In the early days of MTV promo-building, we had no money to license footage, no less shoot our own material, so we became adept at not only using the music videos themselves as our stock footage library, but also finding film in the Public Domain we could commandeer for our purposes. (This is what led to the multitude of people with black bars over their eyes, which many people assumed we did to be “cool,” but it was actually a response to the lawyers’ demand that we render the people in the old footage unrecognizable). I suppose I developed a reputation for being handy with old B/W newsreel footage, because one day a call came in to produce a fake 1947 newsreel highlighting fictional reporter/comic strip heroine Brenda Starr. The short video would be used at a launch event for the upcoming Brooke Shields movie based on the character’s exploits. The cool part was that when I showed up at Brooke’s eastside townhouse with a 16mm camera and a crew of two in order to shoot film I could edit into the historical footage, she actually remembered that we had met years earlier in London, when I was studying abroad, and she was a guest star on “The Muppet Show.”

One of my first freelance gigs after leaving my staff job at MTV was also one of the coolest: producing a music-driven multi-media presentation for The Fashion Group, an industry group founded in 1928. While the whole endeavor was hugely challenging and enormous fun, the highlight was Karl Lagerfeld coming up to me at the end of the show telling me how much he loved it and asking for a copy. Lagerfeld! This job led to many more in fashion, or fashion-adjacent, including this one: a mood-setting video for the launch event of a new product line from Almay. Stress Cream was great stuff; I was very sad when they discontinued it several years later.

Going back to my earliest days at MTV, people have always asked me to write and produce “marketing presentation videos” or “Sizzle Reels” as they later came to be called. The first challenge always was trying to make them as not boring as possible. The second challenge was making something out of what was usually nothing, materials-wise. Alyse Kobin was a pioneer of the branded tie-in, or promotional sponsorship; quite possibly the best example of all time was the inclusion of Ray Bay sunglasses in “Men in Black” (you put on the Ray Bans to block the rays of the neuralizer… get it?). She had to fight like hell to convince Ray Ban to pony up for the placement and the marketing, but when the movie came out, sales when through the roof. Over the years, she hired me to make an awful lot of these videos. Here are merely four of them.

Ah, but when we’re talking about Industrials, “sizzle reels” are Beyoncé videos compared with Training Films, amirite? And yet… I was brought all the way up to San Francisco to co-write and direct a whole series of training videos for Safeway supermarkets. The job? Make them as funny and engaging as possible. The subject of this one? “Goodbye Carryout.” You’re welcome!

I really wish I had this whole video, because it was pretty darn good, and it has dated in the most charming way (it’s about this new thing called “e-business”… online shopping! You’re gonna love it!).

Jordanian musician Zade Dirani is one of those artists who is known and beloved all over the world, despite a relative lack of name recognition in the United States. He was in Los Angeles to do some recording at the legendary Capital Records studios, and I was asked to create a series of videos to post online, each one covering a piece of music and a part of his story. He’s a charming, talented, passionate man and it was a true pleasure to spend a day with him.