"HE INNOVATED THE MUSIC VIDEO WORLD, HE WAS DOING THINGS PEOPLE HADN'T DONE BEFORE."
-Mike Frankfurt: Entertainment lawyer
Giraldi set the tone for music videos in the early MTV days. His narrative and musical storytelling abilities were first seen in Michael Jackson's "Beat It" as the video swept the country and won numerous awards including that year’s coveted American Music Award, the Billboard Music Award and the People’s Choice Award. Hand-picked by Jackson himself, ‘Beat It’ became the stuff of legend partially because of real life members of the Bloods and the Crips; notorious LA gangs. The shoot almost turned into a disaster though, as Bob recalls an incident that almost halted the entire production::
"I thought he was crazy, but Michael got the police to go along with it. He got the Crips and the Bloods to go along with it. Everything was fine for half a day. Then after lunch it got hairy. One of the Crips started smacking one of the Bloods around, and there was a fight. The police said, 'we have to shut this down'... I thought 'There goes the music video.' So I countered, 'Let me try one thing. Just one thing. If it doesn't work we close it down and go home. Let me play the music.' And we picked it up from Eddie Van Halen's guitar solo... Peace. It worked— everyone crowded around and watched Michael and his posse dance their asses off—The way those kids danced,,,the look on the faces of the crips & bloods said it all: 'We may be the baddest asses in the world, but that's something we'll never be able to do."
Next up was making the first music video ever to feature dialogue, as Giraldi directed Pat Benetar's "Love is a Battlefield" soon after, He directed Michael Jackson again, this time with Paul McCartney for their song "Say Say Say." Then his favotrite , “Hello” with Lionel Richie. Giraldi continued to win acclaim and define the future of the medium, working with even more music luminaries: Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Ricky Martin, Hall & Oates, earth wind & fire, Will Smith, and more.
"The wonderful thing about working with Bob is
he can take your lyrics...spread them out and
really expand them to another dimension, to another level."
-Lionel Richie