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Doug Pray has directed documentaries ranging from Hype!, about the exploitation of the grunge music scene in Seattle, to Infamy in 2005, about graffiti culture, to last year’s Surfwise, about the surfing Paskowitz family and their eccentric patriarch. Pray’s Sundance premiere Art & Copy is a scattershot look at some of the pillars of advertising including George Lois, Lee Clow, Dan Wieden, Mary Wells, David Kennedy, and the big campaigns they’ve worked on, such as Apple’s 1984, the Got Milk campaign, Nike’s “Just Do It,” and more. We talked to Pray about his planned move into narrative filmmaking, making an ad for ads, and “growing flowers in hell.”

So you’ve been pretty busy with this and with Surfwise. When did you finish that movie?

It premiered in 2007 in Toronto. But it really came out in May of last summer. It came out in theaters at the end of May. And then it came out on DVD on July 29th.

And it was part of the whole HDNet movies thing? Didn’t they include it in that?

It was an HDNet film. And they knew it was an independent film, but they eventually signed on and they funded it. It was the first time I’d ever had a movie that was funded by a company full-on. Like, “Here’s the funding. Make the movie.” And knowing that we had a possibility for distribution through Magnolia Pictures, that was great.

So, yeah. I’ve been really busy. This is the first time in six years that I don’t have any film on my slate.

Is it scary, or more of a relief?

No, it’s great. I’m actually going to do a dramatic feature film. I’m going to take a year and try to find a script. Because I just have always wanted to, I want to try. And if it just doesn’t work, great, I’ll go back into docs. I love doing docs. I’ll always do docs all my life, but this is a good time to try to do a feature. So that’s what I’m doing.

Have you done anything narrative ever, like a short of anything?

Sure. I went to UCLA Film School and I never took any doc classes at all. It was all about actors and trying to write. And I do some commercials, and in some of those formats I’m directing actors. So, yeah. I’ve been around, I guess, so that’s not foreign to me at all.

But it sure is different. I love documentaries. I love the process of making docs because they’re so … I don’t know. You can kind of achieve it at the end. Not at the beginning. What I hate about features is it’s all in the script. If the scripts sucks - you can never get a good movie out of a bad script.

You can get a great documentary out of a bad start. Because you can shift, then you go, “Oh, my god, this is becoming something new.” I love that. It just takes time.

Did that happen with Art & Copy? I know at the press event that you were kind of saying that it changed focus as you were making it. It started out kind of being a tribute and then it became more about these guys and their personalities.

I think it was mostly just - I kind of knew going in that I didn’t want to make a tribute film. Which really is what it sort of started out to be. It was really simple. The One Club said, “Hey, let’s make a movie about these hall of famers.” And I knew it would be interesting, because you don’t get a chance in life too much to sort of meet major industry captains. In advertising, they’re the gods.

So I was just like, “That’s got to be an interesting film, somehow.” So I signed on. And it took such a long time to kind of get my head around it. I was really busy with other movies and funding was difficult. It was just a lot of issues. It took a long time. It took like three years. It was really just a collection of interviews and the some B-roll, you know, rockets and stuff like that.

So what changed was that I didn’t expect it to become really human, in a way. That sounds kind of altruistic. That sounds a cliche almost. But it was like I thought maybe it would be more like, “Let’s go behind the scenes on a campaign and kind of figure out how they make it,” and it really didn’t go that way at all.

I mean there are some stories, but it just became more about who are these people who have actually affected our culture, and what’s going on in their minds. That just became the most interesting thing to me.

So the One Club, what is their organization?

They’re a nonprofit organization. It’s like any industry has a kind of a - I don’t know what to call them, really. They’re a nonprofit organization that simply awards and celebrates excellence in advertising. And their kind of fundamental purpose is to make ads better. And so what they do is give out awards in excellence. I guess it’s like what Sundance does for filmmaking. And that’s their goal. So in a funny way…

So I haven’t understood this film until this week, and then finally - like I did a couple of interviews a couple of weeks ago and I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. I really didn’t.

I saw this thing yesterday in the - and it was like, god, I didn’t know how to frame this movie or what to expect from the audience or anything. I was a little bit afraid of it because it’s about advertising and comes with such a fully-loaded topic, for anybody. It’s just like, “Advertising, god, are you just trashing it?”

But when Dan Wieden the other night at the premier said something about, “If young people saw this film, maybe advertising could be improved,” it sort of all came home to me. It was like, OK, maybe I did - that was what they set out to do in the campaign and that’s what I tried to do.

Like make an ad for the advertising world.

If you look at advertising as part of our environment, then 95% of it is kind of pollution, and can we clean up that environment. It sounds kind of funny to say it that way. But the film is inspiring, and does make people kind of think, “My god, why can’t it be better?”

We all of this money and resources in the economy going into communicating to us and giving us messages, and the people in my film - whether people like it or not - they at least feel strongly that they are trying to somehow give a positive message. That’s the wrong word. But they’re saying something.

They definitely don’t feel like they are just guys out to make a buck, or maybe that wasn’t shown.

Right. Like if you told them, “Oh, you’re really into manipulation.” They’d say, “That’s really not our goal.” I mean, it is. It’s like, “We want to sell product for the client.” But their whole thing is, if they can work in that industry and still make a message and still be artists and still be revolutionary, even if it’s in their own mind, that’s their goal.

But that’s only these guys. I felt sort of funny, like very privileged to be in their presence even. Somebody accused me the other day of, like, I kind of just got sold on them and I’m like, “Oh, everything they say is great.” But some of that’s true. They’re really smart, really intelligent people.

This is one of those documentaries where you felt like, wow, you could have made six or seven documentaries from this. Because you could have just made a documentary about George Lois, for instance.

I wanted to at one point. I actually proposed that about halfway through. I said, “You know, why don’t we just do this about George?”

His Esquire covers were fantastic.

Yeah, it’s pretty unbelievable. What’s so interesting about advertising is that — it’s like if you told a painter, “OK, go paint a painting. But by the way, it has to make people do this.” It’s art that has to make people do something.

It’s difficult.

And my film is not about what it’s making them do, or the associated commerce downstream. It’s all about the advertising. I find it really interesting. You have to do research to do something like that in the movie. He’s like, “Look, I make art. I try to move people, I try to make them laugh or cry.” It’s the same exact thing an artist does. It’s just that, yeah, it’s all being paid for by a giant corporation that wants to move a ton of beer. And so in most people’s minds, that completely removes it from it having any integrity.

And I understand that. I felt that way most of my life. But then you start looking at art — like real “art,” quote unquote — and then you start going, well, what’s funding that? What corporation is actually funding NPR and PBS? Which corporation is it?

And how is that being paid? Who’s sponsoring Sundance? And every single party we go to? It’s sort of like you start realizing, well, when you get funding for an independent film, which I have, where’s that money coming from?

That’s a good point.

I don’t have any rich uncles, but if you go to a rich uncle, where’s that money coming from? I’m not trying to take away the obvious commerce part of it, but it’s just interesting. I look at art really differently now, because of these guys.

What about advertising? Do you look at that differently after making this?

Oh, I definitely do. It makes me more pissed off just at bad ads, going, “This is so stupid.” I do advertising myself. Four or five years ago, I started doing some commercials. I sort of had this big moment where I realized all my heroes, like Errol Morris, they did ads. I couldn’t imagine that they would do that.

Anyway, I started. I have really mixed feelings about the whole thing. But I love doing ads. They’re a great challenge, really dynamic and super. You get paid, which for a documentarian is kind of a shock.

When you talked to these guys, and when you were going through the histories of these companies, did you get a sense that there were ads that they didn’t want to talk about, or things that they weren’t proud of that they had done, or ads that they were like, “We wish we could have done better on that”?

I think they all were like anybody. They would have massive frustrations: campaigns that have died, clients that really got impossible to work with. But when you go into that stuff too much, I was more looking for the things that were cultural touchstones. So that was more of my choice. I went in knowing well, this guy did “Got Milk?” It’s a pretty cool campaign. Let me talk to him about that. “Got Milk?” if anything, I don’t think they think that was their best work.

It was more just like trying to figure out different personalities, like how Hal Riney’s personality and his upbringing and childhood really feeds into his work. So for him, the Reagan thing was just perfect. He changed the landscape of politics arguably.

Anyway, so I just kind of knew the ones — like “Just do it!” I knew I wanted to do that. I guess the whole movie, in a funny way — it doesn’t focus on bad ads, and it doesn’t even focus on the bad ads by these guys. It focuses on: how did they move a nation and why?

Doug: And where did that come from, and can we try to break that down? And something like Hilfiger — like Tommy Hilfiger — that’s a fascinating story to me, because it shows two or three things that are really interesting. One is it’s very much George Lois’s Bronx, fighting, schoolyard, in-your-face, “punch the status quo” personality.

It’s a classic example of the personality making ads, because it’s like he was saying, “**** you!” to Calvin Klein and all those guys.

Right.

It’s just intensely - it was great for George Lois. The second thing is it’s one example where an ad actually brought up a quality — I don’t know anything about Tommy Hilfiger’s clothing. I’ve never worn it, and I don’t have any opinions on it. But when Tommy Hilfiger said, “God, that ad freaked me out so much that I decided I had to just go crazy making the product.”

You kind of go, that’s funny. The ad led the product. It actually improved, arguably, the product. It’s kind of interesting.

I wanted to ask the guys about that in that panel. When they talked about the Braniff ad and how they got Braniff to paint their planes different colors and everything, I wondered if advertising had led other products like that before, or if they had convinced them, “If you make this change, we can make a great ad for you.”

It’s the best ones. The best ones are the ones where they’re working with the top head of the whole company. Saturn was an example of that. I didn’t even tell this story. It’d probably be on the DVD, because Hal Riney, he went to that company, he named the colors, he named the car.

He named it the Saturn?

Yeah. They wanted to give it names, like the Saturn whatever, like Sundance, those crazy car names, and he said, “Well, why don’t we just call it a sedan?” And that’s very Hal Riney-like. Let’s just be really, really simple.

And they were like, “Well, what color should we call it? Should it be like starburst horizon? Is that good?” Hal said, “How about red?” You know, Saturn sedan, color red. And he did everything. He designed the concept. Everything we think about Saturn is from the mind of Hal Riney. It’s just a car. It’s no different from any other car Detroit was making.

Everything about it, the whole homespun, folksy, you kind of see, “Oh yeah, that’s an American brand.” It’s all just totally Hal Riney came up with all that. That’s interesting to me. That’s because he can work with them at that level.

So what the guys were railing against, all of them, that there’s a section in the movie where they’re just bitching about MBAs and committees and testing, and it’s because they can’t get anything good through. And it’s very frustrating. So I thought that was kind of telling.

You look at like Mary Wells. She’s did the whole Braniff thing, design and everything. You know, Nike is another story like that. Phil Knight, Dan said this the other night, he said something like, “Just spell it N-I-K-E. Make sure the spelling is right.” So they went off and just created all these intensely great commercials.

You’ve really get a sense for that in the movie with the whole Apple ad, because when they saw that the board of directors did not want to run it, the two Steves decided to fund it themselves.

That’s another example of the perfect ad.

I wonder how many times it relied on the ballsiness of the corporation as well as the ad agency. Sometimes these corporations have to really go take a leap of faith and go, “OK. We’re going to spend a ton of money on this, so all right.”

Like the Hilfiger thing. What if that had blown up in his face and he was derided for that, and people were like, “How dare you compare yourself?” But it went the other direction.

Well, it’s funny. You look through the books, like George Lois books and the campaigns, and it’s like, “I don’t remember this campaign at all.” I think they’ve all been associated with things they did not promote.

This era of advertising, even as far back as the Braniff ad, some of those were created in the era of when the jingle was king. You had to create your own little ditty. Did you ever think about including it? I know at the beginning, there’s sort of the montage and you can hear the Alka Seltzer ads and everything. Did you ever think about including any of those? That was it?

That was the best I could do. I just couldn’t fit them in at all. There’s so many jingles I wanted to get in there. I wanted to get other designers. I wanted to do so much more, and instead, it just - all my films are like this.

You were hindered by the time constraints?

You end up with a certain thing. That’s what it is. We didn’t touch on Internet advertising. We didn’t touch on it. And there’s other modern advertisers, like these guys out of Florida. Crispin Porter is who everybody regards as like the shit. They are the kings of advertising today because they’re doing all the really great stuff.

And there’s a lot of pretty good advertising being made today by people not in the movie. That just reflects the One Club and who’s in the Hall of Fame, and maybe someday they’ll be in that too.

Like, we don’t even mention David Ogilvy, one of the major pioneers. And again, all this movie reflects, aside from One Club, is the creative revolution of the ’60s and a handful of people who were totally inspired by it. Because everyone in the movie was definitely inspired by that.

They all had their, “Wow, I looked at what Birnbock was doing, and I said ‘I’ve got to do that too.’” All of them. I have that quote from pretty much every single one of them.

Another thing is that all of these guys are not in touch with the daily campaigns. They’re just the heads of these huge - like there’s 700 employees at Wieden+Kennedy. And Lee Clow’s like the head of 300 offices worldwide. He doesn’t even travel.

Really?

I was like, “Do you have to go around the world all the time and be the boss?” And he’s like, “No. It’s just not worth it. It takes forever. I’d rather hang out on the beach.”

As they approached you about this and you started putting it together, what was the hardest thing to wrap your head around?

Just the fact that it was about advertising. It was on the simplest level that I felt like I was somehow selling out. Because I really pride myself on the films I’ve made. I’ve really been about underground culture, and I consider myself somebody to likes to think about all sides of an issue.

But also, there’s a part of my personality that really respects people who work within the system, and I also have a mistrust for instant radicals, like people who are just like, “I hate everything, therefore I’m brilliant.”

And maybe it’s just because I’m older. When you age, you really do start changing your perceptions of life. But there really is a part of me that respects people who say, “I’m going to stay in the dead center of the system.” As Kirk Souder, my executive producer, he’s has this concept of, grow flowers in hell.

Instead of just saying, “Well, screw this,” because I think it’s unrealistic. Maybe you heard me say this the other day, it’s really - but that was the hardest thing to get my head around. It was just the fact that it was about advertising. Because I knew what people would think, because I’ve felt that way my whole life, first of all, until I started ads, but also, I just knew.

A really good friend of mine made this incredible movie called The Ad and the Ego. It’d be a great double-feature with this. He’s so awesome. Because it does go there. It completely goes into manipulation and how sexual images and things just make you do this and how they give women a feeling of being inadequate and all that stuff.

And it really would be just a brilliant double-feature. Mine is about the power of advertising and the inspiration of it, and this is about the power of advertising and how dangerous it can be.

Yeah, the insidiousness side of it.

And of course, it was an underground film that never got distributed. It came out 15 years ago.

So, anyway, that was the hardest thing. So I was trying to wrap my head around it. And Kirk Souder, the executive producer, kept saying to me — because I would say, “Well, it’s just a bunch of rich, old guys. Where’s the edge?” And I really have to hand it to him, because he kept saying, “Just keep getting in their minds, and you’ll understand where they’re coming from,” and that’s when it started being alive, because I realized they’re all coming from a similar source.

George Lois absolutely considers himself a revolutionary, and he considers all the ads he did as being the same, to some degree. And I think that Dan Wieden is absolutely a deeply moral, very political, very liberal, left-leaning guy, and probably a multi-millionaire as well. It’s interesting. It’s a really interesting bunch of guys to talk with.

You know what’s interesting? I actually thought at first that it was going be a 60-minute thing, and I was more comfortable with that. I was like, “OK, well, it’s not going to be one of my, whatever, independent documentary features. It’s not going to be a part of my little growing library.”

I was very comfortable with that. Then the producers — and I thank them for this now — they just completely kept hammering. They said, “No, no, no. We want to target Sundance. We really want this to be a feature-length film, a Doug Pray film.” That’s what producers are supposed to be. They kept me on it. They just kept saying, “No, let’s just make it bigger and better. Let’s settle down.” They were very patient with me.

That was another thing I was noticing about this film was that it was sort of back to a style that I was trying to get away from, the style of “Let’s meet seven to 12 people, and get to know them.” Kind of. [laughs]

When I did Surfwise,  it was so liberating to do one movie about one family, and one story, and emotional art. You could laugh and cry, because you cared about them. That’s why I want to do a narrative now, because I want to do that again. I want to do, start to finish, one story that you care about.

But it’s fine. It’s not like I’m putting down a carbon copy. I felt like, “Oh, God, I’m getting back to this episodic thing.” It’s hard to do. It’s hard to keep up. “Big Rig” is a very hard movie for some people, because it’s very episodic. You meet a character, and then they go away. And then you meet another character, and then they go away.

So would this a narrative film be your next, or would you do a documentary again before that?

I don’t want to do a documentary next. I’m intentionally not entertaining documentaries.

Would you write it or would you find something?

I might write it, but I’m also reading everything I can. I’m very, very, very picky. I don’t like anything. Like every time I go, “Why would I make a movie like this? Why not just make another documentary?”