Music Video’s Godfather

Before its programming consisted exclusively of faux documentaries about seventeen-year-old crazy girls, MTV used to play videos. And before MTV, there was Chuck Statler, a filmmaker who lived in Minneapolis, directing local ads and shooting industrial videos. This month, November 2–4, during a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Statler’s apotheosis as the Godfather of the Music Video becomes official.

From 1977 to 1983, Statler shot around sixty short music films for emerging new wave–era stars such as Devo and Elvis Costello. With a shock of white hair and bushy sideburns and a pronounced cupid’s bow over gapped teeth, Statler looks the part of the seventies auteur. And he’s sheepish about all the attention paid to his old reels. “When people pestered me about showing this stuff, I always declined because I was too embarrassed.” He grimaces. “It just looks like Little Rascals. I did this when there was no money.” He gave in when producer and friend Jeff Krulik (known for the cult-mullet-doc Heavy Metal Parking Lot) convinced him there was a healthy audience for the vintage clips.

Statler got his start when he attended Kent State art classes with Devo principals Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale. “We met in experimental sculpture class,” Statler remembers. “I built boxes with colored contact paper and put motors in ’em so they vibrated. It took me a whole quarter to do that.” After graduation, Devo was on the verge of breaking up, so Statler volunteered to “document the occasion.” His first film, In the Beginning Was the End (1977), was a surreal ten-minute clip with the band in monkey masks. It was shot for $600 (split with the band), and earned Devo a record deal with Warner Bros. When MTV debuted, video budgets exploded, but Statler was burned out and disinterested in leaving Minneapolis for LA.

He’s looking forward to the MOMA show, but he has an ulterior motive: “I’m doing this to flesh out my story and give me an answer when people ask, ‘So, what brings you to New York?’ The real focus is to pitch a documentary on elevator music that I’ve been working on for three years.”