was a dancer herself, to be in the video. She auditioned and Lister decided she was sufficiently talented to hire, putting her in a group of similarly-built women so her short stature and plumpness would be less noticeable. Jackie's girlfriend—who Lister did not know was Abdul—did not show up once rehearsals started, so Lister decided to go on without her. A few days later, however, according to Field, Jackie told him Lister wasn't right for the Jacksons. After a week Jackie and Abdul showed up at rehearsals, and Stein privately told Lister that Jackie had indicated that his girlfriend wanted to choreograph the video. She took her check and left. Abdul, a Laker Girl at the time, took over as the choreographer from that point. She said some of the members of the band approached her after attending a Laker game and asked if she wanted to choreograph their video. "My only problem was how to tell the Jacksons how to dance," Abdul later recalled. "Imagine me telling them what routines to do. I was young, I was scared. I'm not quite sure how I got through that." The success of the choreography in the video helped lead to Abdul's then new career of choreographer in music videos. It was also due to the success of the video that she was chosen to be the choreographer for the Jacksons' Victory tour. Filming took place at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, New York. On the first day Stein told his crew that since the Jacksons were devout Jehovah's Witnesses, no drugs or alcohol would be tolerated on the set. Shortly thereafter he was looking for two of them he needed for a sequence. Behind a cyclorama he saw them in 30-foot-high () silhouette "shoveling something into their nostrils. I ran the length of two football fields, kicked over the lights and no one ever saw it but me." Paul Flattery, a producer with the Picture Music International production company, blames the handling of this video by producer Diaz and director Stein for driving the company into bankruptcy. "I'll take the blame for many things, but not that video," Stein responds. "We were constantly waiting around for everybody to be ready. It was endless. I don't even know if there was a budget . . . I do not know what it ended up costing." Reception Reception for the song was mixed.