Rainier Beer Lookalike

The recent post devoted to movie-marketing adventures called up some other memories--of Hollywood films I watched in the making, and of some parodies I later wrote and helped produce...

Back in 1962, Seattle staged its hallowed-in-history World's Fair, called "Century 21" (look, Ma, we made it!). This extravaganza created the Space Needle, several theatrical venues--the entire urban-park Seattle Center in fact, including the Monorail connecting it to the city's downtown--and put Seattle successfully on the world map. I was going-on-20 that year and definitely jazzed by the sudden cultural opportunities; fondest recollections are for a brilliant staging of Beckett's Waiting for Godot (still relatively unknown back then), a rollicking concert by Erroll Garner, and the chance to watch Elvis Presley make a movie, It Happened at the World's Fair by name.

Not one of his best by any means, but the filmed-on-location viewing opportunities were excellent. I remember two scenes in particular, relatively simple stuff that took the crew hours to set up and then actually "get in the can," as the director would say. One had Presley going into the entrance to the Space Needle, but needing all extras coordinated and the light and camera angles just right. And the other was more important, Elvis and the movie's darling little Oriental girl (his unwelcome sidekick, sort-of, but a plot-crucial character in fact) getting on or off the Monorail at its downtown station, the extras even more important and visible. The girl was cute as a button, and he was lean and tan and fit as a fiddle, "The King" in all his splendor, even appearing in what turned out to be a so-so film.

Sadly the next time I saw Elvis almost-live was at a concert in the Seventies, when he'd successfully come back, conquered Vegas, and then gotten fat and druggy. That particular evening his joking with the back-up singers was strained, even verging on racial-stereotype humor, and his ever-perfect musical timing slightly off--his pathetic decline acted out right before our eyes.

But before that, in 1972 I was hired for a major freelance-writing gig that required me to move to Georgetown, that upscale part of D.C., for a month to research, partially write, and also edit, proofread and then publish a 24-page one-issue tabloid newspaper called Fresh Water Journal or some such, its layout and typefaces mimicking Rolling Stone, which was just then making a splash (er, so to speak).

Why? Well, the Potomac River was in disgraceful condition, and the three states involved (plus D.C.) had united to persuade the public to vote support for water treatment upgrades--possibly even going so far as what was then called "tertiary treatment," meaning basically giving the polluted river wastewater (including sewage) enough chemicals and sunlight and filtering to make it truly potable again. A radical idea back then, but one that has been gradually taking hold around the water-rationed world ever since.

The newspaper I saw to publication was distributed free and was actually fun to read, filled with news and views and editorial cartoons, convincing science and political analysis too, making the whole river-purifying idea as palatable as possible. But free paper or not, the citizens weren't buying; the measure failed at the ballot box. Clean-up of the Potomac had to wait several more years...

At any rate, while I was inventing a newspaper, that ghastly-green horror film The Exorcist (a different sort of pollution) was also in town, filming on location in Georgetown; and the crew and I happened to be staying at the same Marriott across in Arlington. Sitting at the hotel bar in the evenings, once in a while I'd get into conversation with crew guys. They had good Hollywood gossip stories, and a general disdain for the film's director, William Friedkin. The main complaint seemed to be that Friedkin was not focussed on the daily filming; instead, he'd spend hours on the phone (pre-cell days) working to line up his next directorial jobs, neglecting the current work that was costing a whole heap every day.

I was invited to drop by the location shoot and watch, so of course I found time to flee the typewriter. One cloudy day I tracked the crew to a scene of tree-shrouded concrete steps--shooting day-for-night, I think--and watched a couple of actors go through the motions; I was hoping to spot Max Von Sydow (admired from the great Ingmar Bergman films) but no such luck. Friedkin was there but didn't seem to have much to say; I couldn't tell if his bad rap was justified or not. Pretty boring day, actually, and I chose not to view the finished film.

But I couldn't escape the movies (or television). Back in Seattle, I was soon working for the Rainier Beer creative group, and in no time involved in, and then producing, commercials that parodied Casablanca, Cole Porter, The Twilight Zone, "Indian Love Call," Lawrence Welk, Garland-Rooney musicals, TV's Archie Bunker, Star Wars, and much more. But I want to mention two projects I'm especially fond of, company sales films the public basically never saw...

The first was a collection of brief movie parodies created for a firm selling tax-deferred annuities, using familiar movie scenes to tout different investment aspects; the length of each varied from 30-60 seconds up to 2-3 minutes, with the short ones meant to be lifted out and used as TV spots. So I got to write variations on a "Pearl Pureheart" silent (using title cards, our heroine tied to the railroad tracks); the murderous Hal computer in 2001; Gene Kelly dancing and Singin' in the Rain; Robert Preston delivering his "trouble in River City" fast-talking spiel in The Music Man; Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not (the classic "just put your lips together and blow" scene); and more.

Moreover, since this was one of our typical shoestring-budget shoots, I got tapped to do more than observe and approve (or critique--the agency producer job). It was my voice picked to deliver, flatly, without emotion, the speech of our "Hal" computer; and later I got to wear a hat and raincoat--"rain" drenching the Pioneer Square set courtesy of firehoses--and be briefly accosted by our singing Gene replacement. (Unpaid and anonymous, as ever!)

Anyhow, my best sales-film script was a job for Rainier. Each year we'd create some meant-to-be-comical setting in which to embed or at least introduce the coming year's beer commercials. One year, for Rainier Light, the boss dreamed up a TV spot meant visually to "marry" a beer bottle filmed in close-up with the famous silhouette (and voiceover) of tubby director Alfred Hitchcock. I wrote the words, and the production company found an L.A actor who could "do" Hitchcock. And he was so convincing (visually rounded too) that we quickly decided to expand his role--that is, to write the whole sales film around Hitchcock's familiar droll, on-camera introductions, seen each week on his popular television series. I read a couple of books of Hitchcock interviews to get the gist of his longer speeches and stated ideas about film, and then translated these into sales pitches for Rainier spots, discussing taste, freshness, the element of surprise, and so on.

Our actor did a brilliant job mimicking Hitchcock, talking to the camera in the various set-ups introducing each beer commercial (making my script sound more clever than it was), and we had a good visual trick going throughout too: what appeared to be a bomb taped under a desk, the timer dial ticking down to zero as the sales film went on and on, Hitchcock talking about suspense and "McGuffins" and other matters while the movie-viewers were watching a bomb about to explode... At the last second, the actor reached down and pulled the wires or something, as he continued to talk about denying the audience's expectations, always keeping the surprises coming.

It was a banner year for Rainier spots and sales, maybe the peak year, somewhere around 1978-1980. After that, well... subsequent sales films have vanished from my mind. I do remember scripting a fun Archie Bunker spot for Heidelberg Beer (also owned by Rainier) involving a kilted Scotsman confronting the astonished Archie, but generally (as I believed then and now) Rainier's much-honored commercials started their slow decline around then. The writer-producer (me) was bored, anyway, and ready to abandon reel world for real World.

Which I did.

So Few Books, So Much Time

I've never written or published a book, though I've been featured briefly or mentioned casually in several--which relates slightly to the "witness" title this blog bears.

I think basically I'm too stubborn or willful to submit to the necessary work regimen, or just unable to stay focussed long enough, to write a novel or memoir or even a book of related essays; lengths ranging from brief lyric poem on up to feature screenplay seem to be my attention-span limits. Still, other people have deemed bits of my work worthy of preserving--poems appearing first in so-called little magazines, for example, and then a couple of them picked up for obscure anthologies later.

A different example: back in the late Sixties-early Seventies I wrote maybe two dozen short pieces for Rolling Stone; and three of my record reviews were then reprinted in the first book collection devoted to such--brief but deathless paragraphs praising releases by Clifton Chenier (I was proud to introduce his Zydeco accordion music to the world of rock), the Everly Brothers, and... who? Can't remember the subject of the third. (All of the pieces I wrote do also appear in the early bound volumes of Rolling Stone, but that doesn't count since there was no selection process involved.)

Another article I wrote back then, this time for Ramparts Magazine, critiqued what I saw as the phoney revolutionary attitude of Jefferson Airplane, examining the band's Volunteers album in particular, issued while the group was also doing jeans commercials! Many years later this piece was picked up for offprint use in the syllabus of a counter-culture course taught at a college in Germany, and then quoted too in a recent biography of the band, Jeff Tamarkin's Got a Revolution. I guess Internet access served as the key.

On the other hand, my long interview with Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman (offered complete, for the first time, in five early chapters of I Witness) has been quoted in a couple of Parsons biographies (one book also used a photo I own of Gram and me, seen below-right on this home page), but because both The Helix and L.A. Free Press underground newspapers long ago neglected to credit me as author, any quotations appeared anonymously (as it were).

Also basically anonymous were my writing and editing efforts for three other books: the notorious mid-Sixties Course Critique of professors and classes at the University of Washington (loads of fun to compile and write, laced with ridiculous puns throughout); the 30th anniversary history of Seattle Center and the renowned 1962 Seattle World's Fair that launched it (Meet Me at the Center by Don Duncan); and a thick Seattle Art Museum catalog for a major exhibition of (pre-Green Movement) giant "Earth Works." The author, some hopeless academic, hated my attempt to enable reader comprehension!

No thanks there, of course, but I did receive brief mentions, merited or otherwise, in two books focussed on Elvis Presley: Greil Marcus's Mystery Train (a later reprint offers after-the-fact acknowledgment for a story he used that I'd told him years earlier) and Peter Guralnick's great two-volume definitive biography of Elvis, for which I had helped line up a couple of interviews with Northwest promoters or reporters. (But you'd have to look deep in the lengthy Who's Who of people thanked to find my name.)

The experiences I had at the Stones' Altamont Festival turned up later in another guy's book too. Record producer and folksinger Sandy Paton, best known for his excellent Folk-Legacy label, published a collection of short prose pieces back in the mid-Seventies (I've forgotten the title and don't find it referenced anywhere) and in the one on Altamont he namechecks me and the battles, Hell's Angels vs. stoned fans, I witnessed with horror that day; Marty Balin of the Airplane, for one, was knocked out by them.

More personal: over the years I've fantasized that someone somewhere would discover my circulating screenplay on Mississippi Bluesman Robert Johnson, titled Hellhound on My Trail (written back around 1968-70; see blog chapters of June 12 and June 15, 2007), and offer to publish it, but only the last 20 or 30 pages have ever seen print. I've come to accept the unlikeliness of that ever happening now and have learned instead to look with special fondness on the final two books I want to mention.

Among the best English Lit courses I took in grad school, at the University of Washington in 1965, was one titled something like "The English Popular Ballad" (meaning the post-medieval Child Ballads, more or less), taught by Dr. David C. Fowler. The major assignment in his course was to select a folk song well-known in England or America that the ballad hunters had missed--to research it through history, try to find the ultimate source for it, analyze its structure and content, and finally make the case for its inclusion in the somewhat ex-clusive ballad books. I chose the Scots folk song usually titled something like "Lang a-Growin'," or "The Trees They Do Grow High," made famous by Ewan MacColl, Joan Baez and others; did all the research, sending for manuscript copies from overseas libraries, reading microfiche and old songbooks, listening to all the recordings available, etc., with no Internet back then to make things easier; then wrote my paper--which convinced Fowler so completely that his own subsequent book, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad, cited my research and thanked me for establishing the song as worthy of serious academic study.

That remains the highwater mark of grad school for me (even though I only learned of my inclusion in Fowler's book several years later). I may only be a footnote, but by God, I'm proud of it!

From a Scots ballad to the Nottingham cityscape... as we finally head south to England and the novel titled Living Proof, from the great "Charlie Resnick" series of police procedurals by prizewinning mystery writer John Harvey. Back when I still had a real-location bookstore, the annual BoucherCon gathering of mystery writers and fans came to Seattle, in 1994 or so; as a mystery bookseller I naturally had to "buy" a dealer-room table at the convention.

One evening there was an auction staged to raise funds for the widow of author Robert Bloch (best known for Psycho), whose medical bills and recent death had left his family in financial straits. Towards the end of this worthy event, Harvey as one of the guest authors offered to auction the rights for some fan to appear as a character in his next book. This novel idea (excuse the pun) seemed to leave the room confused, convention-goers looking around at each other wondering whether it would be "cool" to spend one's money so (let's call it) egotistically.

Let me just say that Harvey's generous offer soon became a regular fundraising occurrence at such conventions, and other authors immediately afterwards that same night made similar offers successfully. But this first time out was met with silence. Finally, just to get the bidding started, I raised my hand for the seventy-five dollars or whatever it was... and no one else bid! So suddenly there I was, about to assume some unlikely role in an upcoming mystery. Harvey and I talked a bit; I assured him I didn't care what he wrote, and that he really didn't have to use my name at all. But we corresponded more over the next few months, and finally he sent me a proof of the page and role I'd come to fill...

I'm quite happy to state that on page 137 of the hardback of Living Proof, any curious reader can find one "Ed Leimbacher" and his Seattle store MisterE Books given a comical, slightly venal, but recognizably booksellerish walk-on part (several paragraphs actually) at a fictional book fair in Nottingham. And further deponent sayeth not.

Gee, ain't it grand to be famous for, maybe, 15 seconds?