At one point during his career—let’s assume rather early on, shall we?—Miami Vice actor Philip Michael Thomas coined the affirmation acronym “EGOT,” which stands for “Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony.” Because he planned to win all four. At the 1984 Academy Awards ceremony, Thomas wore a gold medallion emblazoned with the letters “EGOT.”
So far, Thomas hasn’t been nominated for any of these awards, but he did become the spokesperson for the Psychic Reader’s Network in 1994, claiming that he’d met the world’s top psychics via his world travels. I wonder if he ever asked any of them about his chances for an “EGOT,” the grand slam of showbiz?
From Vanity Fair:
In one profile, he compared himself to Gandhi; in another, he claimed that women came up to him and said, “Oh God, I love your thighs, I want you to take me to bed with you!” He bragged about his friends (“Steven Spielberg calls … I get calls from Nancy Reagan … The Queen of England wants me to come over”) and even about boasted about the breadth of his reading (“I read books on philosophy, religion, higher learning, and spaceships”).
Maybe the Queen and Nancy Reagan just loved his thighs? The gold “EGOT” medallion is a pretty Kanye move, right? Well, either Kanye or Tracy Jordan...
Keep reading.
Thomas made an attempt at a musical career, beginning with a 1985 album titled Living The Book of My Life, which he apparently wrote most of the songs for and produced himself. There’s a music video that was made for the single “Just the Way I Planned It” and it’s THE standard-setting stunner of a massive celebrity ego trip—a goldmine of comic hubris—that has remained unmatched since 1985.
Dig the lasers, the “cosmic” THIRD EYE, his face superimposed over the pregnant woman’s belly, the greasy forehead—WHAT THE FUCK was this guy thinking? Obviously it was Thomas himself who came up with the concept here. WHO ELSE POSSIBLY COULD HAVE??? No, it was Thomas himself who was clearly responsible for displaying himself to the world in this manner. No one else would have had… the motivation. Just him, the gold “EGOT” medallion-wearing guy. It was, ahem, just the way he planned it and that’s undeniable! It looks like he choreographed it, too!
From the LP jacket:
Listen to the magical mystical melodies of the universe…calling out your name…moving your soul and spirit through life’s cosmic game…Look deep into the mirror of your soul and discover a wonderful truth…The greatest book you’ll ever know is written and lived by you!
Or in this case, “Tubbs” from Miami Vice.
I originally saw this atrocity exhibition on a Manhattan cable access program called Bad Music Videos that was hosted by Karen Finley and art critic Carlo McCormick, a mid-80s TV show (and nightclub performance) that mocked, well, bad music videos, long before Beavis and Butthead. After I saw it, I wanted, nay, needed to have my own copy and within a few days, a friend of mine at MTV had a 3/4” dub of it messengered over to the video post-production house where I was then working. I made countless crisp VHS copies of this thing. I was an evangelist for its awful awfulness. It never failed to work its magic. Everyone’s jaw dropped when they saw this shit sandwich
Yours will, too.
Forget about that Billy Squire debacle, there is virtually nothing, I repeat, nothing, that’s worse than the Philip Michael Thomas video embedded below. Keep in mind that he wrote the song, produced it and conceptualized and directed this video, too (WHO ELSE would have produced such an epic piece of dreck to glorify the man-god who is PMT???). Thomas is an auteur of such incredible bad taste that he rivals John Waters in that department, with the important distinction that with John Waters, it’s deliberate.