LAUNCH SOMETHING NEW

By Doug Pray

“Creativity can solve anything…anything!” So said the legendary art director and adman George Lois, who created countless iconic covers for Esquire and made “I want my MTV” a catchphrase. It’s the final quote in my new documentary Art & Copy (damn, I gave away the plot!). George is almost shouting as he says it, because it’s a challenge to the rest of us. He’s saying that it doesn’t matter who you are or what job you’re stuck in—you can be creative, you can inspire others, you can affect your world. You don’t have to be an artist to be creative. You can be a waitress, a plumber, a secretary, a midlevel executive, a teacher, a salesman, whatever. You can be deep inside the system or way off the grid. There’s no board certification or license for creativity.

The people we call great artists are the rare few who’ve figured out how to use a creative medium—whether it’s paint, trumpets, or dance shoes—to make us feel something. George Lois and his contemporaries like Mary Wells (who put Braniff Airways stewardesses in Pucci uniforms for her End of the Plain Plane campaign), Lee Clow (who introduced the Apple computer to the world with the legendary 1984 commercial), and Dan Weiden (who gave us “Just Do It”) were doing the same thing, but they did it through advertising. They worked in an industry known for mediocrity and manipulation and spent years battling with committees, market researchers, unimaginative clients, and lame products, yet somehow they still managed to communicate something authentic, inspiring, and human to a mass audience. As the producer of my film once put it, “They grew flowers in hell.”

Even though more than $500 billion is spent annually on commercial messages, and billions more on delivering them to us via hundreds of commercial satellites orbiting the planet, the vast majority of advertising is lowest-common-denominator trash. These admen and women were different because they refused to reduce advertising to a shill for a product. They were hired to sell dog food, but they got us to love dogs more. They were hired to sell shoes, but they inspired us to exercise more. Sure, they were selling stuff and being paid for it, but they changed our culture, sometimes for the better. In a working-within-the-system way, that’s revolutionary.

As a filmmaker, I’ve often found myself drawn to creative rebels working outside of society. In Hype!, it was the Seattle music scene, which emerged on its own via rain, beer, humor, and collective disdain for the record industry; in Scratch, it was DJs who discovered a new way to play vinyl and invented hip-hop in the process; in Infamy, it was graffiti writers whose chosen form of artistic self-expression is a felony. I originally thought my ad film would be a departure from those creative renegades, but it wasn’t. All of these people are fiercely independent artists who decided to do something different. They weren’t considered geniuses. They didn’t run away to a mountaintop and get struck by creative lightning. They worked with what they were stuck with, perhaps were bored with, maybe even hated, and flipped it into something they loved.

These unorthodox creative people have taught me how to deal with my own projects too. When I’m stuck in the middle, when I’ve lost direction and am beginning to hate my work but I’m too committed to run away, they inspire me to face the challenge and reinvent, rethink, reedit, maybe even reshoot. Eventually, it starts to look all right again and I remember that I love what I do. Whatever you do, wherever you work, and whatever materials you work with, remember there’s always a way to break the mold, flip the system, and make something that can change the lives of people around you.

Now go be creative. Try starting with something you hate.

DOUG PRAY IS AN AWARD-WINNING DOCUMEN TARY FILMMAKER WHOSE WORK INCLUDES H YPE!, SCRATCH, INFAM Y, BIG RIG, AND SURFWISE. HIS LATEST FILM, ART & COPY, IS OU T IN AUGUST 2009 FROM AR THOUSE FILMS