The Story Behind the Aviddiva Video of Nobody Know Me
MadonnaTribe has received more information about how the Nobody Knows Me Avid Diva remix video, edited by director/editor
Dustin Robertson came to life.
The nine-minute piece came about while Madonna was editing both the video and remix video for her single Hollywood at Dustin’s studio called Aviddiva in Venice, California along with Jean-Baptiste Mondino, the Hollywood director.
A die-hard Madonna fanatic himself, Dustin showed Madonna a rough montage of magazine covers he had done as an homage to Madge in his feature self-portrait called Pumping Velvet. The preliminary magazine montage she saw presented her life in order but only as it appeared on magazine covers around the world. As the montage was ending she screamed, “But there’s more! There’s a lot more!
Right then and there Madonna decided that she would not shoot any additional footage for the video for her next single, Nobody Knows Me, but rather it should be an assembly of everything she ever did in her life in order throughout her career and commissioned Dustin to complete what he had already started to do. Dustin rose to the occasion, bringing with him over 36 hours of personally digitally archived master tapes he had already been assembling throughout most of his life. After 2 months of reviewing Madonna‘s work journals in which her daily appearances were detailed, Dustin had assembled, in order, clips from every major event, appearance, video, tour, film and commercial Madonna had been a part of since her very beginnings. What Dustin didn’t already have (which wasn’t much), Warner Brothers and Madonna‘s office supplied including an appearance on Oprah, Unpublished Versace Stills and rare Japanese liquor commercials.
The video is set against a driving, dance remix track that Dustin himself remixed using samples from old Madonna tracks mixed into a sparce bed of Nobody Knows Me to tell Madge’s epic tale both sonically as well as photographically, ironically suggesting that, if you think you know Madonna after all you’ve seen, you’re wrong… as she sings over and over, Nobody Knows Me.
Dustin’s Director’s cut presented at the MVPA sponsored event, “Director’s Cuts” is Dustin’s original version of the piece before Madonna requested many scenes/chapters be deleted from the montage including all pornography, The Sex Book, A Certain Sacrifice, Coffee Talk w/ Babs, Sandra Bernhard, Sean Penn, Warren Beatty, Dennis Rodman, Tony Ward, and basically anybody else she’d ever dated other than Guy Ritchie. Apparantly Dustin had been Too Thorough in his efforts to throw Pop’s First Lady’s life back in her face… or maybe everything she actually did finally caught up with her all at once. But this uncensored version has it All in – the Madonna we all DO know and love and can’t forget- wouldn’t want to if we could. It’s quite intense and impressive when examining just how much STUFF Madonna’s really done… and in Dustin’s words, “The Bitch has lived!”.
A watered down, jewish and family-friendly, married mother Ester, G rated version is available through different Madonna bootleggers and video dance remix compilations found most commonly in gay bars as the clearances for the different clips in the video itself were never secured- a conscious descision on Madonna‘s part to put out something underground and epic yet unsellable… much like Dustin’s self-portrait, Pumping Velvet, in which a sped up :90 second version of Nobody Knows Me now appears, as paid for and commisioned by Madonna herself.
Special thanks to Celeste from Aviddiva for kindly supplying this article to MadonnaTribe readers.