The Art Of Reverse Graffiti
By Robert Goldrich
Doug Pray enjoys the self-described “gray area” he’s carved out for himself in the advertising arena. Best known for his feature-length documentaries such as the recently released Surfwise and Big Rig–and earlier films like Infamy and Scratch–Pray finds himself called upon as a commercialmaker to often work with actors and try to get them to act as if part of a real documentary. Conversely he’s frequently been coupled with non actors on spots, his goal being to elicit from them solid, believable performances.
While he revels in those scenarios, Pray can also look back fondly at a more clear-cut proposition presented to him this year–a three-and-a-half-minute piece that 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.
Titled The Reverse Graffiti Project, this mini-documentary was made on behalf of client GreenWorks, an environmentally safe line of cleaning products from Clorox, for agency DDB San Francisco. DDB creatives gravitated to Pray for the project based on Infamy, his 2006 documentary that delved into the lives and minds of six notorious graffiti writers.
“For me the simple approach was best,” related Pray whose spotmaking home is Los Angeles-based Oil Factory. “It’s always a challenge to figure out how art and commerce can properly mesh. Yet I viewed this project as GreenWorks commissioning a film about an artist. It was a win-win situation. I’m filming in the streets of San Francisco showing Paul doing his thing–while doing the thing I enjoy, documenting an artist and his art. I love portraying artists. From Paul’s standpoint he got some well deserved attention as an artist–what he’s doing is really cool, profound and he’s a genius at it. And GreenWorks wins through an interesting association with cool, environmentally responsible art.”
That art was essentially a mural in San Francisco’s Broadway Tunnel. Curtis created a greenscape in a dirty urban environment. And the web film showing him creating the art generated an overwhelming positive buzz and hundreds of thousands of hits on the web.
Originally DDB thought its staffers would shoot the mini-documentary themselves guerilla style with digital cameras. But Frank Brooks, DDB San Francisco director of production pushed for the agency to go with an accomplished documentary filmmaker, Pray.
Indeed that helped the project immeasurably. It’s one thing to pass a :15 or :30 whacky film around virally for laughs. But it’s quite another to get a fairly serious three-and-a-half-minute documentary passed along. Pray’s documentary sensibilities and the unique appeal of the subject–artist Curtis and his artwork–helped make for a captivating portrait that viewers found entertaining, informative and worth sharing with others.
Diverse fare This year two Pray-directed documentaries were released. In May his Surfwise, an intense and entertaining portrait of the Paskowitz family–telling the story of legendary surfer Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, his wife and their nine children who were home schooled on beaches around the world–debuted in theaters. In June, Pray’s Big Rig, an insightful look at truck drivers, came out on DVD.
And at press time, Pray was in the midst of Art & Copy, a feature-length documentary about advertising and creativity–and their profound effect on modern culture. The One Club project will tell the stories of such notables who while known in our industry aren’t exactly household names in the general public–creative luminaries such as Lee Clow, George Lois, Mary Wells Lawrence, Hal Riney, Dan Wieden, David Kennedy, Phyllis K. Robinson, Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein.
Art & Copy is scheduled for completion in December.
Meanwhile interspersed among Pray’s documentary endeavors are assorted spots, including an anti-smoking ad for the Virginia Tobacco Settlement Fund out of agency Barber-Martin, Richmond, Va., which is a 50-50 mix of real couples and actors, We see these couples kissing spontaneously in various settings. The tagline points out that nonsmokers “get kissed more.”
Pray’s spot credentials also include “Cynthia” and “Ed,” PSAs for the Kaiser Family Foundation and Viacom, part of the “Know HIV/AIDS” campaign from DDB Seattle.
In “Cynthia,” for example, Pray took an actor and put her in a real situation that was emotional and intense. The actress was a parent and played the part of a mom who traveled to an AIDS treatment clinic in El Salvador and reacted to what she saw. The piece indeed rang movingly true and earned a best PSA Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS).
Pray’s documentary acumen has also been applied to ongoing work for the grocery store chains Stop And Shop, and Giant out of agency Mullen in Wenham, Mass. “The commercials are incredibly simple, the ‘stars’ being real people who have never been filmed before,” said Pray. “We cast in the actual stores. These aren’t your typical testimonial ads. We go into these people’s homes, they talk about their lives, their kids, their families.”
Returning to the aforementioned “gray area” cited by Pray, he kicked off the year with two shorts for Kodak out of Ogilvy & Mather, New York.
The three-minute films had Pray cast actors but he gave them characters to portray and interviewed them to get closer to the essence of a real person performance.
In one of the shorts, a pregnant woman looks to connect with her mother who lives overseas. Using Kodak technology, the expectant woman constructs a flip book documenting the milestones of her pregnancy so she can share her experiences with her mom in Spain.
In essence the spirit of this storyline parallel’s Pray’s talent and affinity for sharing lives and experiences through his filmmaking.
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More