(The link to play the spots is at the end of this post)
Sometime around 1974 I was President of a film production company named Arapada that I formed with Darrel Landrum and Gordon Blocker, who I called the Wizard.
I was thinking about that time period and this is some of what I remember – as I remember it. Gordon and Darrel, if you're still out there, let me know if anything needs to be changed.
We did whatever seemed interesting at the time, including the Traveling Multi-Media Stage presentation that John Denver used as the backdrop for his tour during that time (Produced by Gordon) and DeBakey doing open heart surgery, which I think was Produced by Darrel.
The only work that I have from that time is a scratched print of two recruitment spots that we did for the Houston Police Department.
I was hired by Daigle Merriman and Associates (John Daigle and Stan Merriman), who were hired by the HPD, to write and Direct the first recruitment spots that they needed as part of their efforts to satisfy a Federal Court Injunction to hire more minorities and women.
At the time, setting one of the spots in the year 2001 was really radical, and I still have trouble sometimes thinking about the fact that we passed that 4 years ago. It's kind of like the feeling that I had when we passed 1984 and I think about George Orwell's great novel.
Understandably (in hindsight – I was a bit more naive in those days) the HPD expressed serious reservations with both spots that I eventually produced.
First, they probably didn't like the futuristic look of the 2001 spot and second they hated the wording of the “Race of Life” spot, specifically, the phrase “we must sometimes take the opportunity to make ourselves free.”
I don't know who in the department made these objections known to Daigle Merriman, but that is what I remember them talking about. Basically, I think that they wanted spots that just made them look good, without doing anything about minority recruiting – kind of a standard old policeman walking along patting some standard little kid on the head. If you remember, one of the justifications for not hiring minorities and women, especially in those days, was that there were not supposed to be any qualified applicants.
Daigle Merriman was able to make a deal with the department that was part compromise and part gamble. They would shoot a basic, standard spot with a black guy sitting on a stool in the studio just telling people to come on out and apply and they would show the two spots that we already had produced to the current group of cadets and give them an evaluation sheet to fill out after they saw them. Sure, they were all white, but they were young, and hopefully, somewhat open minded. Thankfully, they loved the spots and the evaluations were positive, so we were able to use them.
When the spots were first aired in the San Antonio market, they had to send additional recruiters, the response was so strong – College graduates who qualified for the job. I understand that the Chief of Police for the HPD is now Black, I wonder if he was one of the applicants who responded to our spots.
The film was damaged by careless handling many years ago (not by me) but I still like both spots and they still tell the story, both visually and with the narrative.
One thing about the Kids in the “Race of Life” spot – if they were 12 when we shot it, they would be 43 now (as I write this). Hard to imagine.
We ran them straight into the camera all afternoon, some of them had blisters on their feet so the pain that you see in their faces is probably real. For some reason the cameraman shot them slightly off center, so the night before we flew out to Los Angeles to do final editing we re-shot all of that footage using the off center film and a setup to shoot each frame one at a time. That took all night and we took the unprocessed film with us when we caught our plane in the morning – hoping that it would be alright. I thought it was beautiful – a little grainy, but tight and right in their faces.
Arapada won awards for these two spots, including one at the Chicago Film Festival that year. I don't remember the specifics of the other awards that we won. One day, I need to dig out the actual Award Certificates, I'm sure that I still have them.
Comments