Lionel Richie – Dancing On The Ceiling

The trick was thirty-five years old. Motown paid more than anyone had ever paid for a music video, and hired the man who invented it.

Reports put the budget somewhere between $350,000 and $500,000, with around $400,000 the figure most often cited, which made it the most expensive short-form music video anyone had produced to that point. Motown spent that on a visual gag that a Fred Astaire picture had already pulled off in 1951. The money did not go toward inventing something. It went toward hiring the man who had done it the first time and asking him to do it again, bigger.

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Richie in 1986 had no equal in American pop. Can’t Slow Down had sold ten million copies and taken the Grammy for Album of the Year, and in March 1986 he collected an Academy Award for Say You, Say Me. The follow-up album was going to be called Say You, Say Me too, until he rewrote enough of it to change his mind. Recording ran more than a year and a half across five studios. Motown released Dancing on the Ceiling on August 5, 1986, and the album went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and sold four million copies in the United States.

The title track was the lead single, out on July 15, 1986. Richie wrote it with Mike Frenchik and Carlos Rios, the session guitarist working his second album with him, and produced it alongside James Anthony Carmichael. Billboard’s Hot 100 took it to No. 2 that September, where Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” and then Huey Lewis and the News blocked it from the top. It reached No. 7 in Britain, No. 1 in Norway, and the top five in Sweden and Belgium. Critics were not kind and have not warmed since: AllMusic filed it under indulgence, and Blender later put it at No. 20 on a list of the fifty worst songs ever recorded. The record is a bouncy piece of nothing and does not pretend otherwise.

The room turned, not the dancers

Stanley Donen directed the video, thirty-five years after directing Royal Wedding, the film in which Astaire walks up a wall and across a ceiling without a cut. The mechanism is the same in both: the room is built inside a rotating drum, the furniture is bolted down, the camera and its operator are strapped to the floor and turn with everything else. What the audience reads as a man defying gravity is a man walking normally while the world rolls around him. Astaire did it alone. Donen’s 1986 version puts a whole party in there, which is considerably harder to keep upright. Michael Peters, who had choreographed Beat It and Thriller, staged it. The shoot took three days at Laird International Studios in Culver City and one day at the Mondrian in West Hollywood, and the video premiered on September 8, 1986.

The rest of it is 1986 concentrated to a syrup — a Ferrari, keytars, Rodney Dangerfield and Cheech Marin wandering through, and a skirt-over-the-grate nod to The Seven Year Itch. One of the dancers in the room was Diane Alexander, who married Richie in 1995. Donen later offered the detail that gives the whole production its shape: Richie adjusted to the rotating room faster than Astaire had. Whatever the song is worth, the man could work the rig.

Richie went out on a forty-city tour behind the album and then stopped. He would not release a record of entirely new material for another ten years, and nothing he made afterward came close to what these three albums had done. The single that closes out that run is the one nobody defends, and it has outlasted plenty of better songs from the same year for a reason that has almost nothing to do with the music. Faced with the problem of following the biggest album of his life, Richie did not try to invent a new image. He bought forty seconds of film history and stood inside it.