Film and music was combusting into MTV when John Mellencamp invited me to work on a documentary about him. For a lifelong cinephile and music head like me, it was a golden opportunity to get behind the camera and I seized it. After which I directed a number of music videos, most notably Stevie Wonder’s “It’s Wrong (Apartheid)” from In Square Circle, but for the most part I became a well known practitioner of what was being called “the long form”: documentary and performance pieces in which I was able to use the camera to tell vivid stories about artists and the music they were creating. My work from 1983-89 as a writer and director ran the musical gamut from Prince to Ravi Shankar, and included some of the biggest and most diverse artists and groups in the world, many at critical personal junctures and creative transitional phases: Aerosmith, Billy Joel, Luther Vandross, Teddy Pendergrass, Phillip Glass, Julio Iglesias, the Highwaymen. In 1987 I collaborated with Alan and Susan Raymond to make ‘Elvis 56, a film about one year in Presley’s life that was acclaimed as one of the best pieces ever done on a rock and roll figure and cited by Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney as one of their personal favorites. I have since written, produced and directed many hours of television for broadcasters as diverse as VH-1, CNN, History, The Sundance Channel, HBO/Cinemax, and PBS. Among them are The Drug Years, which was based on my book, Can’t Find My Way Home—one of the most successful doc series in the history of VH1—followed by Sex-The Revolution and Lords of the Revolution. My last documentary, Planet Rock: The Story of Hip Hop and the Crack Generation, produced for VH1, was nominated for Emmys in Outstanding Arts & Culture Programming and Outstanding Achievement in a Craft: Writing.