MadameNoire Featured Video

The phrase “fake it until you make it” was created specifically for Sharon Oreck.  Her memoir Video Slore details her hilarious and sometimes scary encounters with celebrities and their minions on the sets of ’80s and ’90s music videos.  Unlike other memoirs or thinly veiled works of “fiction,” Oreck names names.

Her stories about Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince and other superstars are not exactly surprising, but funny nonetheless.  According to Oreck, Naomi Campbell physically assaulted her assistants and propositioned a skittish Michael Jackson with oral favors on the set of “In the Closet.” Tommy Lee paid a hapless set helper $2,000 to eat a booger at a video shoot. Whose booger it was remains a mystery. See? Not surprising, but funny. There’s nothing malicious in Oreck’s writing. Her words don’t make her or the celebrities look anything but human, which sometimes means whiney and unreasonable and often times funny–in retrospect at least.

Starting out as a teenage mother on welfare, Oreck takes thankless and woefully underpaid crew positions on B-list movie sets until she does what a lot of people seem to do to make it in Hollywood. She lies. Instead of cluttering her resume with the truth of her less than stellar career in movies, Oreck simply makes up movies and gives herself fancy titles.  With Google and IMDB, nothing like that could work today, but back in the 80’s, people were kind of at the mercy of resumes. In an instant, she transforms herself into an established, experienced  producer.

Her first video as a producer is Sheila E.’s “Glamorous Life.” Oreck is not familiar with Sheila E or her pint-sized friend Prince, but she is quickly brought up to speed during a strange meeting where Prince and Sheila E sit on silk pillows and silently approve kooky polyester costumes.

Sprinkled within the juicy and hilarious celebrity stories are bits of Oreck’s humble beginnings and her unconventional path to an unconventional job.  The story is not told in a linear fashion and at times, the book gets patchy and disjointed. Still, it’s worth a read. Oreck tells a lot of behind the scenes stories about popular videos in Video Slore. It’s fun to watch those videos again and know who had a wardrobe malfunction, what certain scenes were supposed to look like or which celebrity dad berated the director and producer of his daughter’s video to the point that his daughter cried.  Looking at you Joe Jackson.

Comment Disclaimer: Comments that contain profane or derogatory language, video links or exceed 200 words will require approval by a moderator before appearing in the comment section. XOXO-MN