She’s Breathless
During more than three decades as a producer, Michael Seligman has amassed enough anecdotes to fill a book or two. Or three.
While he can’t reveal most of them, Seligman does recall one incident involving Madonna he can relate.
In 1990, the year of “Dick Tracy,” Madonna is scheduled to sing the film’s Oscar-nominated song “Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)” during the “Academy Awards” broadcast.
“And she worked her tail off for that song,” recalled Seligman, who served as the show’s supervising producer. “She worked with a choreographer. She worked for three weeks straight every day, day and night, refining this number. She’s a perfectionist.”
The problem is not everything works perfectly during a live broadcast.
“We rehearsed everything and it went fine,” said Seligman.
The production calls for Madonna to rise from below the stage on a lift through a hole in the stage floor. Once Madonna is on stage, a stage engineer in the rafters will be instructed to switch on her microphone and she’ll sing.
“So it’s time for Madonna to sing and the stage manager with his headset on tells the stage engineer to switch her mike on. But nothing happens. He repeats himself. Nothing happens. The mike doesn’t go on,” said Seligman.
“So the stage manager tells Madonna in this nervous kind of voice that the stage engineer is not answering his call and her mike isn’t being put on. ‘But don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You’ll be handed a mike when you get up on stage. It’ll be fine.'”
Madonna apparently disagreed.
“As the lift is about to go up, she grabs the stage manager by the neck,” said Seligman. “Now the lift is going up and the stage manager is going up by his throat. She finally drops him, grabs the mike and does the number perfectly.”
Seligman later learns that the heat from the lights in the rafters affected the engineer and he fell asleep. “He looks for me in the truck after the number and I told him that stuff happens,” said the producer. “We became friends after that.”
And the song that Madonna sang? It won the Oscar.