The Art of Staying Independent in a Commercial World with Clay Walker

Dustin Grinnell (00:00:00 --> 00:00:02)
I'm Dustin Grinnell, and this is Curiously.

Dustin Grinnell (00:00:06 --> 00:01:44)
In this episode, we explore the extraordinary career of Clay Walker, a renowned photographer and independent filmmaker with a diverse set of skills encompassing producing, directing, photography, editing, programming, and design. Clay has made a significant impact over the past 28 years on various projects spanning short and feature films, music videos, television programs, and interactive media. During our conversation, we delve into Clay's critically acclaimed 1992 PBS documentary Post No Bills, which profiles Robbie Canao, a satirical political poster artist known for his guerrilla-style approach in Los Angeles. We also discuss his groundbreaking documentary on the North Carolina swing band the Squirrel Nutzippers, which achieved international recognition, earning Clay 1 platinum and 2 gold records from the Recording Industry of America. We also touch on Clay's latest documentary film, The Cole Nobody Knows, which centers on jazz legend Freddie Cole and his has garnered widespread acclaim, earning numerous awards and being showcased in over 50 international film festivals. Beyond his filmmaking achievements, Clay has become a sought-after speaker, sharing his knowledge and experiences at esteemed institutions such as South by Southwest, the Smithsonian, Sundance, and more. Clay has also nurtured the next generation of storytellers by teaching motion graphic design at the Art Institute of Atlanta and documentary filmmaking at Emory University. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Clay Walker, an innovative visual artist whose creativity and unwavering passion have left an indelible mark on the landscape of independent filmmaking. Clay Walker, welcome to the podcast.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:01:45 --> 00:01:46)
Hi there, good morning, Dustin.

Dustin Grinnell (00:01:47 --> 00:01:54)
Um, I should say, uh, this is Clay Walker the filmmaker and photographer, not the country music artist Clay Walker.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:01:54 --> 00:01:59)
You just had half the people turn off this podcast, right?

Dustin Grinnell (00:01:59 --> 00:02:35)
Yeah, thank you for coming on and talking about your work. You have a fascinating body of work that spans 30 years or so, uh, between, uh, photography and filmmaking and commercial work, etc. And, and I'm looking forward to digging into all of it. I was wondering, just to kind of start off, people will get a chance to read your bio and read about your work a little bit, but I was wondering if you could give us a little bit of background into how you got into visual art. And is this something where you wanted to do it from a young age, you were interested in photography and, and filmmaking, um, or did it grow over time? What's Give a brief background.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:02:35 --> 00:02:39)
I think my start in visual arts began when I went to college.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:02:39 --> 00:02:45)
And I actually went to Georgia Tech on an electrical engineering scholarship. And I knew—

Clay Walker - 1 (00:02:45 --> 00:04:57)
That I could get into more of a visual arts type of thing or hands-on. I just, you know, the way things are now with you've got so much access to things. Like, I started very fundamentally in high school. I was mostly into fine arts. I took multiple years of fine arts in high school.

I also had received a scholarship to the Memphis College of Arts where I would go on the weekend and had a great opportunity to do things I couldn't do in high school. And I did Tremendous amount of, it's kind of funny, mechanical drawings. Like, so I took drafting in high school and spent a lot of time doing isometric drawings with the T-square, you know, just hundreds of hours of, you know, perfecting this meticulous type of work. But I was also very good at math, so it was this very strange paradox of like, I was in math competitions, so I very much, you know, I was able to get a scholarship to go to Georgia Tech and that seemed the way to go, electrical engineering. You know, whatever happened in that last bit of my senior year and going to Georgia Tech, you know, just that was wearing off whatever my interest in mathematics and science was.

So I landed at Georgia Tech into this program and amazingly I was immediately bombarded with film stuff. I had no exposure to still photography or filmmaking, but so many of my teachers there were speaking in terms of, you know, films, you need to go see this, you know. I had one teacher, my English teacher, had written, just recently published a book called The History of the Narrative Film. So he used a lot of film references and stuff in English class. And the architecture program was so intense that they started speaking to you in a visual way, you know, and through films, things like Kyan Scotsky, um, David Byrne's True Stories had just come out.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:04:57 --> 00:05:01)
lo and behold, there was a black and white darkroom, you know, in the basement there.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:05:01 --> 00:05:36)
And this person was constantly doing black and white prints, and I was becoming very fascinated in that. And so I realized very quickly in Georgia Tech that I didn't want to stay there, and I wanted to stay in an academic setting. So I applied to NYU and I applied to USC, which were two of the primary colleges in which you could go get film training, and my sister was moving up to New York. She's a music protégé flautist, and she was gonna go to Juilliard, so it kind of influenced me towards going to NYU. And so I finished out my year at Georgia Tech and started getting involved in some film production there within the city.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:05:36 --> 00:05:44)
They had a place that you could go do weekend things, work on a music video, just get your hands on a camera as part of a group, as part of a team.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:05:44 --> 00:06:46)
And I did move to New York City, and I did go there to go to NYU. I got accepted, and When it came time to register, absolutely, probably for the first time in my life, realized that I would never be able to afford to go to a school like that. Like I'd gone to Georgia Tech on scholarship because of the, the math background and the test scores and stuff. And I thought that would just carry over to someone wanting to do, you know, photography and filmmaking. And so I did not enroll in classes there and I was supporting myself as a bike messenger. I was speeding around Manhattan and I actually got stopped by a police car on 6th Avenue for various infractions of running through red lights and all these different things they came up with, not having a bell on my handlebars and stuff. And I realized at that moment I should probably get back in school. And so I pretty much got out, I guess, the phone book at that point and started trying to find a school in the New York City area that hadn't started yet. And so there was this amazing college in Queens, LaGuardia Community College, that was on a quarter system. So they hadn't started yet and I was able to enroll there and start taking classes.

Dustin Grinnell (00:06:47 --> 00:07:35)
Fascinating. Yeah. So one thing I want to talk about is your photographic work. You've had a very interesting career. You've photographed some high-profile people, actors like Marlee Matlin, Philip Glass, Susan Vega, Richard Gere. You even did a project photographing the Dalai Lama. And as we were speaking about coming on the podcast, you talked about photographs you took for the second ACT UP presentation in March of 1988. You said some of those pictures were— you felt like they were the most significant or important you'd taken. They are beautiful pictures. I was wondering if you could kind of briefly introduce that project, what the demonstrations were, and how you got involved in photographing them.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:07:35 --> 00:07:39)
At LaGuardia, they had a black-and-white photography program.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:07:40 --> 00:07:52)
There was a 2-year program that you could do to get a degree in that. And so I was thrilled to enroll in a class where I could just start basic black and white photography skills and darkroom skills.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:07:52 --> 00:08:01)
And I had an amazing teacher, Julio Nazario. Since then, I mean, it's hard to define someone as your mentor, but he's definitely been a voice in my head ever since.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:08:01 --> 00:08:36)
And he always put that in my head when visually surveying something, you know, am I telling the story visually? Am I close enough? Am I far enough away? He was someone who very much didn't believe in ever using a zoom lens on a camera. So he really insisted that I just start with a 50mm lens and just have that on the camera. And if I need to get closer, I need to physically move closer. If I need to get back, I need to, you know, physically move back. And what that does is creates much more of an interaction, you know, with whatever you're photographing. You're not just a fly on the wall zoomed in, you know, from far away.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:08:37 --> 00:08:38)
You're in the middle of it.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:08:38 --> 00:09:02)
You're there. Person you're photographing is conscious of you, and there's a moment there that you're sharing. And I think, you know, he sent us off as students to do the typical type of thinking projects, you know, go around and take pictures of different things, you know, of shadows, of subway stairs, you know, and things like that. I lived in Hoboken, so I spent a lot of time going back and forth on the train and really did that.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:09:02 --> 00:09:09)
I just started doing, you know, photographing anything. And it's very interesting looking back at these photos now, you know, you're taking your baby steps.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:09:09 --> 00:09:11)
And it—

Clay Walker - 1 (00:09:11 --> 00:09:15)
once you see all these pictures, you're realizing the one thing you're not doing is taking pictures of people, you know.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:09:15 --> 00:09:17)
So you've got to start making that approach.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:09:17 --> 00:09:25)
And I've had some friends who are just amazing street photographers who can walk down any street anywhere and have a rapport with anyone and take amazing photos.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:09:25 --> 00:09:35)
I am not that person, but I am someone who can go into a setting and slowly ease into having a conversation with someone and taking those photos.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:09:35 --> 00:09:47)
And so You know, one of the things that was going on, you know, Manhattan at that time, there was just so much protest and different demonstrations going on the street, much like it is now. But I just, for me, it was kind of a political awakening.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:09:47 --> 00:09:52)
It was a social consciousness awakening of just all these different things going on.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:09:52 --> 00:11:16)
And I started seeing those photos. And so at one of these demonstrations, I met that photographer who took that picture, and he convinced me to come work for this newspaper called the National Alliance. It was a— one of the few, um, if not only Black editor papers in the country. And one of the things that I was covering then was the Tawana Brawley story that happened in Poughkeepsie, New York. And so I was going up with all these activists who were leading these demonstrations to photograph them and, you know, bring attention to this thing that had happened there.

I mean, it later became known that the story wasn't true, but at the time it was very dramatic and passionate. It led me to meeting Dr. Lenora Fulani, who was running for president in 1988, and she is the first African American woman to run for president who's had her name on the ballot in all 50 states. And It was very fascinating just following these things, you know. I mean, I went from, you know, as I say, taking pictures of shadows of trees to being in the middle of some of the more important political moments of the time. And one of the assignments that I did have was to go photograph this ACT UP demonstration that was happening on Wall Street in Manhattan.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:11:16 --> 00:11:19)
It was the 1-year anniversary of the first one that they had done.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:11:19 --> 00:11:32)
And the point of their protest was to raise awareness to The pharmaceutical companies were just charging way too much money for the treatments. It was unaffordable for these people. And just, you know, the general inaction of all politicians.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:11:32 --> 00:11:37)
This was the Reagan era. And, you know, it was just being cast aside.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:11:37 --> 00:11:43)
You know, it was like I could theorize so many reasons why, you know, but these very passionate people came to this demonstration.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:11:43 --> 00:11:44)
I took these photos.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:11:45 --> 00:12:18)
Some of them were published in the National Alliance at that time. And, you know, I sat on them for many years. And I, you know, as a photographer, as any type of filmmaker, A lot of your responsibility is just preserving the stuff, you know, and keeping it safe. And, you know, as we developed this online way of viewing things, you know, I started putting them out there. I think I had them connected to the Wikipedia page for ACT UP. And, you know, slowly over the years, I've been contacted by people. And, you know, this was 1988. So, I mean, I hate to say it, so many of those people in those photos died of AIDS.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:12:18 --> 00:12:23)
I mean, they It just was at a time where they, the treatment wasn't available to them.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:12:23 --> 00:12:59)
And, you know, a lot of people didn't survive that. So the people who have reached out to me, I've had, I'm friends with a lot of people on Facebook. Um, you know, people who are in the photos, um, grandchildren of people who are in the photos and slowly but surely they find me, you know, and it, it often catches me off guard cuz it's just, it's a lot of emotion, you know, it's a lot of, um, hurt and pain that people are still, you know, it's in the present tense and especially if people haven't seen these pictures. So, One of the incredible stories— Peter Serko, this wonderful human being who contacted me, sent me an email saying, you have a picture of my brother in these photos.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:12:59 --> 00:13:01)
I did not know he was a political activist.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:13:01 --> 00:13:03)
I didn't know he participated in these things.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:13:03 --> 00:13:07)
And I was looking through your pictures, and here he is. I have a picture of him being arrested.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:13:07 --> 00:13:42)
And Peter and I became friends. Peter actually made a documentary about finding this photograph, and, um, he's done so many wonderful tributes to his brother and It's crazy because he did a stage play about his brother dying of AIDS and invited me up to Binghamton, New York to see him do this production. And I stayed in David's room and, you know, in the house that he grew up in. And I just, you know, it's one of those moments in life where you're like, wow, I took this photo, you know, 25 years ago, this person found it, we've become friends, and I'm now staying with his lovely family in his room that he grew up in.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:13:42 --> 00:13:45)
So, I mean, in what universe does something like that happen, you know?

Dustin Grinnell (00:13:45 --> 00:14:32)
Well, you know, it's the kind of relationship between art and life and how they kind of bounce back off each other. You were part of something and you affected a current event, and that event came back and affected you. And I think that's just a really interesting way to be in the world. And one of the words you said that I wanted to ask about a little bit more is the idea of responsibility. You said you have this responsibility to protect the images and to shepherd them almost. I was also wondering, from a kind of like a historical perspective, what responsibility do you feel in a moment like that when you're capturing a demonstration? How do you weigh the sociocultural burden? How do you deal with it and manage that responsibility in making your pictures or making a film?

Clay Walker - 1 (00:14:32 --> 00:14:57)
I feel like with— take the ACT UP photos, for example. I've always felt like so much of my work, people don't know it exists, you know. And I feel like with photos like that, you know, they fall through the cracks. People, you know, until they've— I've been contacted by different places who have put them into collections online. I mean, specifically with the ACT UP photos, Emory University actually bought the negatives from me a couple years ago because they wanted to preserve them.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:14:57 --> 00:15:01)
They added them to one of their collections so that people can have them, make use of them.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:15:01 --> 00:15:23)
And in preparing those images for Emory, it was really kind of an epic undertaking because I didn't want to just hand him the negative sheets and say, here you go. I actually, you know, I went in and digitized each image at the highest possible resolution. These are all black and white photos. So, you know, we've got all these wonderful AI-infused correction programs now that can look at a photo and take out the dust and stuff.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:15:23 --> 00:15:28)
But with black and white, it really takes the human eye and just a very manual process.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:15:28 --> 00:15:56)
And so I took about 90 photos of that event, and I think it took me about 3 months to prepare these images for Emory just working on each image one by one to take out dust, take out scratches, take out anything that affected the image. And it, it took such a physical toll on me that I did this in a seated position, that that was the last moment in my life I could ever sit down at a desk to, um, work on stuff, to edit or do photos. I had to stand up.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:15:56 --> 00:15:59)
So I built this desk, you know, that I'm standing at right now to talk to you.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:15:59 --> 00:16:45)
And it was because of these images, because it was just, you know, it was too tedious and just crippling me to be in this position, but it was, it was what needed to be done to perfectly make these images the best they could possibly be for others to have them. And, you know, I get contacted by films. Early on, some of the images were used on a documentary on Greg Louganis. The Anthony Fauci film that was on National Geographic used a couple of them. And because this was, you know, the initial days of AIDS activism and I want anyone who wants to use them to have them. So I feel like as the archivist of these, I think they've been preserved in the best possible way that they could, you know. And it's funny because you carry these negatives around, you know, I've got books of things and you just—

Clay Walker - 2 (00:16:45 --> 00:16:46)
it's—

Clay Walker - 1 (00:16:46 --> 00:17:08)
I don't have that much stuff, but the few things that I do have, I feel like have gotten more attention lately than they did, you know, for decades from their beginnings. And that's fine. I mean, I just, you know, I think in terms of responsibility, I think You know, I realized the impact of that day. It was funny, I was only there, you know, for maybe 2 hours, but this was a very pivotal moment in a lot of people's lives.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:17:08 --> 00:17:10)
And, you know, I want them to have it.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:17:10 --> 00:17:17)
And I love these relationships that I have with people that I see. These people who are family members of these people are also incredible people.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:17:17 --> 00:17:26)
So they're amazing artists. So it's just, it's been an immersion into other people's lives that I might not have ever had. And it starts, you know, with these connections, with these images.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:17:27 --> 00:17:53)
And I think as technology improves, you're asking me this question like I've made a couple of documentaries. One of my documentaries I shot on film and I'm still carrying, you know, these negatives around because it's like at what point can you jettison this stuff? Have you got it into the present well enough? This one 16mm documentary, I had it scanned a couple of years ago to 2K image frame by frame and it looks gorgeous. You know, it's like it's the best I've ever seen it.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:17:53 --> 00:17:55)
I've never even seen it looking this great.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:17:55 --> 00:18:20)
So Do I jettison the negative now or do I keep it because in a year from now there's gonna be 8K 3D imagery scanner kind of thing? So you just don't know what to do with this stuff. So I think I feel the burden of that. I have everything kind of condensed down, but I will continue to carry this stuff around 'cause I just, you just don't know what's around the corner with invention and stuff.

Dustin Grinnell (00:18:20 --> 00:18:45)
[Speaker:CB] And you care. You care deeply and that's evident. There was another photograph, a series of 3 photographs that you shared with me. It was 3 pictures vertically oriented at the Hoboken Overlook in Hoboken, New Jersey. There was a picture where it's this beautiful place where you can see a panoramic view of New York City. Explain that project. What is that about?

E (00:18:45 --> 00:18:46)
Yeah.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:18:46 --> 00:18:57)
[Speaker:AC] That was kind of one of those accidental series that you don't know that you've started. I think when I first started doing black and white photography in Hoboken, I was the first subject of my photos.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:18:57 --> 00:18:58)
You know, I would take kind of—

Clay Walker - 1 (00:18:58 --> 00:19:12)
it wasn't necessarily self-portraits, but I might put myself in a setting, you know, where I put the camera on a tripod, set the timer, run as far away, be in it, come back, get the camera. And so this was one of those moments where I used to go up to this overlook.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:19:12 --> 00:19:13)
It wasn't very far from my home.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:19:14 --> 00:19:20)
And, you know, and so one evening I took a photo and it was very surreal. It was when the Twin Towers were still there, obviously.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:19:20 --> 00:19:31)
And there was a forest fire going on in North Carolina or something, but the smoke had come up to Manhattan and just, it was just this eerie, foggy, could not see through it for a few days.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:19:31 --> 00:19:37)
And that's a hard thing to capture at sunset, you know, in black and white film as well. But you can see the Twin Towers.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:19:37 --> 00:19:38)
It was kind of an eerie thing.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:19:38 --> 00:19:42)
And so I think it really just took me that long to make it back to that spot again.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:19:42 --> 00:19:53)
But 16 years later, I was kind of on the eve of doing, uh, the first day of shooting with Freddie Cole on a documentary that I was making about him, and I went over to Hoboken and sat down in the same place.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:19:53 --> 00:20:24)
A little bit of it had changed. The bench was a little different and took a photo. Then the Twin Towers were gone and this was around 2003. And so doing the math, I decided, you know, 16 years later, gotta go up there almost to the month, I think. And, um, my wife and I went up there and found the spot. But at this point I actually reached out to Stevens Institute, who, whose property that this is, cuz I felt like, you know, it would be one of these moments where you prepare this elaborate trip up there and then, you know, it's like, you know, you don't really have access to get to where you're going..

Clay Walker - 2 (00:20:24 --> 00:20:35)
And so I wrote to them and they put me in touch with one of their social media people, and so they were kind of fascinated that this person is taking this time to come up and take this 32-year span of images.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:20:36 --> 00:20:50)
And so we did, we set up and took this photo, kind of framed it a little different where we sat and stuff, but it kind of created the trilogy of this. So I guess you'll know where I'll be in 2035 when it's time to do the next one of those. Right.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:20:50 --> 00:20:50)
But I love it.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:20:50 --> 00:21:02)
I mean, I love stuff like that. I've seen, you know, you see pictures of people in New York who have come back 35 years later to take a picture of the same street corner, you know, and how it's changed and stuff like that. But, you know, the thing that's changed a lot in that photo too is me.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:21:02 --> 00:21:05)
So it's interesting to see me through different stages of life.

Dustin Grinnell (00:21:05 --> 00:21:15)
It's interesting. You've changed because you're a subject in the last picture. You've changed as the photographer and changed as the subject as well. Yeah. And do you actually plan to go back in 16 years?

Clay Walker - 1 (00:21:15 --> 00:21:16)
Oh, sure.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:21:16 --> 00:21:17)
I don't see why not.

Dustin Grinnell (00:21:17 --> 00:21:22)
And then another one. It could be 5 or 6 depending on Lifespan.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:21:22 --> 00:21:26)
Right, agreed. That'd be a good plan.

Dustin Grinnell (00:21:26 --> 00:22:01)
So if we can, I'd love to talk about your documentaries. And I think the first one that came on my radar was Post No Bills, the profile piece of Robbie Canale, the satirical, quote unquote, guerrilla artist, the poster artist. And I really thought it was just a fascinating look at him as a character and his work. And I would love to kind of have you kind of briefly talk about how you got involved in that project and how you went about making it and bringing it into the world.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:22:01 --> 00:22:03)
So I transitioned from living in New York.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:22:03 --> 00:22:11)
I did actually apply to USC to go to their film school and got accepted to USC, but not the film school.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:22:11 --> 00:22:30)
But I did move to Los Angeles at that point and with the intention of just continuously applying to USC's film school after getting declined. Went to USC, started attending classes, applied to the film school. I applied a second time, got declined. I applied a third time, got declined. It's, it's very competitive.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:22:30 --> 00:22:32)
I think they were letting in like 10 or 11 people at the time.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:22:33 --> 00:23:00)
And during that time, I worked in the cinema library on campus and was meeting different people. And I don't know if it was there or somewhere on campus, I just kind of overheard that the school was very much in need of people who were interested in documentary filmmaking, that that everybody wanted to be, you know, the next George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. And I mean, I can't say that I lied on my fourth application. And they also had a policy, if you don't get accepted on the third time, don't bother applying again.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:23:00 --> 00:23:06)
But I went for it and applied this fourth time and wrote this thing about how I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:23:06 --> 00:23:21)
And either I wrote that into the truth or I always felt that way. But I got accepted on the fourth time and entered into the program and got to participate in a very interesting dual arrangement with the anthropology department.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:23:21 --> 00:23:22)
And the film department.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:23:22 --> 00:23:28)
And in really in my second semester of courses, you know, we had to make a documentary.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:23:28 --> 00:23:39)
And that's kind of a complicated thing to just jumpstart and a short documentary, I should say, to jumpstart, you know, without unless you were already arrived on the scene, you know, with something to do.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:23:39 --> 00:23:42)
So my first interest really was ACT UP.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:23:42 --> 00:23:51)
Like I did start going to some meetings and trying to see if I could put together some interview subjects. And it was not working out.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:23:51 --> 00:24:02)
And just because it was just too much coordination, um, you know, I mean, I know we all know now it's like you've got your phone, your laptop, you could just get in touch with 10 people in the moment that I spoke this sentence.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:24:02 --> 00:24:03)
But it just—

Clay Walker - 1 (00:24:03 --> 00:24:06)
we could not do that in that short amount of time.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:24:06 --> 00:24:14)
So funny enough, one of the people I reached out to was Matt Groening, who was the creator of The Simpsons. It was showing, you know, just as a 2-minute piece on The Tracee Ullman Show.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:24:14 --> 00:24:17)
And I always loved Life in Hell cartoons. I just—

Clay Walker - 2 (00:24:17 --> 00:24:19)
those were always so funny to me.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:24:19 --> 00:24:58)
So this seemed like someone that would great subject of a film. I don't think much had been told about him. And my third person was Robbie Canale, who for me living in Los Angeles at this time, if you lived anywhere on the West Side or, you know, because that's where he lived, his posters were everywhere. I mean, they were just this strange thing that you caught out of the corner of your eye that you had no idea. So, and to explain this to your listeners, like, so he would do an oil painting of someone like Ronald Reagan, and he would have just this very simple amount of text that would say like, "Contra-diction." And this was during the Iran-Contra time. He would go out at night with his little—

Clay Walker - 2 (00:24:58 --> 00:25:00)
he calls them his guerrilla armies.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:25:00 --> 00:25:07)
They would meet, he'd hand out a roll of posters to people, give them wallpaper glue, and just send them out into the city to glue these things up.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:25:07 --> 00:25:14)
So they would get glued up on traffic light switching boxes, construction sites, anywhere anybody could get creative with.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:25:15 --> 00:25:41)
And so as someone who lived there, for all the different posters that he was doing at the time, it gets saturated. You start seeing a new poster, you start seeing the tattered remains of an older poster, you may not know who it is. There's no website on it, there's no explanation as to what it was or who it was if you didn't know who it was. And so, it just really becomes kind of subliminally in your mind, all this crazy stuff is all around me.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:25:41 --> 00:25:46)
I mean, it's like an art exhibit just going from one space to another.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:25:46 --> 00:25:55)
And there was a bookstore in Santa Monica that he sold them out of. And just in the same process, I found myself in this bookstore and I bought two of his posters.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:25:55 --> 00:26:02)
I bought the Contradiction one and I bought the one of George Bush Senior that was It Can't Happen Here, was a poster that he had put up.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:26:02 --> 00:26:40)
And I had these posters and, you know, as I'm failing with getting something going with ACT UP and Matt Groening, I'm like, hmm, maybe Robbie Cannell, you know. So I went to the bookstore, wrote him a letter, had them give it to him, and he actually called me back quite quickly. And we were actually able to move very quickly to create a 10-minute documentary about him in the context of this class, the second semester of, you know, my film degree at USC. And during that time, I always felt like I wanted it to be a longer film. And so the process in which we were making this film, we were shooting with a camera that could only hold 3 minutes of film.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:26:40 --> 00:26:43)
We weren't recording sync audio.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:26:43 --> 00:27:33)
So everything, you know, it was visual storytelling in which we were able to make this documentary, you know, to tell his story through voiceover, music, and it was cute, it was funny, but I definitely saw the need to make this longer piece. And so I feel like even once the class was done, I just kept shooting stuff, you know, but it was— you have to understand, like, you can walk outside with your iPhone right now and capture anything going on and it's going to look great and it's this great quality, but to do this type of filmmaking back then, if you didn't own a camera, you know, you had to rent a camera. And to rent a camera, you had to have an arrangement with the rental house, and you had to have insurance, and you had to go pay for this, and you had to schedule it, and you had to go do it. And even, you know, in doing all this, I could still only afford to rent the cheapest thing that they had, you know, an Arri camera with a lens turret, or just the one that just had a single lens on it.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:27:33 --> 00:27:39)
And I would rent one lens, you know, going back to my still photography training, you know, we're just gonna shoot this entire film with one lens.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:27:40 --> 00:27:55)
And and then schedule stuff with Kunal. And I feel like I was able to kind of keep it going, but I had to convince him that this could be done, that he just wasn't wasting his time with someone trying to follow him randomly when they could show up and do the things that he was doing.

Dustin Grinnell (00:27:55 --> 00:28:14)
Yeah, how did you do that? Because I mean, I think there's a certain amount of convincing your subjects that you're legitimate and competent and confident, because people would just say no. They could say, "No, thank you." And how did you get over that? Hump and convince it was worth his time and all that?

Clay Walker - 1 (00:28:14 --> 00:28:41)
Yeah, I think it worked in my favor that the short film was getting attention. So there, you know, there's all these film festivals, um, started submitting it to those, you know. And back in this time, you would go to film festivals, someone would show something, they'd say, you know, this is sample work of a larger piece that I'm trying to do, you know. We're all trying to raise money to make these films that are our passion projects. And I feel like, you know, Robbie really spoke to a certain constituency. And his posters were being used in films.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:28:41 --> 00:28:50)
The filmmaker Joel Schumacher, he really liked Robbie's stuff. He featured his posters in Flatliners and, um, Falling Down, that film with Michael Douglas.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:28:50 --> 00:28:52)
Oh yeah, it was also in a film called Menace to Society.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:28:52 --> 00:28:56)
One of his posters had a very poignant use in that film.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:28:56 --> 00:30:22)
As an assistant editor, and he set up right next to USC. He was working with a producer who had graduated from USC, and so he had this infamous Steenbeck flatbed, you know, and so we were shooting on the same format that I'd been shooting Post No Bills on. And it's hard to even describe this elaborate device. There was the TV show Poker Face. There was a recent episode which Nick Nolte was on, and he plays this film editor, and he's got this giant Steenbeck flatbed.

This is like exactly the same machine, you know, this was the holy grail of German equipment. That you needed to get your hands on. So I started working as assistant editor on this and was able to keep shooting stuff. And I was also applying for grants for the film. And the funny thing was I would, you know, work all day on this thing and then give it a couple hours, and then I'd come back at night and take off their film off the machine and put mine on, you know.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:30:22 --> 00:30:29)
And at this point, I was able to finally start looking at some of my footage and, you know, hope I don't burn out the light bulb in the machine and have to replace it.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:30:29 --> 00:31:02)
And I applied for a grant from the Independent Television Service. This was a part of the general— the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was trying to offer grants to independent filmmakers to get a more diverse voice of filmmakers out there who might not normally be able to, you know, make a film. And this was their baby steps, and they'd been talking about it for years. There were a lot of really genius people who were trying to form the best way to do an open call for submissions and to you know, how filmmakers apply.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:31:02 --> 00:31:07)
They even came out to cities and just did seminars on how to complete your application to them.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:31:08 --> 00:31:35)
And I applied for this grant. It's my understanding, if I remember correctly, they mailed out 33,000 applications, and I think they got back something like 5,000 completed ones. And from that, they narrowed it down to about 175 projects, and from that, they narrowed it down to 10 projects. And this film was one of those 10 projects. So they basically were going to fund the post-production cost of editing this film. And but, you know, when was the money going to come?

Clay Walker - 2 (00:31:35 --> 00:31:37)
You know, it was going to come installments and stuff like that.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:31:37 --> 00:32:45)
You know, if you ask them, you'd hear these stories of such and such donated $5,000 to film. So being at USC at the time, you know, I had access to a lot of people. So I was constantly approaching very famous people, you know, with a proposal, you know, and stuff, and, um, in a VHS tape, you know, of this 10-minute version of Post No Bills. And, um, it is funny. I mean, I could go down the list.

I mean, I had conversations with George Lucas, um, Charlie Sheen. Charlie Sheen actually owned a couple of Robbie's paintings, so I felt like he would be a good subject. Harry Shearer, Robert Zemeckis, James Foley. And it became very interesting because I, you know, the person who finally explained it to me was Ernest Dickerson, who was Spike Lee's cinematographer at the time, who came on later to direct his own films and stuff. But he was like, stop asking people for money, ask people for specific things.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:32:45 --> 00:32:56)
Tell them you need film stock, tell them you need mag stock, tell them you need, you know, audio recording tape. He's like, you know, I I know someone at Kodak. I will give you their name and reach out to them, see if you can get some short ends.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:32:56 --> 00:33:01)
And that really changed things for me because I was finally able to ask people more specifically for things, you know.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:33:01 --> 00:33:08)
And so we were able to get short ends, you know, small short runs of film and stuff like that to just keep going.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:33:08 --> 00:33:11)
And, and then the grant did come through.

Dustin Grinnell (00:33:11 --> 00:33:27)
So as you were working on this film, I understand there was a period where you wrote a script for the actor Dolph Lundgren, the action actor. In a 5-day period, you wrote the script 5 days, like, for him? You met him on— so what's that?

E (00:33:27 --> 00:33:28)
Tell me that story.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:33:29 --> 00:33:31)
Well, one of the ridiculous aspects of this—

Clay Walker - 2 (00:33:31 --> 00:33:38)
so I was doing all kinds of crazy odd jobs to, you know, anything I could do to put into this film because it really was my passion project.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:33:38 --> 00:34:02)
And I did these Entertainment Tonight surveys in West Hollywood where I would stand out front with these cards and golf pencils and give a— give this very almost half a sheet of paper, you know, to people going into these movie screenings, and I would collect them at the end, and I would get $10 per movie. And, you know, on a Friday night, you know, this was when in Westwood, you know, 1,000 people would go see a movie in a single theater and stuff like that.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:34:02 --> 00:34:04)
So it really was a golden age of film going.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:34:04 --> 00:34:28)
So that was one of the things I did, and that also led to me seeing a lot of different, um, Hollywood people that I would talk to. But I was also, for free, working as a reader at this, um, production company. And I'm gonna keep all names as generic as possible with this. But so that's one of the very common jobs, you know, in Los Angeles to do for free is to come into a production company and just read scripts that have been submitted to them.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:34:28 --> 00:34:34)
And, you know, at least give it some general coverage so you can kind of wean out, you know, the bad ones from the good ones.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:34:35 --> 00:37:37)
And I was in this predicament of everything they gave me, I felt like was pretty much unreadable. Like I just couldn't see anything they gave me becoming a film or being made or even being improved upon to be a film. And so there was this talk of this film Red Scorpion that Dolph Lundgren had been in that they wanted to make a sequel to. And if you do any searching on the internet, you'll realize just how complicated the scenario was of who financed that film, the Abramoffs. And I mean, it has like deep, disgusting political ties that came out later.

Like, I didn't know any of this, so I'm just this, you know, 20-year-old reading bad scripts. And they had a script that they wanted to go into production with that had been written by an individual who had written a film, a very popular film that Clint Eastwood starred in. And so they sent me home with this script to read. And it was terrible. I was just like, this is terrible.

I can't send it. And so of course, they did. They made the challenging comment of, if you think you can do a better job, why don't you do it yourself? You know, and I'm like, okay, I'll see you in a week. And so I really did.

He wanted My only input was that Dolph Lundgren, there was some festival going on in Malaysia, he wanted this film to take place there. So, I personally knew nothing about Malaysia. So I started in the library, came up with, you know, some things that were going on, some people that Dolph Lundgren mercenary would probably be at odds with. And so the other funny part was, at the same time, I had a huge fascination with Alfred Hitchcock, and I was taking a class on Alfred Hitchcock that Drew Casper, this amazing teacher there, did, where we were able to see every film that that Alfred Hitchcock had made. And so, you know, the best film you could possibly try to take a structure from was North by Northwest.

So what I did was combine this very strange idea of an action film with North by Northwest. So if you can picture, you know, Cary Grant as a Swedish mercenary, you know, this was kind of my plotline of just this mistaken person, you know, that didn't mean to fall into the scenario. And I did it. I mean, I actually wrote a 90-page script, and it was about I think it was at least 7 days. And the funniest problem at first was just that when I printed it out, it wasn't 3-hole punched.

So there was this huge drama of trying to find a 3-hole punch. So I can remember just like going all over Los Angeles trying to find someone who could punch this paper so I could bind it and properly submit it. And so I brought it in, came in a week to the day and gave it to this office assistant who was kind of a head above me. And said, I did it. And she's like, you know, you did what?

And where have you been? You know, it's like, you know, nobody even realized that I was actually writing this or was coming back with it. And I'm like, it's the script. It's the Dolph Lundgren set in Malaysia Red Scorpion 2 sequel. And she's like, oh my God, okay, well, I'll give it to him, you know.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:37:37 --> 00:37:41)
So I've got a contract made up, and I'm going to drive over to you, and I'd like for you to sign it.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:37:41 --> 00:37:49)
And if you'll attach me to the script, I will pass this on to them as something that I think is so much better than the other. So I was just like, well, sure, you know, what I got to lose?

Clay Walker - 2 (00:37:49 --> 00:37:50)
Come on over.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:37:50 --> 00:38:15)
And I sign it, you know, and she's now attached. And I'm going to start talking really quickly through this story, but So she submits it to them and they decide that they like it and they give it to this director that they had just worked with on another film that was in theaters. I mean, these are all real filmmakers and if anybody is hearing the story, they're like, you know, this is not how you do this. So I'm in complete jeopardy because, you know, stuff has to come through an agent.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:38:15 --> 00:38:18)
You know, you don't just hand a producer a script.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:38:18 --> 00:39:22)
Um, she gets me an agent. I go to Century City, I go meet with this person, and it was so reminiscent of the scene in this movie called The Big Picture with Kevin Bacon where he's this film student and Martin Short takes him on as his agent, and he goes and meets with his agent, and the agent's I'm just going to tell you, this is Martin Short, you know, talking. He's like, I've never seen your work. I don't plan on watching it, but I think you're a genius and I want to represent you. And so I meet with this woman.

She's like, I'm not going to read this thing. I'm not going to touch this thing, but I will represent you. You know, this is my fee. I'm going to ask them to return it to me and we will resubmit it properly, you know? And you know, it just becomes chaos.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:39:23 --> 00:39:23)
Let's move on.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:39:23 --> 00:42:14)
Let's rewrite it a little bit. Let's go for Schwarzenegger now. Let's, you know. And so the funny thing is, so you're making, you're writing the script about someone, you're giving them the least amount of dialogue possible because you know their delivery isn't that great. And so what all these actors are struggling with is they don't want to play these roles anymore.

You know, Dolph Lundgren is an extremely intelligent person, you know. And so Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn't want to be the mercenary anymore. But so we go through the creative agencies, we go through, and you know, you can only put this out to one person at a time. So we go through CAA and we go through ICM and this thing just keeps falling through the cracks. And I can't remember how many times I rewrote it, changing it to fit Jean-Claude Van Damme, you know, Michael Dudikoff, anybody that was an action hero that still might want to do this, you know.

But at this point, we're— we don't have the producers, so it's just a script that they would have to like and want to get made. So it all collapses. I'm still working on Bozo and the Snowbills. But it was kind of a crazy story. But then years later— so I never met Dolph during any of this, like, he wouldn't know who I was in a million years.

And So many years later, it must have been 2006, 2007, I was in West Hollywood because this documentary that I made on Freddie Cole was shown in a film festival. And I'd gone out to meet some friends of mine, and I came back to the hotel. And I'm in the elevator, and I've pushed the button. And just as the doors close, and I'm going to just go to bed, this hand comes in between the two doors and stops it and pulls them open. And I know immediately it's Stoff Lundgren.

And he is with someone else. He is very intoxicated. And so he, the, you know, the doors close. It was at a W Hotel. And so at this time what they had was this kind of, uh, LED display with a camera on it.

And so what it would do is it would capture your image standing there, you know, staring at the buttons, and it would reproduce it in multiple layers, you know, from top to bottom, and it would refresh. So it becomes kind of this living and breathing visual art of yourself. And so He and this woman— I'm not making this up— they are parodying the Mr. and Mrs. T Bloody Mary mix thing that they used to do on Saturday Night Live with Lorraine Newman. Like, it's like, "I pity the fool that doesn't like Mr. and Mrs. T." And they're just so happy and having so much fun, and it's so ridiculous. And he falls over on me, and I just catch him with my hands in both of his sweaty armpits and just standing back up.

We're just face to face and just go back up on his feet and I'm like, what floor are you going to? And I push the button and it's like we're best friends. Like, you know, they get out of the elevator and they're like, I see you, you know. And I'm like, oh my God, you know. And I go on to my thing and I'm like— and so I had that moment of thought, like the next day I show up for breakfast very early there.

Dustin Grinnell (00:42:14 --> 00:42:18)
So, and to what degree was your original premise or—

Clay Walker - 1 (00:42:18 --> 00:42:29)
I don't think it had anything to do with anything. So I think it was just the journey of a Hollywood script, huh? Wow. It feels like a slight subplot of Barry, of the thing that, um, Bill Hader is doing right now.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:42:29 --> 00:42:37)
Like, just, just the absurdity of, you know, of something doesn't exist one moment and then it's like this hot thing and then nobody cares about it, you know.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:42:37 --> 00:42:39)
So, and That's pretty much it.

Dustin Grinnell (00:42:39 --> 00:42:46)
And you were pretzeling yourself all the way, you know, writing it for different actors. Right. And yeah, wow.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:42:46 --> 00:43:05)
I did the math. Like, I had it registered with the Writers Guild. Like, the minimum script purchase was like $55,000 back then. So I was like, okay, well, if this gets bought, you know, this is the money, you know. And I think even that person who attached herself, she's like, you know, you should direct this film, you know. So I'm going to put forth that, you know, you should be the director and stuff. So I was just like, Wow, am I going to end up in Malaysia, you know, making this thing?

Clay Walker - 2 (00:43:05 --> 00:43:08)
So, but it, you know, never got anywhere.

Dustin Grinnell (00:43:08 --> 00:43:37)
So one thing that I'm curious about that too is that, um, you know, that's fiction. How much have your ambitions laid in fiction? Because you're a photographer and you take pictures of real people, and you're a filmmaker and you make documentary films, and you're telling true stories essentially. But you wrote this fictional story, this high-concept fictional story, also. Like, have you wanted to make feature films? Like, yeah, make things up?

Clay Walker - 1 (00:43:37 --> 00:43:40)
I think I had a real jumping-off point probably during that time.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:43:40 --> 00:43:49)
I mean, whether I pretended to want to be a documentary filmmaker or really did want to be one, just didn't know it, I think from that point forward that has been the path I've been on.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:43:49 --> 00:43:53)
I think a lot of my initial Super 8 films that I made were fiction projects.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:43:53 --> 00:43:57)
The very first Super 8 film thing I did was an adaptation of Franz Kafka's Hunger Artist.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:43:57 --> 00:44:08)
So it started very complicated. Yeah, and, um, but I, I really— it's funny, I feel like throughout the years, like, when you see people who are purely talented at certain things, you kind of—

Clay Walker - 2 (00:44:08 --> 00:44:24)
if that's just not oozing out of you, you may be going a different direction. I know when I was at art college, um, you know, I witnessed a fellow person who could draw horses from memory. Like, he would just sit down and draw a muscular, detailed horse from his mind, you know.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:44:24 --> 00:44:40)
And I think that kind of swayed me from thinking I could do that, you know, because I mean, people are so amazingly talented. And I think, I think I just kept trying to find what I could do that I felt that comfortable with. That just— a lot of people make things look easy, you know, musicians and stuff, that do work very hard at it.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:44:40 --> 00:44:46)
But I do think there's kind of a balance between things that you're naturally talented at and can naturally express yourself through.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:44:46 --> 00:44:53)
So I think with documentary film work and stuff like that, I think that, um, I mean, I'm probably hiding myself a bit more that way.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:44:53 --> 00:45:05)
Like, one of my initial teachers at Georgia Tech told me I should be an actor, that I should pursue going to filmmaking as an actor, and then I could transition to being a director, that a lot of people were doing that, and that would be one way to get in there.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:45:05 --> 00:45:07)
Um, and I don't know, I just—

Clay Walker - 2 (00:45:07 --> 00:45:31)
I, I actually, even when I was at LaGuardia Community College, I took an acting class, and I think it just wasn't the fit that I wanted. So I think I really haven't done a lot of creative writing in that sense. I think I'm constantly bombarded, even in the corporate work that I do, it's all storytelling type stuff of real people type things. So, but yeah, I mean, I think the Dolph Lundgren thing shows that, you know, if I wanted to, I certainly could, but I'm just not, you know, for some reason.

Dustin Grinnell (00:45:31 --> 00:46:30)
You know, what are my talents? What am I naturally good at? What am I weak at? And I've noticed that in my own work where I write fiction and I write nonfiction, but sometimes the nonfiction stories that use fictional techniques, you know, this hybrid approach like Michael Lewis and long-form narrative nonfiction writers, that's kind of a sweet spot I find sometimes for myself because it's like, You don't have to be exceptionally strong either. It's almost like you're stealing a little bit from fiction and you're telling the true story.

So you have to be kind of a journalist and a fiction writer hybrid in a way. So yeah, I just think it's interesting as living a creative life, you do kind of have to do these check-ins throughout your career. Like, oh, I'm actually kind of good at that. Maybe I should keep going. Or, uh, that doesn't speak to me.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:46:30 --> 00:46:32)
Yeah, I think I wear a lot of different hats.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:46:32 --> 00:46:43)
I think when I was very busy in corporate video type stuff, people would see me as one thing and but not the other. Like, you know, this is my editor, and some people are, this is my videographer.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:46:43 --> 00:46:53)
And I think if I had a story I really wanted to tell, and maybe I, I think I always envisioned myself, you know, as we all do, just growing old in a, a beautiful cabin somewhere with nature and writing.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:46:53 --> 00:47:02)
And I think I've so much life has happened that I haven't found that as an escape to just be, you know, writing and writing. And I've—

Clay Walker - 1 (00:47:02 --> 00:47:12)
a good example is when I was at USC, John Singleton was there, and everywhere I saw him at USC, he was writing and writing and writing. Like, he's under a tree, you know, he's at a bench, and he was writing Boyz n the Hood.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:47:12 --> 00:47:20)
You know, he left school there and made that film, and he was, you know, it's just one of those individuals, you know, they're so passionate about the story that they need to tell.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:47:21 --> 00:47:24)
So I was not on that path, I think, as a writer.

Dustin Grinnell (00:47:24 --> 00:47:59)
One thing I wanted to kind of touch on is you talked about your awakening socially doing some of the earlier work at the demonstration. You talked about how you were attracted to some of Robbie's work and things. How much does your work, maybe focusing on the Post-No Bills documentary, how much does it have a point of view? To what degree are you trying to stay completely objective in your work versus kind of having a political viewpoint? Like, are you trying to tell both sides of the stories? Are you leaning a certain way as the filmmaker? How do you manage that process?

Clay Walker - 1 (00:47:59 --> 00:48:01)
That is a great question. And I can—

Clay Walker - 2 (00:48:01 --> 00:48:03)
I'll use First Nobels as an example.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:48:04 --> 00:48:38)
And, you know, one of the things when I finished the longer film, I had a screening of it, and my teacher who was present for the first incarnation of it was there. And she said that her feedback feedback was that she liked it, but the thing that made her sad about it was that she just didn't sense any of me in this piece. And so I've always, you know, felt that as a very legitimate piece of constructive feedback. And I think, you know, people have different approaches as a documentary filmmaker. They may want to be a Michael Moore and be in the—

Clay Walker - 2 (00:48:38 --> 00:48:43)
a part of this narrative and part of the storyline that's unfolding in front of them.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:48:43 --> 00:48:59)
And You know, that's not my style, but I can say as someone— so for Post No Bills, for example, this is a film that I photographed, I edited, and by default directed, and, you know, did all the production work. And you better believe that there's a point of view there.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:48:59 --> 00:49:10)
You know, it may not be as present, you know, it might not be in your face, but I mean, I could walk you through cut by cut in this film and explain to you why I did that, you know, kind of thing, and what I was trying to say with it.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:49:11 --> 00:49:12)
And So, I mean, I do want to—

Clay Walker - 2 (00:49:12 --> 00:49:18)
I want to open up the Post Novels experience because I think it can really speak very quickly to what you're talking about.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:49:18 --> 00:49:24)
So this is a project where here's this guy, little rebel in the night with his bucket of glue, a roll of posters.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:49:24 --> 00:49:27)
When I wanted to make this film on him, it's really all I imagined, you know.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:49:27 --> 00:49:58)
We're going to go out into a dark street, you're going to glue up these posters, we're going to come back the next day and see them, and, you know, that's our story, you know. It's, it's beautiful. Toulouse-Lautrec would be proud of you. And so, you know, the first time I show up to do this, there's another news crew there. So it's kind of like, okay, you invited them too, you know. And so I've got this little camera that records 3 minutes of film, and they've got, you know, a full ENG package and stuff. And, and, you know, my instruction is, if you could stay out of their way, you know, that would be great. So, you know, so I did that.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:49:58 --> 00:50:02)
Okay, so this isn't my chance to get that footage of him going down the street and stuff.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:50:02 --> 00:50:38)
So it'll happen next time. So next time we do it again, another news crew photographer, you know, and if I, you know, I'm told to kind of stay out of their way. So I finally realized, I got it real quick, that, you know, this whole film that I'm making is about this person becoming, you know, a media personality. Like, he quite possibly might not ever go out without a camera with him. And I think you could argue that it could be for safety, uh, it could be narcissism, it could be PR, you know, it's maybe a little bit of all this, but I You know, you asked where we fit in the scale of things. We were, you know, stay out of the way kind of thing. So that's what I did.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:50:38 --> 00:50:48)
I mean, I just kind of took a step back and focused on all these people kind of obsessing over him and following his thing and his little persona that he was creating for himself.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:50:48 --> 00:51:36)
And I think one of the fascinating things for me that I didn't think would happen was the subjects of his paintings started becoming people who might actually be accessible to me. You know, I think we kind of moved up the scale. And one of the hugely volatile things that happened during this project was he and a student of his made a poster of the chief of police of Los Angeles. And it wasn't a funny little satirical painting, you know, with some cute text. It was a photorealistic image of LAPD Chief Daryl Gates, his face cut out and put on an NRA shooting target with this text saying, casual drug users ought to be taken out and shot, which was something that Gates said. So put these up in the city and it got a lot of attention. I mean, it got a lot of, um, attention from all types of media.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:51:36 --> 00:51:38)
You know, it wasn't just the camera people that he had coming out with him.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:51:39 --> 00:51:57)
And, and in this process, I did what I do best. I started writing letters to people. I wrote Daryl Gates a letter and said, you know, could I come down and interview you? And I gave it kind of a bigger scope of what we might talk about, but I did— he did invite me down. I did go to police headquarters. This is halfway in between the Rodney King beating becoming known and the LA riots.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:51:57 --> 00:51:59)
So we were like in that December spot.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:51:59 --> 00:52:38)
And so I interviewed him talking about Robbie's posters. I was able to get Oliver North. I went to the Reagan Library opening, so I was able to get, you know, Ronald Reagan in actual film that I shot. So one of the things I tried to do structurally and editorially and from my point of view was when I realized that I could get these people, I started transitioning in the film visually and stylistically. What I did was at the beginning of the film, like when you see Ronald Reagan, he's in video. When you see Oliver North, he's in video. And then as I got towards the end of the film, I switched it. These people are now on film and reel, and I started transitioning Robby into video.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:52:38 --> 00:52:44)
Like, you see him in this video texture, you see him in a closer shot, you know, video texture.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:52:44 --> 00:53:13)
And I mean, what I was trying to say, you know, was just, you know, he's entered into this arena in which he's criticizing people, and is he becoming what he's criticizing? So is he diluting his artwork or the efficacy of it by becoming, you know, a TV personality? You know, and I don't know, but I wanted to, from my film standpoint, you know, give you the viewer the opportunity to see that. So that's kind of subliminal, but it was definitely completely deliberate, you know, from my standpoint.

Dustin Grinnell (00:53:13 --> 00:53:59)
Yeah, interesting. I definitely want to talk about your other two big documentaries, The Squirrel Nut Zippers, the band who you made a film about, and then also Freddie Cole, the brother of Nat King Cole. But one thing I wanted to ask that just occurred to me before we touch on those projects is, are there themes that come out through your work? Is there an itch you're trying to scratch, do you think? Or many?

Is there something that ties your work together? I don't know if you ever think about that. Some artists don't. They say, "No, I don't really want to answer that question of what itch I'm trying to scratch because I don't know and I don't care." And others, it's quite explicit. Kind of something that's top of mind for them?

Clay Walker - 1 (00:53:59 --> 00:54:27)
I think it's a little bit of both. I think once you have a few bodies of work, you could probably attach some type of analysis of it. And I think you're right. I was trying to figure that out yesterday. I think with Robbie Canale, I think one of his paradoxes is he actually is this painter and he creates these paintings that are for sale, but he makes these posters of them and he goes out and puts them out on the street, and he creates an awareness that this painting exists.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:54:27 --> 00:54:35)
So he really doesn't like it when, you know, people say, "Here's Robbie Canale, poster artist." It's like, "No, I'm an artist, you know, I'm a painter." And I think with the Squirrel Nut Zippers, it was the same way.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:54:35 --> 00:55:13)
They were inevitably caught in that huge wave of swing music revival, but they didn't want to be called a swing band, and they always kind of pushed that label aside. And then I think with Freddie Cole, you know, he didn't want to just simply be known as his, you know, Nat King Cole's brother, even though he loved his brother. And obviously the work that Nat King Cole did set the stage, but they were contemporaries even though there was an age difference with them. So I think in both of those three topics too, it's like people who were unknown becoming more known. I mean, my Freddie Cole film was called The Cole Nobody Knows. So I think the funny thing with the Squirrel Nutzippers is like everybody knows them and they became very famous, but they weren't.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:55:13 --> 00:55:15)
I mean, they weren't when I was working with them.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:55:15 --> 00:55:25)
And it really they had almost an overnight explosion into the popularity of them. So I think those are themes that probably run through those things.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:55:25 --> 00:55:29)
They could be real or not. I could argue for them.

Dustin Grinnell (00:55:29 --> 00:55:41)
[Speaker:CB] Yeah, I think there was one thing I remember you telling me through email around the time of filming Post-No Bills, you ran into a guy named Terry Orc.

E (00:55:41 --> 00:55:42)
[Speaker:NDB] Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:55:42 --> 00:55:54)
[Speaker:CB] Right? And you got to know him and became friendly with him. And I understand And he has kind of an interesting story. He was hiding— well, let me let you tell it. It's kind of an interesting experience.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:55:54 --> 00:55:57)
Terry is just— he's one of the great people I ever knew.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:55:57 --> 00:56:01)
And it's just such a crazy story because he—

Clay Walker - 1 (00:56:01 --> 00:56:04)
I worked in the cinema library in Doheny.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:56:04 --> 00:56:07)
You know, it's in the middle of USC campus. People would come there, researchers come there.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:56:07 --> 00:56:09)
They had special collections.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:56:09 --> 00:56:16)
They had stuff that was so rare that, you know, they would put people in a room with just an index card and a golf pencil to be able to take notes of. You know, you couldn't photocopy it.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:56:17 --> 00:57:23)
So he sat on this corner kind of like Christopher Lloyd's character from Taxi, you know, just the hairs everywhere. You don't know if this person is dangerous or crazy or funny or what, you know, but somehow we became friends just because he was there all the time and he was making this kind of underground newspaper called Modern Times after Charlie Chaplin's movie title. And so, he was just all about independent film. And this really was, I mean, in the early 1990s when the film festivals were starting, this really was one of the golden eras of independent film. It was becoming commoditized, it was becoming valuable.

Films were being made for $30,000 and sold for $5 million, and he still wanted to triumph all the original true independent filmmakers. And he was just so passionate. And, you know, we would talk and we'd be friends. And I knew him as Noah Ford. Like, I never— I—

Clay Walker - 2 (00:57:23 --> 00:57:30)
me calling him Terry at this point is just my brain, you know, programming. I mean, I've, I've never called him Terry in person.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:57:30 --> 00:57:34)
But so he explained to me, I mean, it was like Big Fish, Tim Burton's movie.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:57:34 --> 00:57:37)
Like, he just had all these crazy stories about everything.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:57:37 --> 00:57:51)
But he told me, you know, he slowly revealed to me that His name wasn't really Noah, that he was— the FBI was looking for him and he was kind of in hiding. But he, you know, over these years that I knew him, he just, he did so many amazing things for me in terms of introducing me to people.

Clay Walker - 2 (00:57:51 --> 00:57:54)
He would bring me out to do videography on things.

Clay Walker - 1 (00:57:54 --> 01:01:01)
He was managing editor, you know, and he was going to film festivals novels. He was writing about things, he was connecting filmmakers, he introduced me to Sundance, he told me I should submit Post and Bills to Sundance, which I'd never heard of. And I did, and it got accepted. So all these years, you know, I knew him as this. And after I moved away from Los Angeles, pretty much immediately, within a couple of months, I, you know, I get the phone call, you know, do you accept the charges from a federal prison, you know, from, you know, person calling you as Terry Orc?

I mean, Noah Ford? I mean, you know, it's me, Clay. So long story short, it's like in that moment in Big Fish where the guy wasn't sure if all these stories that his father had told him were true, you know, and he realizes, oh my God, they're all true, you know. It's like, so Terry had been in some connection with Andy Warhol, and, uh, he had stolen these silkscreens for producing Andy Warhol's work and had made, um, fake ones. And so he was still in possession of these screens all this time.

And so the FBI wanted them back. He had a minimal time in jail. And even when he would call me from prison, it was like he was having the time of his life. You know, he was like on the same floor with Charles Keating, and you know, it was just a party. Everything was a party for him.

So long story short, he was Terry Ork. He was the person who co-founded CBGBs back in the '70s. He was the producer of Television, this punk band, and he went on to have just this amazing producing life. There have been some collections of his work that have been done. To capsulize all these bands that he produced and made famous at the time.

The movie CBGB that was made, I think Johnny Galecki played him. But the funny thing in hindsight, so obviously Terry, this fits the bill of everything I would want to make a documentary about. This is a person not many people know. And I tried. I mean, I kind of laid some work.

I met, I can't remember his name, Richard Floyd of television, had a very unremarkable conversation with him about Terry. And the funny thing was Nobody remembered him. None of my friends, none of the people— like, I'm friends with all these people from the library, so nobody ever saw him. Like, I tell these stories, you know, I'm like, you know the guy that sat over there and was just like— so he almost became like this figment of my imagination, but I didn't have photos of him, you know. I almost can't prove that he exists because there's just so little recorded stuff of him.

But I do have pictures of him. But it is funny how I can't connect. And like, I'm telling you this story now, I was in a party in Brooklyn and I said his name and some guy stepped forward and I was like, I think I just heard you say Terry York. And he was some director who had directed Madonna videos and stuff and worked all the way back, you know, to like Debbie Harry and the Ramones and stuff. So there is this connection.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:01:01 --> 01:01:07)
Like, he just is your friend. He just is nurturing. He is supportive and and is a train wreck.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:01:07 --> 01:01:20)
And unfortunately, he died right before I got finished with the Freddie Cole film. It was probably about that same time that I ran into Duff Lundgren, that I was in town, and he had been getting progressively sick and passed away at that point.

Dustin Grinnell (01:01:20 --> 01:01:24)
Well, you could take 7 days off and write that.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:01:24 --> 01:01:25)
Right.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:01:25 --> 01:01:29)
I could just put it into an AI program at this point, you know, "Write me a film about—" Actually, you could.

Dustin Grinnell (01:01:29 --> 01:02:18)
You could put that premise in, yeah. It did remind me that this idea of he was your friend and he had a very compelling story in and of itself, and it occurred to you as an artist, "Well, maybe that's an interesting subject." How do you manage finding stories in that regard? Do you take from your life? Are you more of a journalist approach? It's a little bit of both because I think of someone like David Sedaris who is a memoirist and he steals from his friends and families all the time. He's always writing about his family and in some cases kind of embarrassing them versus others who they never are visible in their work. For you, how is that story finding, story choosing process?

Clay Walker - 1 (01:02:18 --> 01:02:22)
I think in these, they were different things that had impact on me.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:02:22 --> 01:02:27)
Like the squirrel nut zippers, I was hearing them on the radio and I really liked them.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:02:27 --> 01:02:44)
And that project began as I wrote them a letter. In Buddy Cole, the funny thing was I had been a fan of his long before I was aware that he lived in Atlanta. And I hate to say it, it makes me sound like I don't know my music, but I didn't actually realize he was Nat King Cole's brother. So I had a huge appreciation for him.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:02:44 --> 01:02:46)
He did a recording with Grover Washington Jr.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:02:46 --> 01:03:00)
that he sings a couple of songs on that were just two of my favorites forever. And when I finally connected that dot that he was Nat's brother, it wasn't a huge epiphany, but it was like, you know, of course he is. But it just, you know, for some people, they—

Clay Walker - 2 (01:03:00 --> 01:03:03)
not a lot of people have that pure of an experience, I think, with knowing who Freddie is.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:03:03 --> 01:03:08)
So I feel very compelled, you know. And again, I wrote him a letter, you know. It's like this just always starts with this letter writing.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:03:08 --> 01:03:12)
And his manager came back and said, you know, we'd love to do this.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:03:12 --> 01:03:45)
Um, but I feel like there's a certain reality of all this, of ownership and media and all this stuff, you know, use of image. So I think, you know, to the question that you're asking me, I think, I think I've kind of gone into hiding in some ways because I feel like, you know, it's, it's impossible to make a film on a, on a musician, uh, like with someone who records other people's music, that music's owned by someone else. So if you're an independent filmmaker, you know, making a film on your favorite musician who doesn't perform their own songs, you're in trouble, you know, when you try to distribute that.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:03:45 --> 01:03:56)
Like, it may not ever be seen. And the Squirrel Nut Zippers were a unique group because they wrote their own music. So we were, you know, I was working with the record label. And, you know, we could do whatever with that.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:03:56 --> 01:04:11)
So we didn't get stuck in that rut. So I think, you know, having pursued any type of other musical documentaries in that standpoint. And I think there's this myth that you're going to make a bazillion dollars, and there probably have been a couple of documentaries, you know, that have done quite well financially.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:04:11 --> 01:04:24)
But I think, you know, it's a financial undertaking to do one of your passion projects, and you have to be careful, you know, of the financial impact it could have on your own life and stuff like that. Because you're, you know, if you're a passionate artist, you're going to do whatever it takes.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:04:24 --> 01:04:29)
And I, you know, I I enjoy my life not doing these things.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:04:29 --> 01:04:32)
So I feel like there is a balance, you know. You know, I think you kind of have a protection level.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:04:32 --> 01:04:34)
But I, I do think if something came along—

Clay Walker - 2 (01:04:34 --> 01:04:44)
I mean, if someone contacted me tomorrow and said, man, I heard that thing on Terry York, would you write a film? You know, I wanted to do it. He was my, you know, mentor as well. I would, you know, I would love to do that.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:04:44 --> 01:05:00)
But there's just, you know, there's the reality of balancing this. I know you've tried to segue into talking about doing corporate type work, and I feel like when I finished Post No Bills, I moved to Atlanta again for the second time and came out here with the that beloved film editing machine. And, you know, the industry was in transition at that point.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:05:00 --> 01:05:05)
We were moving from film to digital, and, uh, it was kind of a slow process.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:05:06 --> 01:05:07)
And, you know, it's kind of unemployable.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:05:07 --> 01:05:22)
I just finished this PBS documentary, and there was— I was applying to things, and, you know, I ended up applying to pizzerias, and I ended up working at Kinko's. That was my landing spot after making this film for 4 years. And.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:05:22 --> 01:05:40)
But slowly, you know, Adobe came along, Photoshop came along, After Effects came along. And so I had from high school a lot of computer programming, and I saw a job opportunity for an interactive programmer creating interactive CD-ROMs. And I had just the tiniest of experience.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:05:40 --> 01:05:43)
I had taken an image that I did of Laurie Anderson.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:05:43 --> 01:05:49)
At the time, Laurie Anderson had a Puppet Motel interactive CD that was out. This is all, you know,—

Clay Walker - 2 (01:05:49 --> 01:05:51)
just years before the internet.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:05:51 --> 01:07:39)
And it was created in this programming software that I wanted to try to figure out how to learn. And so I bought that and immediately within like a week, saw a job offering for it to go create, you know, corporate CD-ROMs, interactive CD-ROMs for like MCI. And I went in and I said to the interviewer, I'm like, I'm gonna tell you, I've got like 2 weeks tops experience with this, but this is something that I made with it. And the person was like, well, you've got the most experience of anyone we've interviewed. You're hired.

And so, you know, I started doing CD-ROMs and just epic amount of work week hours, you know, 40, 80-hour weeks, more than that. And, but what it created was this this new opportunity. And I learned at that time that there were different musicians that were coming out with stuff. Sarah McLachlan came out with this thing called an enhanced audio CD. So people who were creating— a CD will hold 74 minutes of music, and so if an artist has 40 minutes of music, there's empty space on the CD.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:07:39 --> 01:07:42)
I approached them about making an enhanced audio CD.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:07:42 --> 01:08:00)
And so So they came to town and I talked with them and they didn't quite understand what I was saying, but their record label did because their record label, they were paying attention to this type of technology. This was Mammoth Records in Carrboro, North Carolina. And they said, "Go for it." It was kind of like writing the Dolph Lundgren script.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:08:00 --> 01:08:05)
It was like, "I wasn't gonna be paid, but if you wanna do this, do it." And so I did.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:08:05 --> 01:08:46)
And so we amazingly did it. So the Hot album, you can't even play it now, I don't think. But if you had the Hot album, which was one of their second release, you know, it worked as an audio CD or an enhanced CD. And what was in that enhanced CD was several years of my work of going around with them, going to shows, putting live performance, and compressing and encapsulating the stuff into an experience that you could step through and learn more about them and see stuff. And so the funny thing about them was that they had sold— when I first approached them, they had sold like 10,000 copies of The Inevitable. And, you know, they were playing all over the place. And the Hot Album came out with this interactive presentation and it got a lot of attention, I think, from the interactive world.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:08:46 --> 01:08:52)
CNN did a piece on it. I had some news people try to explain what was going on on the CD because they were excited about it.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:08:52 --> 01:09:35)
It was a very interesting thing. And that was that. I don't remember what the initial sale of the album was, but so they went ahead and moved on to their next recording. They did Perennial Favorites. And at this point, the record label was very much on board. I had I had a small budget to do it. It kind of retroactively paid me for all the expenses that I'd had doing everything else. And I don't know exactly the timing of it, but it really was the TV show Millennium, this thing with Lance Henriksen, the guy who played Bishop in Aliens and stuff, that came on after The X-Files. He was doing some kind of autopsy or something and had one of the songs from the Hot Album, the song titled "Hell," and he was either whistling or singing or whatever,, it just, it took off for them. Like, it just skyrocketed. And so this, the CD that had been—

Clay Walker - 2 (01:09:35 --> 01:09:40)
I don't know how many it sold— it went gold, then it went platinum, and then it almost did another platinum.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:09:40 --> 01:09:46)
So it sold close to 2 million copies, and, uh, it was a phenomenal success. It made them—

Clay Walker - 2 (01:09:46 --> 01:09:49)
they were on every TV show performing, and it was fun.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:09:49 --> 01:10:01)
I mean, it was— to come out of the grunge era, you know, to go to these shows where people were dressing up like they were from the 1920s and dancing to this music. I mean, it was an incredible moment, I felt like, you know.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:10:01 --> 01:10:07)
And then the internet happened, you know, and then all this stuff was just completely accessible, you know, from a web browser, you know.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:10:07 --> 01:10:20)
So there wasn't really a need to, you know— and on a Macintosh, like, an enhanced audio CD works perfectly. On Windows 95 or Windows 98, you know, whatever this thing was born into, uh, you know, everybody was having problems.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:10:20 --> 01:10:27)
So it was a complicated thing that the record label didn't particularly want to do in terms of answering technical support for something, you know, that it either works or it doesn't, you know.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:10:27 --> 01:10:35)
If it doesn't, just move on. And The Perennial Favorites also had an enhanced CD program on it that I made, and I was extremely proud of that.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:10:35 --> 01:10:38)
I think it was some of the best work I've ever done from a photography standpoint and video.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:10:38 --> 01:10:45)
And I mean, it's like a sand painting, you know, you can't see anymore. It existed, it was there, it's gone, and that's okay.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:10:45 --> 01:10:52)
But with that same footage, I was able to make the documentary that we speak of, this, um, about the recording of the Hot album and the band itself.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:10:52 --> 01:10:59)
And that in itself stood alone. They used it as an EPK to promote the But in terms of the content of my work, I love it.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:10:59 --> 01:11:01)
I mean, I wouldn't change anything about it.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:11:01 --> 01:11:08)
I remastered it recently and didn't change anything because the record label, they didn't interfere with anything that I did. You know, I think they just—

Clay Walker - 2 (01:11:08 --> 01:11:21)
it was probably the one time in my creative adult life that I was just slightly ahead of the technology. You know, I was able to do this stuff with the help of a couple of people who could program these drivers, you know, that would launch the CD and stuff like that.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:11:21 --> 01:11:22)
But it was great.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:11:22 --> 01:11:34)
I mean, I felt like it was an interactive experience in And what came forth from the Squirrel Nut Zipper success was just the amount of communication to me from people who did go through the enhanced audio CD.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:11:35 --> 01:11:57)
And like a good architect, I hid things in it. I slowly released on the internet, like if you want to find this book that I had compiled all the interviews and all of everything that they said, it's like this 500-page book and it was hidden. You would never know where it was. And I created keys, like the boss key. You could do this at work and if your boss comes, just hit the B and it brings up this PowerPoint slide.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:11:57 --> 01:11:58)
Just stuff like this.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:11:58 --> 01:12:08)
So it was very fun. I mean, it was, you know, as an independent filmmaker who'd gone through like the film festival thing where you talk to people at screenings and stuff, you know, to just have like this global, you know, of people—

Clay Walker - 2 (01:12:08 --> 01:12:11)
because people love them, you know. So it was fun, you know.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:12:11 --> 01:12:14)
It wasn't any type of political thing to argue about.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:12:14 --> 01:12:17)
It was just, you know, people love learning more about them.

Dustin Grinnell (01:12:17 --> 01:12:24)
Yeah, that must have been refreshing. Yeah. Do you still— where are they now? Are you in contact with them? What were they—

Clay Walker - 1 (01:12:24 --> 01:12:59)
They're still going. Yeah, I saw. So this would be a podcast in itself of, um, it's very complicated, all that happened. So the Squirrel Nut Zippers, that name itself was a candy that was produced in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Um, as part of this experience, I actually went up there and visited the plant. I shot the candy being made, and it just all imploded. The band took the name kind of with a handshake agreement with them. And at a certain point, so, you know, this song called Hell becomes popular, and the very old executives of this company, they were trying to sell it.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:12:59 --> 01:13:11)
They didn't like the association at this point, you know, with the band. So a lot of different lawsuits started happening, and I probably can't get it all right, but like, Mammoth Records was bought by Disney, I think, by the time Perennial Favorites came out.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:13:11 --> 01:13:30)
And they had some type of ticking clock as to they wanted another big hit, and Perennial Favorites wasn't as popular as hot was. And so just a lot of lawsuits started happening, like the candy company sued the band, sued the record label, and the band imploded. The two couples that were married within it divorced, and they kind of all went their separate way.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:13:30 --> 01:14:18)
The band does still exist as an incarnation. I think I may actually see them in Memphis in a couple of weeks. I am still friends with Jimbo Mathis, who's kind of the lead driving force of it still. But yeah, they have endured in a lot of different manifestations of the band. So I'm thrilled, you know, and they did keep the name as they had it. I think the candy company just really wanted them to stop using their trademarked logo and stuff, you know, of the squirrel and stuff like that. And I think that was probably the agreement that was made there. But some publication in North Carolina wrote a piece one time called like the Squirrel Nut Zipper Opera, and it really detailed the imploding of them. And I don't even have a copy of it and I don't think you can find it online, but it really was, it was a fascinating I mean, they, you know, it's just the reality of so many amazing creative people being together and what happens.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:14:18 --> 01:14:21)
I think it's inevitable. I hate to say, I think that, you know, it's so passionate.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:14:21 --> 01:14:28)
I mean, it's just, you know, you come together and you break apart, and it's just, it's life. It's the way it is. So I had a great relationship with each one of them.

Dustin Grinnell (01:14:28 --> 01:15:25)
So I feel like it was, it was a great experience. Um, I guess as we kind of think about winding down a little bit, I, I wanted maybe broaden the conversation. I always think about this when I talk with very creative people, like what they think about what the role is of an artist in society. What's the role of artists as citizens? I think in Post Nobels, I started to think about that. Robbie is clearly a provocateur, but there's a point of view there. He's calling out hypocrisies. He's not just a shock jock. He's saying something with his art. Whether it's abuse of political power or what have you, or just calling out people who are being undemocratic or offensive. I know it's kind of a lofty, grandiose question, but what role do you see artists playing in society?

Clay Walker - 2 (01:15:25 --> 01:15:33)
[Speaker:AC] I know that's a tough question. I can probably only boil it down to my— I mean, it's gonna have to be an issue of integrity.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:15:33 --> 01:15:37)
I think if you're someone like Robby, it becomes a lot of responsibility.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:15:37 --> 01:15:55)
I think when these people step forward and are visible and have a message, unfortunately, what we're talking around, too, is capitalism. I think Robbie sells stuff, it's about money. He was featured on all these TV things that have advertisers.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:15:55 --> 01:15:56)
I feel like— I really don't know.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:15:56 --> 01:16:43)
I mean, we live in such a funny, strange age now. I think of Robbie's— those were the good simple times of just Iran-Contra, you know? You didn't have a Donald Trump where people are just so committed to what they already believe. Jordan Kepler on The Daily Show did an amazing sidebar-type thing where he was talking about interviewing in the field, and he talked to someone who was dead set in her view of Donald Trump hadn't done anything wrong, and Jordan Kepler kept saying, "Well, no, there actually are witnesses who have said that he did do this. Would that change your opinion?" And And she's like, "No, I guess not. Nope, I believe what I believe." So I think that's kind of the reality now that I think of what an artist is up against. Who's Robbie Canale talking to at this point?

E (01:16:43 --> 01:16:54)
Is he gonna sway someone who is stopped at a red light and sees a poster and thinks, "Oh, yeah, the Supreme Court, they really are awful." [Speaker:AC] He even minimized the kind of influence of his own work.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:16:54 --> 01:17:00)
He's like, "Maybe they'll get in your brain for a second, And right, and I think, is it his responsibility?

Clay Walker - 2 (01:17:00 --> 01:17:00)
No.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:17:00 --> 01:17:03)
I mean, how could you make it his responsibility?

Clay Walker - 2 (01:17:03 --> 01:17:43)
I think, I think the responsibility of an artist trying to be a political provocateur is to, you know, to have integrity and to— if you're telling something, you know, you're, you know, the truth is such a complicated thing. It always has been. But I think now we're moving into all these artificial creations of things. I think, you know, going forward as a political artist or as anyone doing documentary work, you know, it's, it's going to be really weird challenge to humanity, you know, in terms of what is real and what is the truth. And I can only say from my point of view, you know, if I do whatever I do next, you know, that would be the foundation for whatever I do. I mean, everything is propaganda. So I mean, everything has a point of view.

Dustin Grinnell (01:17:43 --> 01:17:44)
So I think—

E (01:17:44 --> 01:17:59)
Yeah, you really think that in a way everything is sort of propaganda because it always has an author, it always has a creator. Creator, and that creator always has a certain amount of experiences in politics and background that influences the output.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:17:59 --> 01:18:00)
I mean, propaganda is a loaded word.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:18:00 --> 01:18:13)
It could sound negative, but it, you know, it's just, it's something that is embodying, you know, a point of view. I mean, there's even a blank piece of paper hung up at the, at MoMA would be, you know, you could project onto that how brilliant that is.

Dustin Grinnell (01:18:13 --> 01:18:16)
It's just a blank piece of paper.

E (01:18:16 --> 01:19:37)
So yeah, I remember there There was a quote I heard once that the writer, especially, I guess, is responsible for civilization not destroying itself. I do like that definition in the sense that you're bringing things from the darkness into light. You can't necessarily control what happens, but I think the Washington Post's tagline, "Democracy dies in darkness," is something I could get behind because truly, I mean, I mean, if we don't know it, if it's unexposed, we're in trouble. You think about Rachel Carson. She's one of my heroes and how she exposed DDT and just bring it to light and let the chips fall where they may in some degree. Yeah, agreed. So one of the things I'm very interested in is your balance between the artistic projects, the passion projects, the things that really have your heart and soul, and the corporate work that is you could be just as passionate, but to some degree, they pay the bills and they keep you financially supported. And the balance there— my life is very much that life of trying to strike that balance as well. And so I was hoping you could maybe just touch on that and how you manage that as a, you know, over the course of your career. And then I also know that you want to talk about a project that you did recently called the Sea Learning Project for University.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:19:37 --> 01:19:40)
So say what you'd like to say about that.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:19:40 --> 01:19:56)
I think once I got finished with the Squirrel Nut Zipper projects and I, I was kind of back in this world of, you know, having equipment to be able to shoot and having editing system and, um, you know, just the ability to have the tools at my disposal that I really never did.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:19:56 --> 01:20:04)
I, you know, you very quickly fall into having to do projects that you get paid for instead of these labors of love and stuff.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:20:04 --> 01:20:27)
And I very quickly fell in with different agencies and creating videos for Delta. I did a ton of stuff for IBM over the years, conferences, corporate conferences, you know, that was pre-pandemic. That was really a big thing that I did a lot. I did a ton of stuff for the Home Depot for the last 20 years. Probably almost any video you might click on their website might have been something that I worked on as an editor at some point.

E (01:20:27 --> 01:20:29)
Did you do the how-to videos?

Clay Walker - 1 (01:20:29 --> 01:20:39)
Like how to install or? More of like gardening products and tools, like just an explanation about, you know, a tape measure or sun patients versus inpatients.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:20:39 --> 01:20:44)
And if somebody is standing at a desk with a lot of plants around them, that's probably something that I've edited.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:20:44 --> 01:21:19)
And I was able to use this, you know, I call it corporate conference season, you know, it often went from December to April or May, and it literally financially afforded me the ability to just work so hard at all that stuff, but then I could, you know, work on independent projects. I've worked a lot as an editor on a lot of films here in Atlanta. I think in those early days of digital video. This one camera, the DVX-100, it was a very affordable Panasonic camera that would shoot 24p that looked very filmic. It was, you know, a cassette tape to shoot on was $10.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:21:19 --> 01:21:24)
So people who had stories they wanted to tell, you know, were able to start doing this and making films.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:21:24 --> 01:21:30)
And I fell in. I feel like with a lot— I used to say I've probably edited every type of genre as an editor.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:21:30 --> 01:21:38)
And people were coming to me and asking me, you know, if I could edit this thing, you know. And there was usually some kind of technical problem, so it was, it was a lot of different things.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:21:38 --> 01:22:31)
But I I felt like I really enjoyed that time of working with these filmmakers. I, I sadly often joked that I was like in the independent filmmaker witness relocation program because I feel like I would work on these films, we would complete them, they would submit it to Sundance and Telluride, they wouldn't get accepted, and they would kind of move on and disappear and I'd never see them again. So I kind of, uh, kind of had this ongoing relationship and that kind of ended. I mean, the industry came to Atlanta, uh, the film industry, and I think that a lot of these people that I used to work with, they were were more wardrobe-type people, set dressers and stuff, and, you know, wanted to be independent filmmakers, but they found, you know, permanent placement on this never-ending slew of work that has come to Atlanta, which ironically I have never been able to be a part of. And one of the people that I worked with very heavily, we used to joke that we had spent more hours together than, you know, with our own family because we just did so many long editing projects and stuff.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:22:32 --> 01:23:02)
She moved over to Emory University, and through this process I've been able to do different photography projects with the Dalai Lama when he has come to town, just in terms of photographing him. I mean, I haven't had time with him and stuff like that, but I have been able to capture some of these important moments, presentations that he's done here. And one of the things that we set out to do last year, this was probably one of our most ambitious projects, was he has an educational initiative that he started back in 2019 called SEE Learning, which it's S-E-E.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:23:02 --> 01:23:06)
It stands for Social, Emotional, and Ethical Learning.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:23:06 --> 01:23:16)
It's a K-12 education program for international use created by Emory University to provide educators the tools to foster emotional, social, and ethical intelligence in students.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:23:16 --> 01:23:19)
So we wanted to get some examples.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:23:19 --> 01:23:57)
This producer, I mean, she really juggled so many things. I mean, we created this 5-month schedule of intensive travel like I've never done before, and she had other crews that were shooting in other countries. So we went to Italy and Romania, and then came back to the States and then did a second journey to Mongolia and then came back, and then we finished in India. And what we were doing was shooting in elementary schools, capturing testimonials, making short documentaries about how sea learning has been implemented into their schools. And the ultimate goal was to present them at this conference in Dharamsala where the Dalai Lama lives on December 9th.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:23:57 --> 01:23:58)
And so we did it.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:23:58 --> 01:24:17)
I mean, it was, it was a very intense schedule, you know, and we're still in a pandemic. The person I worked with got sick after the Mongolian portion, and I for the first time caught COVID in Mumbai, you know, early December, right when I was gonna really be, you know, burning the late-night oil to finish these pieces.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:24:17 --> 01:24:19)
So, you know, you just can't control this type of stuff.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:24:19 --> 01:25:21)
We were very safe, you know, double masking on flights, but we spent so much time in transit. I didn't quite do the math, but we spent somewhere between 3 weeks to a month just in transit, like at the airport and, you know, overnight stays and stuff like that, just trying to get to these different places that we were going, remote places. And it was a fascinating project. I feel like, you know, all of my skills as a documentary filmmaker and just traveling equipment, you know, I really got that down to a science for this trip where I had to travel 3 cases that weighed 50 pounds each, that the cases themselves had a 62-inch total measurement type stuff. So, you know, everything came in at 49.5 pounds because I was— I just had to use everything I could have. And, um, I mean, it was a fascinating project. We were, you know, the people that we so happy to see us that we were up near the Russian border in Mongolia, and just, you know, they had been waiting for us to get there. And, uh, you know, we would do as many interviews as we could during the time, shoot the students in classrooms, and created these wonderful pieces that were presented to His Holiness the Dalai Lama on December 9th, this conference.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:25:21 --> 01:25:37)
And, um, I'm hoping that we'll do more of it, but I feel like that was a wonderful part of my career where I was able to kind of bridge getting paid for something that was very important, which may shape the future of the world in terms of education and people's behavior with one another.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:25:37 --> 01:25:49)
So I was very grateful. I mean, I think it took me about a month after getting back to just kind of get over the stress of traveling and COVID recovery and stuff like that, but it all worked out really well.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:25:50 --> 01:25:52)
And if people want to see them, where should they go?

Clay Walker - 2 (01:25:52 --> 01:25:54)
That is a good question. There is a website.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:25:54 --> 01:25:57)
Let me see if it's on there while I'm talking. Talking.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:25:57 --> 01:26:28)
If you search for sea learning, it will take you to the IMRI website, and I'm not sure if their Vimeo page is linked to it, but if you were to search for the conference that was held in Dharamsala, India in December, um, there— a lot of that stuff, the entire program record is there. And I mean, it was people from all over the world came there to give presentations and talk about how sea learning is being used and students, um, and just discussions. And it was just, you know, it was an incredible gathering in testament to all the amazing things that the Dalai Lama has done for us.

Dustin Grinnell (01:26:28 --> 01:26:28)
Very cool.

E (01:26:28 --> 01:26:48)
So yeah, I don't have any more questions. It's been a fascinating conversation. I am very grateful for you donating your time. I love kind of digging into your background and speaking with you, and I hope more people get exposed to your work. If they want to find more of your work, where's the best place to go to find that?

Clay Walker - 2 (01:26:48 --> 01:26:54)
I think if you just Google it at this point, my name and one of these topics like Freddie Cole, Clay Walker, it's all on Vimeo.

Clay Walker - 1 (01:26:54 --> 01:27:01)
Vimeo to answer your question, but I think there's a lot of other places that it's being housed and stuff. So, but you could definitely—

Clay Walker - 2 (01:27:01 --> 01:27:06)
the Squirrel Nut Zipper documentary is out there for free. The Freddy Cole documentary is out there for free.

E (01:27:06 --> 01:27:10)
And, um, I believe the Post No Bills is a dollar.

Clay Walker - 2 (01:27:10 --> 01:27:11)
Uh, yeah, it's a dollar.

E (01:27:11 --> 01:27:20)
I've tried to make it as economical as possible. Well, uh, thank you again, and, um, I really appreciate it.

Dustin Grinnell (01:27:20 --> 01:27:28)
Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this episode of Curiously. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Clay Walker. Stay tuned for more conversations with people I meet along the way.