not hearken to him. Steve Martin knowledgeable me later I had made a mistake.”
