Revisiting the Velvet Bowels of Advertising Part 4: "Energy is Power"

OK I just remembered. Before Bud's Dance, before the Oregon Lottery work, before the World Cup spots for Weiden and Kennedy, before the first taste of the sting of bad, expensive and lucrative big name national boards there was "Energy is Power." I'd known Darrell Williams for quite awhile. He was one of the guys at Marx, Knolls, Denight and Dodge advertising agency, which was one of the places I went once in a while when I was trying to make the transition from lighting director, AKA gaffer to director... what! I'd do a spot or show something that I shot as a cameraman or recut something and stop by. Darrell and the guys would come out. They would look. They would smile. They would ask a couple of polite questions, thank me and return to what they were doing. Ray Dodge, the guy with his name on the door, was a really sweet man. I remember having a conversation with about how he was troubled by doing a spot for a lumber industry lobby group. Integrity? When I think about the Portland Advertising community in those days I remember pretty much everybody as really decent people. At Borders, Perrin and Norrander executive creative director Tom Kelly went to the trouble to find me even though he couldn't read my phone number on the overly artsy label I used to have on my reel. There was Rob Rosenthal when he was at Cole and Weber and then Jim Carey who took over for him when he went on to start his own shop. And Darrell.

Let me say this right up front. Darrell Williams is a genius. Darrell Williams is one of the best writers I have ever read. Darrell can turn a bleach commercial into a warm, touching and needless to say funny exploration of the duality of human nature as seen through the eyes of a smart, slightly alienated 12 year old girl. Listen it's one thing to get to work on really whacked out creative at either end of the spectrum. Big money. Nike. No money. Oregon Lottery. But it's another thing altogether to consistently come up with brilliant stuff in the world of direct marketing.

On one potential project he had this idea that he and I would get cheap round the world tickets, a camera and a minidisk recorder and hit then very new ruta del Lonely Planet. In fact the minidisk recorder was the product. The story was about this cool, quirky, young vagabond and his recorder gathering aural souvenirs from the globe. Music, conversations, street sounds, Gitanos in the caves of the Sacre Monte in Granada, Inuit Throat singers, death metal bands in Helsinki, old ladies hocking fish in Indonesia.

OK, I have a minidisk. I love it. Others love it. But the concept and the product tanked. Why? Because it was designed to be an alternative to something that was basically perfect. The CD. OK it was smaller and like cassettes you could dump music on it but really who needed it. Nobody. But what this 3" x 3" x 1" wafer could do was record amazing audio. And what you recorded was available in a non-linear way... it was like a studio in your pocket. Darrell saw through the smoke of another corporate dance to sell yet another format to an unsuspecting public who had in a period of just a few years just dumped their records for cassettes and then dumped their cassettes for CDs. Darrell saw what the thing was good for. Darrell saw a huge army of pierced, dread-locked backpackers kids hitting the road to see the world beyond the suburbs. He wanted them to take these gadgets and grab sound like snap shots. Sound without images. Sound as an absolutely pure, unsullied medium. He wanted to change the world through audio and this cool little box. Millions of kids making mix tapes (disks) of little windows into the soul of man, passed around like trading cards, spreading a virus of understanding and compassion. It was brilliant. It was transcendent. Well, they, being the big they, passed. You wanna what? You're going where? I suspect they wanted a well scrubbed, cute teenage couple happily jabbering between "Call to Actions", pimping the box and the Mariah Carey catalog to that vast demographic perceived to have money to burn, no brains and nothing to say... American youth. If they had only listened to Darrell.

Darrell came up and I suspect comes up with these works of genius on an hourly basis. Being brilliant is as easy as breathing for this guy. It's in the wiring.

The road trip seems to figure into Mr. Williams world and it was one of these that he proposed to me over breakfast one Saturday morning. Why me? I have no idea but I'm glad he asked. Ostensibly he had to create a short film for the a trade meeting for the Bonneville Power Administration. He wanted to drive up the Columbia River Gorge. He wanted to take an very straight office intern who would serve as talent. We would shoot some stuff.

So we hit the road with a wind up Bolex, a cheap tripod incapable of panning and the intern. On the way up we talked about our childhoods, the business, our wives, his children, my pets, movies we wanted to make and music. As long as I have known him Mr. Williams has been this oracle of really great and often obscure music. And his taste is impeccable.

At that time I had been watching a lot of documentaries by Errol Morris. Although I found parts of his films to be mean spirited and not exactly fair to his subjects I was attracted by how he just let the camera sit there. No swank moves. No severe lens. Just a plain frame... an unadorned canvas. And the timing of his editing was just... off. Things were on the screen for too long. A guy would slowly walk across the frame, look at the camera, wait for very long time and then a pull lizard out of a garbage can. It was so designed but unpolished. I loved it.

I guess "Energy is Power" is the first time I tried to purposefully be unflashy. The guy stands there. He waits too long and gestures. He acts uncomfortable. He was uncomfortable. It's funny. The scale of things is off. 10 story power lines loom over an almost imperceptibly tiny guy. Metaphor? Probably.

I think too that in this film I started to play with a concept that I began to think of as "wet and dry." Energy is Power has a "dry" half and a "wet" half. Obviously the dry half is the stuff with the intern and wet stuff is the archival (stolen) stuff at the end with the music. Both parts are in there own way fine but when you combine them you really get something that is more than the sum of it's parts.

About the trip. I think we brought the bike so we must have had some idea in mind. We picked the inflatable punch bag up in the Dalles. The plastic pig too.

I shot the other material, the frying pan, the fan, the tea kettle, the spring in the studio of a friend the next afternoon.

We then hit the library and the video rental store gathering images to steal for the "wet" section. Darrell brought in a piece from "Big Audio Dynamite" for the soundtrack. See I told you he had great taste. We cut it one a Montage, the first non-linear editing system. Then on to sound design across the hall at Digital One. Then we had a beer and in the process of making this little gem had became friends. Here's to you Mr. Williams!