GOODBYE TO MTV (Free Subscription)

In this newsletter, Goodbye to MTV (Article), Limited Series vs Serialized - and Episodic (Video), Recommended Book of the Week, Guerrilla Marketing (Course), and How to Market the Video Pitch Deck (Video).

The Hidden Legacy of Music-Video Writers on Cinema

It seems fitting, in this moment of media transition, to reflect on what it would mean if MTV—the once-ubiquitous network that taught a generation how to watch music—went off the air. Far from being just a pop-culture relic, MTV’s rise and (eventual) descent hold important lessons for the film world, and especially for the often-invisible writers who helped invent a new visual grammar in the 1980s and beyond.

MTV and the Birth of a Visual Music Cinema

When MTV launched on August 1, 1981, it didn’t just add another soundtrack to people’s lives—it fundamentally reshaped how music was consumed and imagined. Prior to MTV, music videos were sporadic promotional tools—occasional fare on variety shows or late-night cable. But MTV’s 24/7 video format made them central to an artist’s identity. Suddenly, the visual became inseparable from the sonic.

Movies, commercials, and television began to feel that ripple. As MTV’s presence grew, its influence seeped into cinematic editing, pacing, music supervision, and montage. The rapid cuts, bold transitions, and intertextual visual flourishes in many 1980s films echoed the aesthetic of the music video. In effect, MTV helped train audiences to expect more visual energy—even from narrative film.

Writers, “Treatments,” and the Alchemy of the Music Video

Yet one of the most underappreciated contributions of MTV’s era lies in the work of music-video writers (or “treatment writers”)—those who sketched the narrative, conceptual, or metaphorical backbone of a video, before a director or cinematographer even stepped in. Their scripts were sometimes only a page or two; often more a poetic, surreal outline than a full screenplay. But in those few lines, they had to marry the emotional arc, the beat changes, the hooks of a song, and a visually striking narrative or metaphor.

These treatments guided directors, choreographers, editors, and visual artists alike. In many cases, the writer’s role was to imagine how a music video might function like a short film: a miniature narrative, symbolic tableau, or cinematic dream. Over time, that approach taught a generation of visual storytellers how to think in micro-cinematic units.

One notable example is Ric Menello, a cinephile, screenwriter, and influential figure behind many early music videos. He co-wrote and co-directed the Beastie Boys’ “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)” video, drawing on classic cinema and layering visual irony atop a party anthem. Menello had been writing treatments for music videos for years; his sensibility was hybrid—steeped partly in film knowledge and partly in lowbrow humor and pop culture collage. His work helped transform music videos into small, high-concept visual experiments.

Writers like him blurred lines: sometimes they shifted from video treatment to feature screenplay, or influenced directors who would later cross into film. The techniques developed in those short video scripts—elliptical transitions, rhythmic montage, visual metaphor—fed back into cinema.

The Cinematic Afterlife—and What’s Lost

If MTV were to go off the air, or dramatically scale back its video programming, what would we lose—beyond nostalgia—especially from a film perspective?

A training ground for visual writers and directors. The music video era became a kind of incubator: directors (e.g. David Fincher, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry) got early breaks making music videos or video commercials, often building from the kinds of scripts and treatments MTV required. The act of turning 3–5 minute songs into visual stories sharpened their instincts. Losing that pipeline removes one of the few low-barrier creative laboratories where writers, visual thinkers, and risk-takers could sharpen their craft.

A bridge between music and cinematic narrative. MTV normalized a visual–music syntax—fast cuts, montage, self-reflexive visuals—that later found its way into mainstream films. Music video sensibilities infiltrated opening title sequences, music montages in film, even trailers. The echo is everywhere: consider how many films nowadays treat their music sequences as mini-videos. Without MTV’s central stage, that cross-pollination risks diminishing.

Diminished demand for writers of short, high-impact visual forms. In today’s world, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram Reels, vertical video, and AI might fill parts of that void—but they seldom invest in a narrative treatment written by a dedicated writer. The “scripted visual hook” is often collapsed or algorithmically generated. The disappearance of a platform like MTV means fewer opportunities for deliberate, poetic, human-crafted video scripts to be commissioned, refined, or preserved.

The archival and cultural loss. MTV was not just a broadcaster; it became an archive of music’s visual history. It documented fashions, youth culture, aesthetics, ideology, and the evolution of visual storytelling around songs. For writers and film historians alike, it’s a trove. Turning off the lights risks losing institutional memory—and erasing a living lineage of how visual storytelling evolved in relation to music.

Conclusion: Turning Off MTV Isn’t Just Turning Off a Channel

If MTV were to vanish—or even to retreat to a shell of reality programming—it would be a symbolic closing of a chapter in the convergence of music and cinema. For film writers or visual storytellers, the loss is not merely sentimental: it’s structural.

MTV nurtured a form of micro-cinema tied to rhythm, metaphor, montage, and sonic emotion. It provided a platform, sometimes unstable but always daring, for writers to experiment in marrying sound and sight. Its influence lives on in feature films, commercials, music documentaries, title sequences—and, more subtly, in how we expect music itself to tell stories.

So as we imagine a world with no MTV, let us remember that we’re not just losing a TV channel. We’re putting a torch out on one of the rare creative incubators that taught writers how to think cinematically, at the scale of a song. And if we aren’t careful, the path forward may yield fewer spaces for writers to sculpt our visual musical imagination.

Here’s a proposed chart of notable music-video treatment / concept writers / hybrid writer-directors—people whose scripting, conceptualizing or treatment work helped shape the visual language of the music video era. (Because the “writer only” credit is often invisible, some names blend roles as writer, director, treatment creator, or auteur.) After the chart, some brief commentary on each.

Table: Important Music-Video Treatment / Conceptual Writers & Influencers

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