What is art? Director Doug Pray has provided different, thought-provoking answers to that question over the years as reflected, for example, in his Grand Jury Prize-nominated feature documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival—first in 1996 for Hype which chronicled Seattle’s grunge music scene; in 2006 for Scratch which took us into the world of hip-hop DJ’ing; and in 2009 for Art & Copy which focused on advertising’s creative luminaries (from Phyllis Robinson to George Lois, Mary Wells and Hal Riney, et al) and the profound impact of their work on our culture. Art & Copy went on to win a News & Documentary Emmy in the Outstanding Arts & Culture Programming category in 2011.
Produced by The One Club, Art & Copy aired on PBS’ Independent Lens series and was an official selection at the Sundance Film Festival in ’09.
Art & Copy captures the magic of creative thinkers and their impact on American culture and lifestyle,” said Mary Warlick, CEO of The One Club and executive producer of the film. “From the time we were given permissino to ‘Think Small’ in the ’60s to being told to get off the couch and ‘Just Do It’ in the ’90s, it is an exciting look at how ideas and advertising affect all of us.”
Pray’s filmography also includes Infamy, a documentary about graffiti culture as told through the experiences of six well-known graffiti artists and a graffiti buffer.
This 2005 film later led DDB San Francisco to director Pray for The Reverse Graffiti Project, a three-and-a-half-minute documentary centered on Paul “Moose” Curtis, a pioneer of the art form known as “clean tagging” whereby dirt is cleaned off surfaces in public places to create shapes, designs, collages and words (through the use of letter stencils) that convey positive messages. In what had been a dirty urban environment—San Francisco’s Broadway Tunnel—Curtis created a greenscape mural. The film showed him creating this art, triggering an overwhelming positive buzz and hundreds of thousands of online hits. The Reverse Graffiti Project initiative for GreenWorks, an environmentally safe line of cleaning products from Clorox, went on to earn DDB a Media Gold Lion and an Outdoor Silver Lion at Cannes in 2009.
Fast forward to today and Pray is again exploring another artform, the artist behind it, its place in the art world and the effect on society at large.
Pray’s feature documentary Levitated Mass: The Story of Michael Heizer’s Monolithic Sculpture chronicles a massive piece of art that became part of pop culture before it was ever on official exhibit—a 340-ton rock sculpture that reclusive land artist Michael Heizer and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) arranged to have transported across Southern California.
The 10-day journey, which had the granite boulder on a 294-foot-long, 206-wheeled trailer, drew camera crews and tens of thousands of people along a route that ended at LACMA. This in turn generated public discussion about the sculpture—whether or not it is art, and what exactly is modern art?
Levitated Mass made its world premiere at a special Los Angeles Film Festival screening in June at LACMA. Pray’s film will continue on the festival circuit, likely play at different museums and gain exposure on other platforms still to be finalized at press time.
The backstory of the art, the artist Heizer, LACMA’s interest in the sculpture and its rise in the public consciousness are all a part of Levitated Mass. SHOOT caught up with the director—who is represented for spots and branded content by Bob Industries—to discuss the documentary, his other recent exploits and his commercialmaking career.
Relative to the ad arena, The Reverse Graffiti Project wasn’t Pray’s first recognition at Cannes. Five years earlier in 2004, a Pray-directed Gill Foundation campaign—consisting of the spots “Dave,” “Steve,” “Frank,” “Kimya” and “Lisa” from DDB Seattle—won a Bronze Lion at the Cannes Festival. The Gill Foundation is a privately funded LGBT organization and the spots were part of a “TurnOut” campaign designed to raise awareness that it was still legal in 36 states at that time to fire someone for being gay.
For the project, men and women agreed to come out to their bosses in documentary-style ads. While the actual confrontation is not shown on screen, what’s captured is the moment just before their admission. The spots are honest snapshots of people who are about to do something that could get them fired, helping to convey the unfair nature of their predicament.
SHOOT: How did you become involved in Levitated Mass?
Pray: The project was produced by Jamie Patricof [and Lynette Howell] of Electric City Entertainment (The Place Behind The Pines, Blue Valentine). Jamie called me about three years ago and said that he heard about this giant boulder that’s going to be moved from the desert into the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It will take days to move—streetlights and signs will have to be moved around. It sounded like an incredible journey. I immediately said, “Stop right there. I love it. I’m in.”
This was at first simply a small film about a large rock. Then I got more interested as I got deeper into the story—the art, the artist, what this event meant to him, what it meant to the museum. I became fascinated with Heizer, an artist who works on an extremely large scale and is relatively lesser known than other artists.
He’s not like Christo who does huge media events. This is also about the museum doing everything it can to continue Los Angeles’ dynamic role in the art world, to make LACMA a destination unto itself.
And it was great to have it all come together with the L.A. Film Festival screening of Levitated Mass at LACMA where people could look at the sculpture and see the movie.
SHOOT: What lessons did you learn from the film?
Pray: I learned about the art world, the story of art, people doing amazing things in the name of art which are not entirely logical—and what it takes to do that, the kind of momentum you need to build in order to do a large-scale art project like that. Then there’s the price you pay for doing large public art. What if people don’t like it or don’t get it? What if people are confused or pissed off by the art? In the end, the message you take from it is patience. Heizer started in 1968 and unveiled his boulder in 2012. It’s a story of persistence and patience. As Heizer says, “A decade is like a second to me.”
SHOOT: There seems to be a theme running through many of your films, centering on art and artists of various kinds.
Pray: In every movie I’ve made—maybe not the truck driving movie [Big Rig]—I tend to celebrate really unique forms of expression. That has been consistent in my work. Graffiti is misunderstood but in Infamy when you get to know the story and the people behind it, you realize that graffiti can be a powerful human expression. The same with advertising as we showed in Art & Copy. On the surface, the tendency is to look down on advertising and think that it’s not art. It’s commerce. But the best advertising is an incredible personal statement, exhibiting great creativity that influences our culture. Actually Infamy could be a nice double feature with Art & Copy.
SHOOT: And the short subject film screened in-between the two could be The Reverse Graffiti Project, which in a sense brought together the art of advertising and the art of a special brand of graffiti-inspired art. The Reverse Graffiti Project was made awhile ago, though. What are your most recent directing endeavors in the ad arena?
Pray: I’ve done three major projects in the last eight months through Bob Industries. First, I did a series of commercials and short films for Scion, telling stories of people who are social motivators, doing dynamic things that positively motivate others. One story was about a food activist in Oakland [Calif.], a chef, author and vegan champion who’s inspiring his community to eat healthy. Another was the owner of a cool bicycle shop in downtown Los Angeles who is motivating people to bike and exercise more. And the third piece is about a promoter, musician and booker in San Francisco who puts on cool shows, promoting different acts and performers. These people filmed their own daily lives and I also shot with them a few days for documentaries that are in line with the theme, “What motivates you? Make every second count.” They all had Scion cars to use for a month so the vehicles had a presence but the entire focus was on these people in their roles as social motivators. Attik in San Francisco was the agency.
Next we did a large project for Microsoft’s Xbox, the announcement film for the new Xbox One platform. Everyone from Bill Gates to Steven Spielberg to top gamers in the world was featured. These gamers are well known in the Xbox gaming community but for me it was another new subculture to explore. The ad agency was twofifteenmccann, San Francisco.
And I’m currently working on an ambitious project for Principal Financial Group out of TBWAChiatDay, Los Angeles, which I’m not yet at liberty to discuss publicly in detail.
Overall, I very much enjoy my work in advertising. It informs my documentary work just as my documentary experience informs and enables me to bring something more to commercials and branded content.
