Scenes From a Scene

Doug Pray photograph by Laura Skelding

By the start of 1993, many Seattleites (myself among them) had a siege
mentality when it came to coverage of their music scene. So when Doug Pray’s
film crew came to town, filming shows at some of the stalwart clubs of the
day (namely, the now-defunct RKCNDY and Off Ramp), they were regarded with
both excitement and apprehension. It might have been full-on apprehension,
except Pray already had local credentials, having done videos for Flop and
the Young Fresh Fellows, and the word amongst the scene faithful was that
Pray was on “our side.”

After premiering the movie at last January’s Sundance Film Festival,
Pray took the movie from his Los Angeles home to South by Southwest this
past spring, looking for attention and a distributor. The $500,000 finished
product, a fast-moving, often funny, 84-minute film, manages to capture
the essence of the scene without either playing into the mainstream media’s
overblown spin on Seattle or capping the cameras with rose-colored lenses.
Now, with the backing of CFP Distribution, Hype! returns to Austin
this Friday for its official theatrical premiere. Although the accompanying
soundtrack (on SubPop Records, of course) sounds, at times, like an oldies
album for my g-g-generation, the film is more than just the story of the
Seattle scene — it’s a neat encapsulation of the thrills and dangers of
placing indie music into the mainstream media. Pray, on a visit to Austin
last week, talked to the Chronicle about the project.

Austin Chronicle: How did you come up with the idea for the film?

Doug Pray: It was actually the idea of Steve Halvey, the film’s producer.
He knew I’d done the videos for Flop and the Fellows, and at the time, in
the fall of ’92, the scene was just cruising. So he put two and two together,
and said, “Let’s make a movie about it!” And I thought it was
just a terrible idea. I knew the people I had to talk to, my friends in
Seattle, would be really cynical about it, and so I put it off. But Steve
was very persistent, so I called up Flop, and the Fellows, and the Fastbacks,
and no one said “no” outright, so I thought it might work. I knew
they were sick of the other images that were being put out there about the
scene, the whole Madison Avenue thing. And it was cool because when I called,
I was out in Iowa trying to write a screenplay, so the phone messages from
me didn’t have the dreaded 213 area code. (Laughs.) If I were from Hollywood
that might have been one thing, but here’s this guy from the Midwest wanting
to do a movie, who’s friends with the Fellows, who’s never done a feature
film before — I guess people figured they had nothing to lose — how could
I possibly be threatening?

And it was immediately clear that this was not going to be the “grunge movie” — I allayed those fears early, yet even now, to
this day, I’m still having to tell people that. In trying to market the
movie, I’ve gotten a lot of people going, “It’s 1996, the Seattle scene
was hip in ’92, give me a break.” But it’s more that — it’s about
who determines what’s hot and what’s not, the whys and hows of that, how
it could have been other scenes, and how this mass consumption happens to
all authentic, underground music scenes. But at that time in Seattle, we
had the perfect opportunity to tell that story.

AC: What segments of the film were the most fun for you to do?

DP: The strange thing is, the parts that were the most fun to edit were
the least fun, or, at least, the most nerve-wracking, to shoot. Like the
Mudhoney and Screaming Trees interviews — I had no control over those,
and as we were filming, I thought they were going to be complete disasters,
totally unusable. Like, I’d roll cameras on Mudhoney and they’d start reciting
lines from The Decline of Western Civilization. But when I edited
those interviews I realized how great they were — and my favorite line
in the film, the one that still cracks me up, is from the Trees interview.
[Note: It’s where Van Conner describes the Trees as a “ton of band.”]

AC: What part of the film is most important to you?

DP: When I was interviewing [producer] Jack Endino and [photographer]
Charles Peterson, I realized how groundbreaking it was. I knew it was good
info, but I was also struck by how they spoke for the community, in a really
interesting way. It was never “I felt this way,” it was “We
felt this way” and that brought in a dynamic where it wasn’t me as
the director or narrator as the commentator, but them. To me, their speaking
in terms of “we” was special — it showed just how much of a community
these people felt they were a part of.

AC: What were your impressions of the scene going into the movie,
and how did those change in the filming?

DP: It didn’t change much — I already knew there was the self-deprecating
sense of humor and the friendliness amongst the bands involved with it.
I knew going up there that I could take the filming one step at a time;
we would just start talking and then I could ask, “Can we film you?”
What came through in the filming is just how down-to-earth everyone in the
scene was. Not that everybody was the same, but we didn’t run into any real
assholes at all. Although we began by interviewing just a bunch of the lesser-known
bands and building the film around that, we knew potential investors would
ask us, “Do you have Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden in it?”
That was a Catch-22; we knew they’d have to be involved but it took longer
to gain their trust. When we did a round of interviews after the initial
filming, about six months to a year after, we told people it was do-or-die
time for the film. We had schedules to work around, but except for Nirvana,
who were unparalleled in terms of the demands placed on them toward the
end of ’93 and the start of ’94, we were able to talk to everyone. It was
really pretty simple to line up. Pearl Jam gave us footage of the pirate
radio thing they did, Eddie Vedder was very easy to talk to, we were able
to get the Soundgarden footage, which was a very big deal to us.

AC: Do you think it’s a better movie without a Nirvana interview
— that is, seeing their story through everyone else’s eyes — or would
you have rather had them in there?

DP: Of course, I would have loved to talk to Nirvana. But I do know this:
Had we talked to them we wouldn’t have gotten quite the perspective we did.
I love the way Jack Endino tells their story as the guy who first met and
recorded them. Besides, you never see record producers in movies like this!

AC: What was it like to document the hype around the scene without falling
into the trap of contributing to it?

DP: The way I reacted to the hype was pretty universally the way those
in the scene felt about it. There’s a widely shared view that bands want
attention, and they want to sell records, but to actually jump the fence
and get into a place of promoting and marketing music — well it’s quite
the opposite to go there and see for yourself how completely misrepresented
you can be. A lot of bands in a lot of forms of music go someplace like
L.A. to be a star, and that’s a very specific, conscious act. When they
come to you, though, like they did in Seattle, it’s a very different dynamic.
There’s a sort of bewilderment that goes along with that, and there’s a
fear of “Oh, my God, they’re going to ruin it; it’s going to become
like Disneyland” when those forces move in to a scene. Ultimately,
what I think it is, is the same sort of cycle that you saw with popular
culture in the Sixties and Seventies, where different stations of genuine,
authentic things became, through this process, completely overblown.”

As soon as you get self-promotional and bombastic about something like
indie rock, you’re back to where you started in terms of trying to create
something alternative to the self-importance of rock music. That’s why a
movie like This Is Spinal Tap is so great — that movie completely
deflates that idea of self-importance in rock, which is hard to do as long
as people like Sting are around. In a way, I’ve broken a rule that no rock
films should ever be done after Spinal Tap. I’m having to jump into
promotion and marketing myself in doing this movie, on a smaller level,
but my big fear is not that Hype! will be co-opted. For me, it’s
“What if everybody hates it and thinks it’s stupid?” (Laughs.)
Oh, great, there’s your pull quote; it’ll read, “Hype!: Everyone
hates it and thinks it’s stupid.” n

This article appears in November 22 • 1996 and November 22 • 1996 (Cover).