99 Tigers

A Creative Agency

Extreme Poetry In The Mountains

Posted by Glenn Lazzaro for his series “Adventures in Television”

“I am a blackhole supernova, colliding with a proton, genetically-engineered from a hooker, mutated into a circus clown, riding on a unicycle. What I mean is: my words make me extra powerful.”

Patrick Anderson. Poet.

In 2000 ESPN was bringing the Winter X Games to the east coast for the first time and they were looking for an entirely different way of packaging the show. The games were going to be broadcast on the ABC network for the first time and they wanted to make a big impression. I had been attending “Poetry Slams” at the Bowery Poetry Club for a while and thought that Slam Poets were similar to extreme athletes in many ways. Both groups push the limits of their chosen field, both are misunderstood by the general public and both compete as individuals.

I had been doing quite a bit of work with ESPN at the time so I presented the idea of using poetry as a way to package the show to VP of Event Production, Jamie Reynolds. The concept was to take five young poets from the streets of New York City, and ask them to write poems for the Winter X Games. The poems would celebrate both the games and the people and lifestyle associated with it. I chose Sage Francis, Patrick Anderson, Beau Sia, Laurel Barclay and Amanda Nazario- all nationally recognized Slam Poets to write poems specific to the games.

We set off to film on location at Mt. Snow Ski resort in Vermont. We were hoping to shoot on top of the ski mountain with vistas of the valley as a backdrop. Of course when we arrived in January a huge cold front swept thru the area dropping temperatures to 10 below zero with wind chills on the mountain-top at 30 below zero. Mt. Snow closed the mountain the day we arrived. We though we would have to reschedule the shoot but my Cinematographer Trish Govoni was undaunted. We scouted the area and found great snowy landscapes that could only exist in Vermont. We made an old barn with hubcaps nailed to it our home base. We also used the forest behind the motel to shoot. (On that location we were able to use hair dryers to warm up the Poets between takes)

Everyone in the action-sports world at the time was “cut crazy.” I was also “cut crazy” but felt as a Director I needed to do something different with the Poets. I really wanted showcase their intense performances. We shot the poems in their entirety without worrying about how long they would be. We did very little coverage because I did not want the poems to be “edited” after the fact. (We did have to do some cuts because the poets were freezing and had trouble doing the long poems without making some mistakes) Somehow we got it done and no one froze to death.

ESPN had expected the poems to be inter-cut with action sports so when I showed them the pieces they were entirely surprised. To their credit they realized that they had a great opportunity to do what they had wanted to do all along. That is: to do something unexpected. The poems formed the framework for the 4 days of live programming and ran unedited just as I hoped.

On February 6th, the X-games began with a haiku by Patrick Anderson.

There is a snowman

his eyes are two perfect x’s

the snowman is me

BONUS: A cut featuring all the Poets reading their haikus.

Inside Pee-Wee’s Playhouse

Posted by Glenn Lazzaro for his series “Adventures in Television”

I am very proud to have been included in a new book  entitled “Inside Pee-wee’s Playhouse: The Untold, Unauthorized, and Unpredictable Story of a Pop Phenomenon” By Caseen Gains. Its a great read about the making of the original CBS television show and filled with great-behind-the-scenes stories and photographs.

Believe it or not, this “Connect-the-Dots” segment I edited for the show was  considered “state-of-the art” in 1986.

If you are interested in reading the book you can get it here:  http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Pee-wees-Playhouse-Unauthorized-Unpredictable/dp/1550229982/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321373227&sr=1-1

 

 

 

Kurtis Blow “America”

http://vimeo.com/30957074/settings

Posted by Glenn Lazzaro for his series “Adventures in Television”

National Video Center, New York City, 1985.

In the early ’80s when hip hop & rap were first noticed by the mainstream, most of the music videos were dance tracks and for the most part, devoid of political messages. Then Kurtis Blow released the single “America” and all that changed. It was a political rant about everything that was happening during the Reaganomics-Cold War-Anti-Russian era in America. Claude Borenzweig, then working at Polygram Records, was editing & directing internal projects when he got the chance to direct the “America” music video. Claude came up with the idea of a classroom filled with kids where Kurtis would teach them the “real” history of America. David Brownstein and Len Epand produced the shoot for Claude on the main stage at National Video. They shot on videotape using the giant, old-school studio cameras that were usually used to shoot “Sexually Speaking with Doctor Ruth.”

Claude did a rough cut using the classroom footage he directed, and a second cut using stock footage that we would combine in the edit. As usual, we went into the edit room over the weekend so we’d have all the time and equipment we needed. We needed time because we had no edit list, no After Effects, no digital storage, no tracking marks. Just an old Ampex ADO and lots of “crossed fingers” that we’d match the motion between the camera moves and the composited footage. Sometimes it matched. Most times it didn’t.

Needless to say, the special effects seem crude compared to what is possible today. But at the time they were considered state-of-art. We also used the then very popular technique of running the footage thru a black & white monitor to distort it.

Claude hadn’t shot any footage for the Pledge Of Allegiance section of the song, so I was enlisted to lie under the title camera and lip-sync the part. Yes, that’s my ’80s mustache you see inserted into the blackboard starting at 18 seconds in.

Shortly after we finished the video, I worked with Frank Zappa on a week’s worth of programming called “Porn Wars” for the music show “Night Flight.” Zappa would appear at the PMRC Senate hearings in Washington during the day, then come to National Video in New York to tape his segments for “Night Flight.” One night I showed him “America.” He was really excited that the rap world was finally getting political and asked for a VHS copy. I was very proud.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bonus: Article about Claude and the shoot in Optic Music Magazine

TeenNick Halo Awards

Posted by Glenn Lazzaro for his series “Adventures in Television.”

2010. Los Angeles.

When Steph Sebag, owner & creative director at BPG, called and asked if I wanted to direct a spot he wrote for the 2010 TeenNick “Halo Awards,” I  jumped at the chance. The spot, cut to Beyonce’s “Halo,” would showcase all the great things teens around the globe were doing to “change their world.” Steph’s idea was to create different tableaus using a series of movable sets that changed from one into another in one continuous “flow,” without using any cuts. The sets would be like giant “transformers” with movable walls and floors on rollers and tracks. Teen cast-members acting as stagehands would physically move the sets on cue and thereby change the world of someone in need.

The “flow” went like this: An outdoor city street would transform into a mailroom; we would travel through a door and find ourselves at a devastated house in Haiti; the destroyed house would morph into a brand new home; the house would rotate to reveal a market in Mumbai; the market would split open to reveal a classroom; the camera would pan across the classroom and enter a bedroom; the bedroom walls would split to reveal a basketball court; the camera would follow a basketball up to the sky and then down to a beach.

For safety’s sake, art director Andrew Trosman had to build sets strong enough to support up to 12 people at a time. This made them very, very heavy. So heavy in fact that on our shoot day, our teen cast-members couldn’t move them on their own. In the spot it looks like the teens are moving these huge sets by themselves, but in reality lots of people off camera were helping: the grips, the electrics, Steph, and me. Even David Chustz, then VP of Brand Communication for TeenNick, and his producer Matthew Perreault spent most of their day hidden, helping the teens move the sets.

In the end, we got the whole thing shot in one long, long day and the spot won a Promax Silver Award.

Bonus: An early crude storyboard I did.

 

 

CBS Letterman In London

http://vimeo.com/29331311

Posted by Glenn Lazzaro for his series “Adventures in Television.”

1995, National Video Center, NYC.

David Letterman was going to London for a week and Linda Danner, then head of the CBS Late Night Promo Department, wanted to do a big spot announcing the stunt.

The problem: there was no London footage. The show would be live, so there would be no footage until the first show aired. We came up with an idea to shoot some maps and iconic London landmarks to intercut with existing footage from New York. We were hoping to create a kind of 1940s movie sequence, where a plane is superimposed over a moving map to indicate the hero’s journey to a far-off land. Of course, once we started putting it together it evolved into something very different.  It was 1995, not 1940, and we loved manipulating footage to create wacky, abstract imagery.

Linda and CBS producer Jane Fogtman started scouring tourist shops for New York City and London iconic miniatures: the Statue of Liberty, a NYC taxicab, a double-decker Bus, the Empire State Building, etc. Finding the props today would be easy, but this was pre-Internet so it took a while.

Art director Kevin Largent would then repaint them with Letterman and CBS logos.

He also built some beautiful miniatures of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Ed Sullivan Theater with a lighted sign. We especially loved the lighted sign. We were crazy for it. We kept turning it on and off until we finally burned it out.

We set up a tabletop shoot at National Video Center with the help of my live-action producer, Susie Shuttleworth. She hired DP Steve Kasmirsky to shoot 16mm film. I shot a hand-cranked 16mm Bolex, creating single-frame animations and flash-frames, for what we called in those days “poor man’s production value.”

After the shoot, we transferred the film to tape and the footage Steve Kasmirsky shot looked really pretty. Too pretty. Too pretty for the aggressive mix track that Bob “Boom Boom” Chapman had done. We thought the messy, grainy, flashy Bolex footage meshed better with the spot Linda wrote. So we distorted the “pretty” footage beyond recognition to match the Bolex footage. (Sorry, Steve.)

Bonus: Later that summer, we shot a spot for the “Late Show”based on the Tim Bodet-voiced Motel 6 spots. The much-loved Ed Sullivan Theater with the lighted sign made a cameo appearance in two shots.

http://vimeo.com/29484957