Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat:

Doug Pray: I think it’s really simple. I think the people who have done okay in this business are people who are persistent despite the desperate struggles. I mean, I’ve never had a film that didn’t have a very dark moment where I really wanted out. And I hated the subject, I hated the film, I hated my edit. I hated the idea. Somehow the idea that, well, just keep going, we’ll figure it out. So somehow this idea of just persistence, of just not really ever giving up, I really think is one of the things I did. I just kind never quite gave up, even though I wanted to. I definitely wanted to.

Announcer: This is StoryBeat with Steve Cuden, a podcast for the creative mind. StoryBeat explores how masters of creativity develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire. So join us as we discover how talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and Entertainment. Here now is your host, Steve Cuden.

Steve Cuden: Thanks for joining us on StoryBeat. We’re coming to you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My guest Today, Doug Pray, is a documentary filmmaker of great range and substance. His portraits of subcultures and creative visionaries have led him to numerous Sundance premieres, critical raves, and awards. His featured documentaries include Love, Lizzo, Surf Wise, and the Emmy Award winning art and copy. His first two films, Hype, the story of the Seattle music scene, and Scratch, about DJ’s and the birth of hip hop, are often ranked among the best music docs of all time. Doug won a, Grammy and five Emmy nominations as executive producer, writer and editor of HBO’s the Defiant Ones. He executive produced from Cradle to stage with Dave Grohl and the Apple TV series Home. This year, 2024 Turner classic Movies and Max debuted The Power of Film a six part series with Professor Howard Suber, for which Doug was executive producer, supervising editor and writer. Doug has also directed dozens of commissioned short films and nonfiction commercials, including an HIV AIDS awareness campaign which won him his first Emmy. For the record, Doug and I know one another from the power of film as I became involved in this extraordinary project as a co executive producer. Like Doug, I’m a UCLA MFA graduate and one of Howard Suber’s former students. So for all those reasons and many more, I’m truly delighted to have the gifted, multi award winning documentarian Doug Pray join me today. Doug, welcome to StoryBeat

Doug Pray: Hi Steve, and thank you so much. It’s an honor to be on your show.

Steve Cuden: It’s a great privilege for me to have you trust me on that. So let’s go back in time, a little bit. What were your earliest inspirations and influences? What was your first creative love, and how did you get into this thing? Making documentaries.

Doug Pray: You know, I always listen to other people’s bios and they always say, well, my mom took me to the matinee every Sunday or something. I am so not that I didn’t watch movies hardly at all as a child. I remember maybe three my entire childhood. Wizard of Oz, of course. Planet of the Apes, let it be.

Steve Cuden: Yes.

Doug Pray: 2001 A Space Odyssey, which also gives you an idea of my age. However, it wasn’t, I wasn’t really that into movies. I was into sort of everything else. I came from a very musical family. My mom was a choir director and a music teacher and a piano teacher. So I grew up all around music. She was also a painter and a photographer. So she was highly creative and had a big influence on me. So I loved the arts. I could do it. I could see it. My dad was a scientist, and so I don’t know how that fits into filmmaking, but it did. I ended up, I ended up making films that I think sometimes try to honor the sciences, but mostly I understood the science of making films, mostly. And I don’t think I’m alone in saying this, but I was kind of in high school and in college, a jack of all trades. I could sort of do everything. I was one of those guys who could pick up the guitar and play it pretty well. But I didn’t really want to have a band. I mean, I was in a band, but you know what I mean? I didn’t think that was my career. I could paint, but I wasn’t going to really become a painter. I could make music. I could do these other things. I could write, but I really didn’t see myself as a writer. Directing, directing films just brought it all together. It was sort of like, oh, God.

Steve Cuden: because it’s all in there. Directing is all about art and vision and sound and all the rest of it.

Doug Pray: It all made sense once. I kind of went, wait a minute, film. Film combines all the arts. I want to make film. So when I was, you know, older, I was in, I was an undergrad, but they didn’t have any classes at my college in film. But I took a little film class and I kind of got into it and then just kept being interested in making short films. They were terrible, of course, all my first short films, but I just, I was just experimenting and making a lot of little films and eventually ended up my first real job out of college. Well, there’s. There’s some stupid jobs I had, but m the first real job.

Steve Cuden: We all have those.

Doug Pray: Yeah. I’m hesitating whether I should even tell you about my first stupid job. It was in the Entertainment industry. I was installing cable tv cables into Denver suburban homes.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s it. Showbiz.

Doug Pray: It showbiz. Yeah. So I can say I work from the ground up, right? Anyway, but I worked in San Francisco in 1984. I worked for a company named Woody Clark Productions. And Woody was a documentary film producer. And the craziest thing is that he actually sold movies to businesses all across the country that were on highly relevant, socially relevant topics for which those companies might get sued if they didn’t educate themselves. And by that, I mean very specifically. Sexual harassment in the workplace, was a brand new idea. I mean, of course, it had been going on for 20,000 years, but it was a new idea. And I don’t mean to make light of it, it was a very serious new idea that, hey, wait a minute. This is wrong. And our bosses could get sued for this. And we need to educate ourselves quickly and stop this behavior, which is how it’s kind of supposed to work. And Woody Clark made this half hour documentary called the Workplace Hustle, starring Ed Asner as the host. Documentary with some reenactments, really dated, creepy reenactments now, when you watch it today. But it was a very powerful film, and every company in the country needed that film. And I was the shipping guy, and I sat there shipping out these prints, 16 millimeter prints, to every company in the country. And my only thought was, socially relevant documentaries make money.

Steve Cuden: Yes, of course.

Doug Pray: Why are you laughing, Steve?

Steve Cuden: You know, I taught for the last 14 years here in Pittsburgh, and every year, they make you go through one of those training courses, or several of them, actually, sexual harassment, various things about, the legalities of what you can and can’t do and say HIPAA and all those things. So, you know, those are very important. And do make money, if that’s what you want to do.

Doug Pray: Exactly. Exactly.

Steve Cuden: But if you want to do something that’s a little more entertaining, perhaps not.

Doug Pray: It’s true. I mean, and of course, I’m laughing, and I tell that story as a joke because it’s just such a, well, docs are like, you know, a, you never make money on docs. B, socially relevant docs, especially. Very, very hard. But, you know, but it also gave me a window into the power of film, not to, no pun intended. With a new series and we’ll get.

Steve Cuden: There, by the way. We’ll talk about the power of film.

Doug Pray: Yeah, I actually. It’s funny I just said that because I really meant, it showed me the impact, the impact of film when it is well done. It was a good film. It really was a good documentary. It was highly relevant, and. And it was powerful. It really educated a lot of people. And then he later made a film about age discrimination in the workplace. And, you know, I eventually moved on, but it kind of gave me a foothold, and I went, that’s how I ended up being able to get into UCLA, into the producers program. And so that’s kind of how it all got started.

Steve Cuden: Did you go to UCLA intending to make documentaries, or did you go intending to make narrative films?

Doug Pray: Narrative, 100%. I mean, I had worked for a documentary filmmaker, so I had a sensitivity to it. I mean, meaning, I liked it. I liked documentaries, and I thought they were great, but I never once thought, oh, I’m going to make documentaries. I went to UCLA thinking, no, I want to be. I want to be the next Francis Ford Coppola. You know, I want to write screenplays, work with actors. And moving to Hollywood, it was all. It was all very exciting to me. And I really. I did not take one documentary class at UCLA in four years.

Steve Cuden: Really?

Doug Pray: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: That’s very interesting. Were the little films that you were making when you were much younger, were those narratives?

Doug Pray: They were so weird, Steve, that I don’t know what they were. They were abstract, strange little 16 millimeter films shot on a bolex, silent. And, it was only after working at this place in San Francisco. And I really do owe it to Woody Clark. He really got my career going, that. That I started kind of working with bigger projects, and I eventually got to be an associate producer on one and started helping edit another. And, you know, I got. Got some really good experiences there. but, no, my short film, it was actually through. I knew some bands up in Seattle, not. Not the famous bands you may be thinking of when I say that, but bands who are. Who were good friends of mine out of college. And I did a couple music videos, and that kind of was, so I was into making music videos. I was, you know, stuff on the side like that. Otherwise in film school, I just was making narrative things, and I was in the producers program, so I was studying producing.

Steve Cuden: And music videos can be quite abstract and don’t have to be particularly, following a narrative structure.

Doug Pray: That’s right.

Steve Cuden: Correct.

Doug Pray: That’s right. And being a musician, it all made sense to me, like, oh, that’s how I learned sort of editing and the rhythm and, you know, the idea of editing rhythmically, you know, came from that.

Steve Cuden: Well, you would, as a musician, understand all that rhythm, timing, how to do something on a beat, all those kinds of things. when you were at UCLA, were you actually making. As a producer, were you making movies there?

Doug Pray: Well, only as a class assignments.

Steve Cuden: As a class assignment, yeah.

Doug Pray: No different than. Yes, I wrote a screenplay. It was terrible. But, yeah, I made it. I made. You know, I. I did all the things you would expect to do as assignments. But I. Yeah, I made one film outside of there, but, like, a 20 minutes film about a car salesman. but it wasn’t a doc. It was a. It was a script.

Steve Cuden: Sorry. So you come out of UCLA, and what do you start to do? How did you eventually find your way into making, you know, making docs and people know you for that?

Doug Pray: Well, since you and I both have UCLA MFA in common, yes. Even though we didn’t know each other at all at the time, I got out and, like, a lot of. I’m going to go ahead and say arrogant graduates. I kind of figured, like, okay, I’m going to write the next great american screenplay, or I’m going to do this or that, or I’ll get hired to direct. It doesn’t really work that way.

Steve Cuden: No.

Doug Pray: The interesting thing about film, as you well know, is that it’s the only things that happen are what you make happen, even, you know? And it’s really. That really hit me. So I actually. I think I had a pretty hard year right after getting out of UCLA. Thinking like, oh, my God, it’s one of the best film schools. I’m so proud. I’m so. You know, I got all this education now let’s do it. And I really couldn’t figure out how to do that. And so it was at the same time that a fellow student friend of mine, Steve Helvey, who was in, also in Howard Subar’s producers program at UCLA. Had the idea that because I’d done those couple music videos. Why wouldn’t we go up to Seattle and make the ultimate, the definitive Seattle music scene movie? The story of the Seattle music scene? Because at that exact moment, which is 1992. The entire world was feasting on Seattle and going, oh, my God. This is the coolest music scene on the planet. It’s like Liverpool. It’s like, you know, it’s like, Detroit. It’s like Motown. It’s like, you know, that’s what it was like. And so Steve, eventually, after many months, and I really thought it was a terrible idea, convinced me to get involved in my first movie. And that’s. That’s sort of the beginning of the end. Well, not the end, but that’s how I got. And then I started really going, okay, we’re gonna make a doc. I’m gonna make a documentary. This makes sense.

Steve Cuden: Did you figure that it would turn into narrative movie making, or did you think once you went down that road, yeah, this is good. I’ll keep doing this.

Doug Pray: It was only after the name of that movie is hype. And it took me, it took Steve and I at least four years, maybe five, to make it.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Doug Pray: Which is not uncommon for a first film, a first totally independent film. We had to raise the money. We had to do all this stuff. And, you know, I can feel sorry for myself, but so many filmmakers say, oh, my God, that first film, that was the one that, you know, you pay your dues on. And. And, we were lucky enough that it got into Sundance in 1996, and it was recognized. It’s not like I made millions or really, frankly, even any money, but it got out there. It really got out there. It got reviewed. It played in a number of theaters coast to coast, and it was something that kicked off my career. And once you’re known as a music documentarian, well, the next jobs you might get or the next producers who approach you, if they happen to like that movie, are going to approach you about another music doc. And that’s exactly what happened. I got involved in my second film then.

Steve Cuden: It’s true for so much in the Entertainment industry, where I’m going to use a term, I don’t mean it too negatively, but you get pigeonholed. That’s what people see you as, so they come to you. If you do a comedy, people think that you’re a comedy filmmaker. If you do a drama, people think you make drama movies, but you may be able to do all of it, but they don’t see you that way because you’re. You’re stuck in that little niche. And that happened for you.

Doug Pray: Yes. And it’s a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that they’re like, oh, he’s really good. And then I go, oh, I’m getting work, or I have a reputation. I made a second film, and that kind of keeps going. The curse, of course, is simply that we don’t think of ourselves. I say we. Any creative thinks like, oh, well, they could do it. If you asked me, can I do animation? Well, I’ve never done animation in my whole life. Maybe I did one assignment once in a class for, like, 10 seconds, but honestly, I would go like, oh, of course. But a real animator would look at me, go like, dude, you don’t know anything about animation. Like, no.

Steve Cuden: Well, you, like me, grew up thinking you could do a little bit of everything. You were jack of all trades. I was a jack of all trades, and I totally get that. You could do anything, and you have many skills and skill sets. You’re not a master of any of them in the beginning, but you have the ability to do all these different things. You’re not awful at it, but you’re also not brilliant at it yet.

Doug Pray: That’s exactly true. That is exactly how it happens. But then if you keep making docs, because I just kept doing it, and I had little kids, you know, my wife and I had two little kids, and I had to support the family. And in fairness, she supported the family very, much so during my starving artist days. But there was a point when all of a sudden I was like, hey, you know, I think I can make money continuing to do docs and to do commercial type work, that is, nonfiction and documentary style. And it’s sort of, things sort of shifted. And to be blunt, I got better at it. I really did get better at it. No mystery there. The more work you do in a particular area, the more experience you get, the more your skills improve. I got to be a better editor. I got to be a better interviewer. I got to be a better kind of structure person, like looking at a doc and saying, oh, I know, what’s wrong with this? And I just kept doing it now for decades. I really never went back to doing dramatic work. I’ve done a lot of different things in the nonfiction realm. I’ve done almost everything you can do in the nonfiction realm, and I’ve done very little in the realm of, you know, working with actors.

Steve Cuden: And so hype was clearly a very good first movie. You got a lot of attention, and people thought you were good enough to ask you to do other things. So it was a very good first film. Did you think you were good at it at that point?

Doug Pray: I thought I was partly lucky, but, also, I told you that when I got out of film school, I kind of felt like I could make a film. And I didn’t mean that in a way that was putting down my education. I really, I loved UCLA film school at the time.

Steve Cuden: Me too.

Doug Pray: I really did. And I did learn a lot, and I felt, I guess one of the things that, you know, graduate school can give somebody, and it’s not for everyone, but can give someone like me, is that confidence of like, no, I can make a film. I just don’t have the right project yet. And I didn’t know hype was the right thing. It felt like, It almost felt like, oh, okay, I’ll do this just to waylay, you know, just to. I need to do something, and I’m really starting to get a little bit depressed because I’m not working on anything interesting. And so, yeah, okay, we’ll do, you know, it was almost. I’m not kidding. It was almost begrudging, like, okay, we’ll do the Seattle thing, but I think it’s going to be really hard, and I don’t think it’s the right idea. Steve and I, you know, I really, really liked Steve and still do, but it was just kind of like, well.

Steve Cuden: You spent four years on it before you got to where you were trying to get.

Doug Pray: Yeah, yeah. It took. It took that long.

Steve Cuden: So was there a point along the road here, over the decades of doing this, where you finally think to yourself, yeah, I am good at this. I do know what I’m doing. I am perhaps a master at making these things. Was there a point?

Doug Pray: I think so. And I think that point, not to sound like a sellout, but honestly, it was when I began getting paid commercially to do the thing I do in documentaries. Sure, that makes sense, because it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone listening. But if it is, believe me, documentaries don’t make a lot of money, and they still don’t today, because most of them are independent. Most of them are self made, you know, unless you’re like, with, you know, Netflix and they’re giving you a bunch of money, and here we’re doing this three part series or something like that. That’s different. But most docs are independent by definition, because you can start out so inexpensively.

Steve Cuden: You just start, well, there’s no doc. Studio. There’s no studio other than, you say, like HBO, perhaps.

Doug Pray: That’s right.

Steve Cuden: You can’t go to Warner Brothers or to Universal Studios or Fox and say, hey, where’s the documentary department? They don’t have them.

Doug Pray: That’s a really good point. Yeah, there’s no. Well, we don’t need a studio building it either. It’s so interesting. And so it was really, I’d say it was after M, my second feature, and I’d done some other little work in between and some other non fiction type work. But this is my second feature, was a good five years after my first talking. Ten years, after film school, I finally was offered an opportunity, a crazy opportunity from the Hughes brothers to help them direct a commercial. There’s a crazy moment when Albert Hughes called me in 2002. I’ll never forget it. I was out in the midwest with the family, and he called. He said, doug, man, we need help. We’re doing these two different ads for Adidas, and we’re in a little bit over our head. Like, we could do both, but we’re trying to do them both at the same time. It’s just too much. We’re going crazy. Our producer is going crazy. He said, man, once you get somebody, get somebody to come in and direct this other, more nonfiction style Adidas ad. I told him no. I was just like. I was like, albert, man, I’m never going to do a commercial. I can’t do that. I just know that’s just not me. I can’t.

Steve Cuden: Why?

Doug Pray: I think I thought it was a sellout, and I was just like, I can’t do this. I just was. I don’t know. I just was. Seemed so foreign. I was like, I’m never going to do an, even a tv commercial. I’m never going to do that. Albert was like, doug, you’re out of your mind. Do you know, like, you know you’re gonna get paid? I was like, oh, I appreciate that. I literally told him no. And I think he either called back, like, an hour later, or I called him back an hour later. Look, I’m sorry. I’m being. I’m taking myself way too seriously. Like, tell me more about it. If. Because what really got me was, if I can help you guys out, then I will. I’d love to help you guys out. And because I had worked with the Hughes brothers, Albert and Alan Hughes, I had edited a documentary for them at this point. So I had made hype, and I’d edited that doc, and I’d done another feature doc, and I just was like, I’m not. I can’t let these guys down. They actually really need help. And it was the Perfect way to get me. And so I said yes, within an hour, I’m sure. But it was like, next thing I knew, I was on a plane, and I was directing a massive commercial. I mean, m like, I got out of the car, and then somebody ran up to me. It was like. It was like five in the morning out in the valley, and, like, it was dark out, and there was all these scenes we had this film, even though they were kind of nonfiction style, they were like real people casting, but were setting up like a basketball game. Cause it’s an Adidas thing. And I, you know, I’d done some prep. Of course. I didn’t just show up and having no idea what was going on. I had a couple days of phone calls with this frantic producer, right? I get out of the car, and some, like, kid runs up to me, and he goes, like, mister Prey, what kind of coffee would you like? And I’m, like, looking at my, like, shitty little Honda accord, and, like, looking around going, who’s he talking to? I’m not kidding. Like, it was one of those moments in my life where I was like, oh, wow, I’m actually the. I’m the director. I’m the director today. Like, you know, and it was great. It was a fantastic experience.

Steve Cuden: They gave you a script. It wasn’t like you had to come up with the idea, right?

Doug Pray: That’s right. They were all. They were sort of. They had started the thing. So, the scenes. A lot of the scenes had been kind of planned out, and some of the. Some of the pre casting had been done, but they really did need me to come in and take over and make this happen. They hadn’t directed any scenes yet. Production, hadn’t started, but all the pre pro, all the development is sort of was in place. So it was like a crash course to get me up to speed and how this works. How are we going to shoot this? Who’s the cinematographer? You know, have I never worked with them before? It was. I don’t tell that story you know, as a way of making sound like, oh, yeah, I had arrived and I was m the man. It’s quite the opposite. It was shocking and stunning to feel like a director and to be able to walk onto the. Because it was a set, you know, that day, and have just a top flight crew. And they were like, you know, hey, do you want the. Do you want this light to come in, you know, from these upper windows, like, this way or that way? And for me to realize, like, I’m a director, all they want is a decision, and all I need is a reason. Okay, I like the light this way because that’s all directors do. That’s all directors do is make a decision. It’s binary. It’s like, either, do you want the red curtain or the purple curtain? I think the purple. Why? Because the character feels more purple to.

Steve Cuden: Me or whatever, but you’re making it sound a little easier than it is because all the decisions have to go through you.

Doug Pray: That’s right.

Steve Cuden: And all the roads lead through you.

Doug Pray: Yes, it’s true. But I think what I guess what I’m trying to get at is just this idea that there was this feeling of, this is really exciting. I’m being paid and paid good money because it was a commercial. I’m being paid as a director, and I’m being respected as a director, and I’m being able to direct a large crew as a director as opposed to the, you know, the ten years of crawling around on my, you know, with a little camera, like just, you know, what we used to call the doc ghetto, which was literally like, okay, you’re not going to. You’re not being paid. Is this a freebie? Yeah, it’s a freebie. Is this a favor? Yeah, it’s a favor, but would you do it? Sure. You know, like just dozens of things like that over the years of just like, helping out friends and doing my own docs and asking for favors and just the world of making independent films with no money.

Steve Cuden: Exactly. It’s just very challenging. It’s challenging even if you have a lot of money. There are challenges to that too. And I think that it’s likely that even on the biggest budgeted movies, the directors always feel like they don’t have enough.

Doug Pray: I think it’s probably true.

Steve Cuden: I think it’s probably true. So when you’re deciding, I want to make a movie, how do you figure out what subject to do? Is it because people come to you or you develop ideas? Where do your films come from? Is it all directions?

Doug Pray: Well, this is partly why I couldn’t write a screenplay. Not that I couldn’t. I’d still like to say that I will someday, but I’m not very good at inventing things. I’m really not. I’m a problem solver. Like, I’m seeing books on your shelf behind you. If you said, If you just handed me any three random books and said, I don’t know what this is going to be, but you got to make a story out of these three books, I’d be like, oh, that’s cool. Sure, I’d love to do that, and I would love to get my brain going on how to do that. Like, this makes no sense. I love limits, and documentaries are all about limits. Like, well, we don’t have that footage. Well, how can we say this in another way? Well, I don’t have that quote. Well, how can you make that speak in another way, and all the way up to the largest decisions on a documentary of, like, how do we even make this? We don’t have access, or, we don’t have this. And I like those kind of problems. There’s just something about problem solving that turns me on. And, and I really, and I really mean this. I’m not being, trying to be too self deprecating. It’s. I really am not very good at just inventing, you know, like, I always joke with people, like, my friends are screenwriters. I’m like, how do you decide? Like, you know, fade in, Wednesday morning, it’s sunny. I’m like, I would. That would take me days to get off that opening line. I’d be like, well, why not Thursday? Why isn’t it raining? Oh, wait. It’s like, like, how do you make up a character?

Steve Cuden: So I’ve been teaching for years, Aristotle and the poetics, and he says, and I’m, paraphrasing it, of course, but he says this very simple thing. Your story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. Wow, that sounds simple. Until you sit down to try to figure out where is the beginning and how does it end. And then you run into the dilemma of all great storytellers, which is, I don’t know where this begins and I don’t know where it ends. And if you do know it, you’re halfway home. You know, that’s what you’re talking about. You don’t want to be inventive about things. You’d rather shoot some form of reality.

Doug Pray: Yes, but it goes back to your first question, which is, how do I come up with the ideas? I never have. I really never have. When the sky’s the limit. Well, like when people will ask me occasionally, say, okay, imagine you have like, $2 million. You can make any doc in the world, or even 500,000. You can make any doc in the world on any subject. What are you going to do? I’m telling you, Steve, I’m just lost because I read articles and I get excited. Go, oh, that’d be a cool doc. I mean, I do have those thoughts. You know, there’s all sorts of thoughts I have that could be a great doc. But, it’s never enough to, like, make me go, oh, I’m gonna do that. I’m gonna go circle the wagons and get the rights of that book and do. It’s more. It’s always been people approaching me and saying, hey, I liked your last film, or, I liked this one film you made. We’re trying to do this. What do you think we have this doc, it’s so much better for me to engage with something that kind of has an idea already and might have that key thing, which is access.

Steve Cuden: That’s a tricky part, isn’t it?

Doug Pray: Yeah, for all docs. I mean, that’s the key word for making a documentary, access. What is your access? And so if somebody has access to something that’s really interesting or maybe an untold story or an underappreciated subculture or you name it, anything, then I can start getting interested. I can start thinking like, oh, this story has not really been told. Their story hasn’t been told, and suddenly it feels like a job and a problem solving. Like, it’s the solve. The problem I need to solve is that this group of musicians or this artist or this, you know, whatever person in business or whoever it is, they feel misunderstood. And that’s a problem that I like trying to solve, is I’m like, oh, I understand you. I get this. I think I understand why you do this, you know, and it’s. That’s exciting.

Steve Cuden: So you like to find or have stories come to you that present an issue that you recognize as requiring a.

Doug Pray: Lot of figuring out, I think so. It doesn’t mean that I like complicated stories. I always want to kind of know, well, what’s this really about? But, but, but I definitely, for whatever reason, and maybe those are the reasons and maybe there’s other reasons, I’ve just never really generated any of the docs I’ve done, and I’ve now done a lot of docs.

Steve Cuden: Do you think that your docs follow a narrative structure, a typical seven plot point structure?

Doug Pray: I’ve never thought of it as seven plot points, usually a three act structure, but I don’t necessarily believe in that either. But it’s just, the answer is yes. They all follow a very similar structure. In fact, if you really just looked at the skeletons of all the docs I’ve made, almost all of them have. They do follow a pattern.

Steve Cuden: Do you sit ahead of time and contrive how the thing is going to unfold even though you don’t have footage.

Doug Pray: Yet, you have to. Oh, you absolutely have to, because partly you still, some of these situations, even if somebody is approaching me, we still have, we still have to go then pitch it. Like, if a producer approaches me and said, I have an idea, would you be interested in directing it? It might take even a month of talking with that person, and I finally might go. And a lot of times I say no. I mean, I honestly will go, no, it doesn’t quite. It’s not. I’m sorry. You know, but if it’s something I kind of get hooked on, then we have to go pitch it. And my point is that by pitching, you have to kind of understand what a film is really about because docs are always. They’re about something on the surface, and then they’re really about something else.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Doug Pray: Of course. So are narrative films.

Steve Cuden: It’s like text and subtext.

Doug Pray: Exactly. Like, what’s this film about? Oh, it’s about the Seattle music scene. Oh, so it’s a music film. Yeah, but it’s really about how pop culture works and cycles of pop culture and exploitation and about how the world discovers something that’s really authentic. It gets exploited and then it moves on in its own way. And, you know, it’s. That’s what, it’s sociology, actually.

Steve Cuden: Is that the same thing in the defiant ones?

Doug Pray: well, I didn’t direct that. And that, you know, I edited and produced that. But you know what? Yes, yes. Each and every episode that did follow a certain pattern. The pattern is usually, I won’t get too lost in this. I’m trying to put it in one sentence. The pattern is a hook to get you interested, to let everybody know who’s watching this. Like, this is. This is big, or this is interesting, or this is something you don’t know about. Stay tuned. And then it’s always the golden era, the heyday, the Good, the up. And then. And then the middle part of a film, call it act two or whatever you want, is usually when, oh, things are getting weird. Something changed, something is messed up about that. Something’s bad. Like, you know, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like a young artist who was just. Everything suddenly is making money and their career starts to get weird.

Steve Cuden: Mm

Doug Pray: You know, and it’s a threat and it changes their. All sorts of their moral code and it changes this or that. I mean, that’s a very common thing with most rock and roll films.

Steve Cuden: So you still need, like, a narrative structure. You still need the ups and downs. It can’t just be a straight line, a flat line story that just follows one boring thing after another. It has to have some kind of a. There’s a conflict. There has to. And there’s conflict in all docs, I assume the ones that you make.

Doug Pray: If it doesn’t have conflict, it’s not drama. If it’s not drama, it’s not a Good doc. Documentaries have the ability to be as dramatic as dramatic films. And it’s in too many docs. I mean, the ones I’m critical of are like just sort of. They are, they’re like you said, sort of flat lines where it’s. If you could take a scene from minute 17 and swap it with a scene from minute 40, and it would make no difference. And that, to me, is the sign of not to sound so critical, but like a bad structure. It has to rise, it has to have surprises. It has to have this idea of a subject, whether it’s an individual or a community or a, ah, business or a band or. I don’t care what it is that they’re going through something that twists and turns and changes. You know, I mean, there’s no such thing as good storytelling if that. If your basic subject doesn’t change and grow or have challenges, even if it’s a tragedy or, you know, some’s either got to go up or down. And if it’s going up, it’s got to go down even within a ten minute period. Like, if you’re kind of going up, it’s really wonderful to surprise the audience with. And then this happens. Oh, it’s so great. He won the Grammy. Like, in the defiant ones, there were so many ups for Jimmy Iving and Doctor Dre. I mean, they went hundreds of Grammys or whatever. Okay, they won lots and lots of grammys. I don’t know about hundreds. And just so many stories of just high, high, high success. So many stories of challenges and tragedies and difficulties and problems with the law or the business or Napster or whatever. I mean, just, you know, divorces are like, every single time we went up, we kind of realized, oh, we can pull the rug out again. Boom. And we would do it as editors. And it really. It was true. I mean, it was. They were true stories. And it was all. It was just a blessing of. What’s the expression? It was, an embarrassment of riches because they had so much in their stories. It was a very dynamic.

Steve Cuden: Well, those are two gigantic lives.

Doug Pray: Yeah. Larger than Life and honest. And honest. Ellen, Hughes is the director, and he’s a fantastic director because he made sure that they wouldn’t do that project unless they could bear all. And they really, really did. They were very honest. And Alan was able to take them there. And I’ve. I’ve often asked that of my own subjects, because nobody really likes a tribute. Tributes are for memorials when someone’s passed away. And tributes are for. If you really just want to honor something amazing and just, hey, make it really nice, doc. And full on tribute. Give this person credit.

Steve Cuden: So how do you go about getting a celebrity, a famous person, a powerful person in an industry? How do you get them to open up like that? Is there a technique, a methodology, or does it just have to play it by ear?

Doug Pray: Well, first of all, you just ask them questions in your interview that go there and see how they go, I think. but I know what Alan did for the divine ones is he really was like, you guys, you got to bear all. And he knew the things they didn’t want to talk about. And he would act. He actually just up front was like, you know, you’re going to have to talk about this. And they’d be like, oh. But so he prepped them for it, and then he would not do it in the first interview or the second or the third. I mean, he did, like, eight interviews with each of them, you know. And in my case, it’s not really any different. I mean, I did a film about. About illegal underground graffiti. Underground meaning just, you know, I mean, it’s called infamy. And it came out in 2006, and I’m very proud of the film. And it really was a whole pole. No punches, very honest. Look at real graffiti. Real graffiti, meaning not like the pretty mural you see on a college campus. I mean, like the taggers, like the hardcore true. You know, representing a crew. Taggers and graffiti writers, but really, really good ones, ones who are up all over their city or around the country. And I had to tell them, and my partner, my producing partner, who knew them, just had to tell them, like, you guys can’t wear masks, and we’re gonna ask you everything. You know, we’re gonna ask you everything.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Doug Pray: And I mean, not. We’re not gonna ask you stuff that’ll get land you in jail, but we’re gonna ask you everything.

Steve Cuden: Did that make it unsafe for you?

Doug Pray: A little, but it, you know, it made it unsafe for them. It was a big step for them to agree not to have masks. Way pre Covid, I might add. But I mean, just masks, you know, like, so they could just see their eyes. They really wanted to do that. I was like, no. In fact, we went further and I asked them if they would allow me to interview their moms or dads. It ended up being moms in most cases, and they didn’t want to do that either. But it was like, no, I really want an honest portrayal of your Life. Like, we really. There was almost became a criteria for, you know, for who we could interview. And we did six graffiti writers and, you know, and it was, it’s very powerful. It really, really worked.

Steve Cuden: You said that you do actually set down ahead of production and determine which direction you’re going to go and who you’re going to talk to and what you’re going to attempt to get. How often does it happen that once you’re in the middle of it, you discover something different out entirely and go in a different direction?

Doug Pray: In the best scenarios?

Steve Cuden: In the best scenario.

Doug Pray: Because that’s the beauty of documentary filmmaking. You have a plan, you have a roadmap, but then just like going off roading or something, or hiking wild. Like, if you don’t have a good map, you can’t go off trail. That’s my metaphor. And it really works because if you don’t have a map, you’re just lost. But if you have a map, if you have a really clear idea of what you want out of the film, not every detail, but a good outline, then it allows you to take these crazy curveballs. I made a film called Surf Wise in 2007 about the Paskowitz family, this legendary surfing family with, this amazing, Strong, Strong, vigilant patriarch and matriarchal Dorian and Juliet Paskowitz. Well, I thought it was going to be almost like just a happy, fun surf. Like, oh, yeah, they live like, they live naturally on the beaches. They never went to school. This is a perfect example of kind of like what, happens if you raise your kids like aboriginal, like wolves or something. And that was his dream. And they ate super healthy and they never went to school and they surfed every day. I thought it was. I was. I, thought I was portraying nirvana, heaven on earth, like really within like two or three days. The interviews just went south in a good way. I mean, in a way of like, oh, no. Oh, no. Like, no. There’s all this other stuff going on in this family and it sounds so mercenary, but it was exciting. It was like, oh, this is a. This story is filled with paradox, which are the best stories, the ones that are like, it’s this and this. They lived the greatest lifestyle in the world and it was deeply troubled and there were serious problems and they were honest about it, very honest. So that wasn’t something that I had to ask them in advance. Will you be honest about your family? They just were. And it just came out. It just came out with all. They have nine kids. All nine kids to a name. We’re profoundly honest. And I just absolutely loved the experience. I mean, it was a hard film to make for a lot of different reasons, but it was just, they were just an amazing family. I love them to this day. And, yeah, they had problems. Like all families in the history of.

Steve Cuden: The world, has there ever been a family that was perfect?

Doug Pray: That’s right. Exactly. So when I approach any character, any subject, I don’t care who it is. I don’t care if they’re like, you know, a billionaire who just won every award in business. I don’t care who it is, you know, like, a major athlete who’s successful all the time, seemingly. So the first place I want to go or the third place I want to go in that interview is like, so what’s hard? What are the days you don’t want to get out of bed? What do you hate about this job, even though it seems to everyone else like, the Perfect job? Because, you know, there’s this idea that Howard Suber, talks about in the power of film is this idea that all great characters are trapped and that all of us are trapped. As a documentary filmmaker, I really believe that’s true. I mean, I really believe that there is that sort of. I call it the private hell. Everybody has a private hell, and it doesn’t mean you need to expose all that. If I’m interviewing somebody about sports, I don’t have to talk about their divorce ten years ago. You know what I mean? It’s not about gotcha. it’s not about, like, I’m not into prurient, like, oh, wow, I get to hear about their sex life or something. I don’t give a, I don’t give a damn about any of that stuff. It’s more I want to know how they do what they do. It’s kind of like, that’s what you do on story

Steve Cuden: That’s what we’re doing here. It’s true that we’re all trapped in our own minds, in our own bodies. We can’t be someone else. We can’t be somewhere where we aren’t, except in our imaginations, perhaps, but we are all stuck within. And this is a wonderful segue into the power of film, which I think we should talk a little bit about. First of all, explain to the listeners, if they don’t know what the power of film is, either the book or the movie or the, or the documentary series, what is it about?

Doug Pray: The power of film is a six part. It’s actually a documentary series because we filmed a legendary professor named Howard Suborbital, who was a PhD who taught for literally 53 years at UCLA. Some of those later years as an emeritus professor, just legendary. And he taught film structure. And he also taught. He taught about how films work. And he did it in a way that he only studied popular and memorable films. He had plenty of classes on, the french new wave and many other amazing genres and film. So it wasn’t that he was anti that he was he. But he really always wanted to figure out the most popular and memorable. He didn’t care about box office success. It had to be both popular and.

Steve Cuden: Memorable films and mostly american films.

Doug Pray: And american films. And he studied them in depth and watched them numerous times and taught many, many classes of them. And his class became kind of sort of this great secret around UCLA of like, oh, one thing, before you graduate, you better take Howard’s class because it taught you about all these very deeply human motivations and things that are embodied in all the great films. Like, he would take the Godfather, which is maybe one of his most famous courses. He would unpack the Godfather, and you just realize again and again and again all the different very human themes that we can all relate to, even if we’re not italian, even if we have nothing to do with gangsters, even nothing to do with anything that’s even remotely like that story There are so many things in that story that we can relate to. And he’s a very good teacher at bring making that come home. Like, here’s why Shawshank redemption works. Here’s why thelma and Louise works. Here’s why even more recent films get out is so powerful. It’s like he really sees it. And so he analyzes films. And to answer your question in shorter terms, the series basically takes 50 years of teaching, and it kind of condenses it into six kind of master lectures. But it’s not a master class either. And it’s not really just academic. It’s all sort of all the things it’s not is hard to explain because it’s basically a professor looking straight into the lens and teaching in his wonderfully humble and humorous way. And then hundreds and hundreds of film clips that illustrate what he’s. Exactly what he’s talking about, because he’s.

Steve Cuden: A pattern recognitionist and he looks for the patterns in all these hundreds of movies as to why it is that these work and others won’t work. And he comes up with all of those principles and elements of storytelling that are intrinsic in all of it, that have been around for thousands of years, since the Greeks and beyond and he’s the one. Howard Subaru’s the single individual who figured out what all those principles and elements are that make movies and plays and books, frankly, memorable and popular. And that’s what I found extraordinary about his class and super extraordinary about the series. Well, the book, he’s got a book called the power Film, right. And it’s like a little, it’s like an encyclopedia of film elements and principles.

Doug Pray: Right. Like if you want to read about destiny, go to chapter D. And each.

Steve Cuden: One of those chapters are only a page or two, sometimes two and a half pages. Mostly one page.

Steve Cuden: And lots of examples of how this, you know, that you can see it and that’s what you did so brilliantly in this series, is you used all of those clips to show exactly what he’s talking about. It becomes obvious on the screen in front of.

Doug Pray: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s a really. I’m always trying to explain to people what it’s like and they say, oh, so it’s like a, it’s like an academic thing. Oh, it’s like a history. No, not at all. Like, he doesn’t talk about the history of film. He doesn’t talk about actors so much. He’ll name them. But like, it’s just, it’s really just this guy, Howard Subra, and his, he sort of has a magical way of lulling you into it. I think people in the first few minutes are going really. And then slowly they’re kind of hooked.

Steve Cuden: It’s easy to get hooked.

Doug Pray: And then it just kind of gets better and better and it gets deeper and deeper. It gets very deep. And you start realizing, oh my God, he’s talking about my life.

Doug Pray: He’s talking about betrayal. He’s talking about romance in a way that I understand. He’s talking about hurt. He’s talking about all these different things that are in my life, you know, or,

Steve Cuden: And that’s what’s reflected in all of these movies. These movies are about people and their problems and their hurt and their successes and all the rest of it. And he’s sitting there and saying, here is why you’re so into this, because of this, this, this and this, this element, that element, this element. So you just back up and you go, wow, that’s really why I like these movies, why I’m a movie aficionado. And frankly, how many people are there on planet Earth that are movie buffs? Literally tens of, not hundreds of millions of movie buffs?

Doug Pray: It’s true.

Steve Cuden: Why does it work. He explains it. There’s no other series that I can think of at all that’s even vaguely like the power of film. Would you agree?

Doug Pray: I totally agree. And it’s. It’s been fun to have it get out there because this was a completely handmade independent film, and, you know, it just, not film a series. And actually, even that, I don’t think has ever really happened. I don’t know that there’s many six part series of anything that are, like, independently made, and. And since, you know, Howard, you know, this took, like, eight years to make, and it’s sort of been a slow, slow thing where we were just like, no, I don’t think we’ll get distribution. I don’t think. I don’t think anybody’s gonna understand this. I. We love it, and we love Howard, and we love these clips, and this is really cool. So we’re just gonna. If we have to, we’re just gonna put it up on YouTube, or we’ll just get it out there. We’ll just send it to everybody, you.

Steve Cuden: Know, you made it out of love.

Doug Pray: Well, kinda. I mean, it was absolutely a labor of love because how was my mentor, and he was Laura Gabbard. I really got to give credit to Laura Gabbard. she was my partner throughout the whole thing, producing partner, and, you know, we. We both just made it. We just decided a long time ago that we really wanted to see this through, and I’m. I’m really, really happy we did, because now it’s starting to get this little buzz from screenwriters and directors and other people going, oh, wow.

Steve Cuden: Where can people find it? They can find it on Mac. Yes.

Doug Pray: That’s right. Well, it’s on Max now. It started out, it was. It premiered on Turner Classic movies, and it still will be on TCM again. But, but they have a thing called the TCM Hub on Mac, so it’s absolutely viewable on Max, and we’re just thrilled that it’s out there. And Howard is 86 and just a great guy, and he’s, we’re just really happy that we got to kind of help him realize his dreams.

Steve Cuden: I’m very happy that you did it, and I think the world should be very happy that you did it, especially anybody trying to make movies and make them better. So let’s talk about the series. What were the biggest hurdles, aside from the massive amount of time it took, what were the big hurdles you had to overcome?

Doug Pray: I think the hardest thing in the beginning was how on Howard’s end, really. And he worked with another ta of his. Laura and I were both tas of his at different eras. At UCLA, there’s another guy named Joey Sierra. And then we brought on an editor, Ava Cumborian, and another guy, Philip Owens, who for the first four years they kind of traded off doing edits. And then I worked mostly on it for the last year and a half. Long story short, the hardest thing was trying to get all of his teachings compressed into six episodes, because we knew they couldn’t go on and on and on for like 2 hours. I mean, they had to be like 40 minutes. Like, that’s a decent time. They’re about 40 minutes each. And that’s a good time for. That’s a good length. So that was really hard. And that was on Howard and Joey. And I mean, of course we were all involved in those discussions, but that was really challenging. And then I think the other challenging thing was just working for Howard because in the end, he’s kind of still my professor. So we’d be editing, whether it was Philip editing or me or abo, it didn’t matter. But like, we’d be editing and we would, you know, not always. We would show him like, okay, here’s some progress. And he would watch and go like, no, you sort of missed the point of that lecture. Like, you missed the, you know, you’re like, oh my God, am I going to get a b minus on this one? So there was that whole dynamic of, wanting Howard to like it, you know? And I think really the most frustrating thing, honestly, was it just took a long, long time. And I felt, you know, both Laura and I felt really, frankly, kind of guilty that it was taking so long because we just. It just took a long time to figure out. It was like a puzzle. It took a long, long time to.

Steve Cuden: Figure out, oh, I don’t know how it wasn’t a puzzle. How many clips are there all told? In all six combined, there’s a lot.

Doug Pray: I mean, I can’t count the number of clips. Let’s just say there’s well over. There’s something like a couple hundred movies presented in short. In other words, like touched upon. That doesn’t mean he’s discussing that alone.

Steve Cuden: Must have taken forever to figure out which clips to use.

Doug Pray: Yeah, it did.

Steve Cuden: Whether it works or not.

Doug Pray: Yeah, it was like writing a book. And, you know, it’s just, by the way, I. My story about him still being my professor, he was just lovely. He was just completely supportive. And I think he realized we’re just doing this for no pay and, like, just wanting to get this done. And, you know, he was. Couldn’t have been more supportive. You know, even up into the 7th or 8th year, he was just like, no, because as we got closer, we kept saying, howard, we’re going to finish this thing. We really are. We’re getting closer. Episode one was finished. Okay, now we’re going to finish episode two. You know, just kept going. It was so the slow reveal of different episodes and getting his approval and doing the tweaks on those, you know, that was the whole last year and a half, at least.

Steve Cuden: So how did you decide how to break them into the six pieces or components?

Doug Pray: Honestly, that really, to some degree that fit Howard’s original. We spent six days on the soundstage. We went on to soundstage and we set up a camera to look right at Howard, directly at him, kind of like Zoom, if you’re looking straight into the Zoom camera. And there were six days. And he did break that up into thematic lectures. So, for example, I think it might be true episode four is called Heroes and Villains. And I think it might be true that day four was heroes and villains. It may not have been called that, but it was about heroes and villains. And, you know, I know that day six on his last big series of lectures was about wizard of Oz and about goodbyes and about all these. Like, it was very emotional. I really remember that. I remember actually getting emotional when we were filming on his last, you know, couple hours in that soundstage because he was. He was really going deep on, I wish we could, you know, I wish the episodes could have been an hour and a half long, not for the making of it, but just in real life. I wish they were, because he really got much deeper on some of these.

Steve Cuden: Oh, you definitely want more at the end of each episode. It’s not like you get to the end, they, thank goodness that’s over. No, no, you want more and more and more because it’s so fascinating and draws you so deeply in. So each episode, which I also really loved, you end each episode with a nice sort of tweak at the end. It’s. You, leave us wanting more at the very end with the way that you end the episodes. Was that by design or did you find that in post?

Doug Pray: That really was in post, actually, just because you want to always, especially in a series, you always want to hook somebody to watch the next episode. So we’re always looking for hooks or a lead in to the next concept. I think a couple episodes, the ends, like, you know, well, in our next episode, we’ll talk about this. But, yeah, you want to leave people thinking even deeper about what was just said so that they go away going, I wonder.

Steve Cuden: It feels like a button at the end of a. You know, it’s a commercial break is coming, so here’s the button. And it wants you to wait for the next thing to come. And so I think that the way that you did that was superb.

Doug Pray: Well, I really like it when Howard talks about you. He’s looking into the camera. He’s talking about you, the viewer. It’s very, It really kind of gets to you if you’re into the series and you’re watching it, because there are three or four times during each episode, he’ll say, like, at the end of episode five, he’s talking about intermediaries. He’s talking about how we all are intermediaries in our lives in different ways. And great heroes are always intermediaries. It’s almost a defining quality of a great hero, which is certainly something I never had thought about. But they’re able to go into different worlds. I mean, everybody from Luke Skywalker to you name it, you could go right down the line and name all the kind of great heroes. And it’s really interesting. And he ends that episode by just saying, and what about you? I think it’s the end of episode three. Forgive me. And he ends up, He’s just saying, like, ask yourself, how are you an intermediary? And I like that ending because it makes people kind of the episode ends, and they’re probably going like, okay, I guess I am between my mom and my dad. Or I guess I am between my workplace, in this other thing, or at my workplace, I’m an intermediary or whatever.

Steve Cuden: Well, I think that that’s the way that it is in Life most of the time. And so, yes, that’s absolutely right. That we are all in between various things. We all put on different sort of personality hats. When we deal with the, clerk in the post office. You deal with that person differently than you deal with your sibling or with your parents. You deal with everybody a little bit different. So, yeah, we’re all intermediaries in this Life. I think that’s what’s so special about it. But again, it’s the way that you guys put it together with all those clips to say, oh, I recognize all of this in all of these movies. And truthfully, you could have done another six parts, really, if you’d wanted to if you’d had another eight years.

Doug Pray: Well, Howard would love to.

Steve Cuden: I’m sure he would.

Doug Pray: He’s going through his notes right now. We just talked about this last week. He said, I’m going through my notes, notes. And I’m looking for stuff that we either left on the editing room floor or that was chapters in my book that we never even touched on. And I was like, knock yourself out. And I love that idea, and let’s talk about it next week. No, no. That sounds so mean. Like, I’m putting the guy up. It would be hard to do that because I think it just. It almost took it all out of us, all of us, even Howard, just to get it done.

Steve Cuden: I think it is what it is. I don’t think there should be another part, especially the fact that Howard, I guess he spent his life doing this. And I think that he’s really killed himself to make this as good as he could make it. And I think that it’s fantastic. And I wouldn’t change a thing. And I think it’s just right. And it makes you want to go read the book, which gives you even more detail. So I think that that’s what’s great about it. It gives you an opportunity to find even more quite easily. Yeah, we’ve been talking for a little bit more than an hour with the absolutely phenomenal, documentarian doug pray. And we’re going to wind the show down a little bit right now. And, you know, you’ve told us all of these, various experiences of yours. But I’m wondering if you can share with us an experience that you’ve been through in all of your years. that’s either weird, quirky, offbeat, strange, or maybe just plain funny.

Doug Pray: Well, I’ll say this. I was talking about my very first feature film, which took four and a half years to make and nearly killed me and was total, total paying your dues kind of project. But I also was so honored to be able to tell the story of the Seattle music scene. And couldn’t have done it without so many people. But it took all that time, and I was the editor in the end, there was another great editor who was working with me, the beginning, and. But anyway, and I’m really into sound design. I’m really, like, to me, sound is the secret weapon of documentaries and the opening of hype. This rock is a big rock and roll film. And we had a massive 5.1 sound mix. I mean, massive. I mean, the whole goal was like we wanted when that when the big bands played your shirt to flutter, like, if you. That was our goal. And spent a lot of time and had some brilliant sound mixers who, by the way, have gone on to many Academy awards, many more than I’ve ever gotten, which is zero, the sound mixers of that film. So this is a big, big thing, and it’s a documentary, but big sound. And it’s the world premiere of my very first feature at Sundance in a packed theater, 700 seats. And I am, freaking out nervous because even though you people wonder why would he be nervous about just playing a film, they’re just going to hit play because you just are. It’s like, worse than, it’s worse than stage fright for me. It’s just, it’s a deep panic. It’s like, oh, my God. And so here we go. The room goes dark. I see the first image and we go, here we go, here we go, here we go. I’m waiting for the five one sound to just kick in and just blow everybody away with this intensive montage of sounds and cacophony and music. And it’s dead silent. And I’m sitting there somewhere in the middle of the audience or whatever, near the aisle, I guess, and, like, it’s just silent and it’s still silent. 5 seconds, 6 seconds. 710. Like, 15 seconds in, I’m going, oh, my God, there’s no sound. Holy shit. And I, like, bound out of my seat and I run up, the audience is, like, dead silent. And, you know, like, there’s this, like, silent movie playing and they don’t know what the hell it is. You know, it’s like, just images and it’s like a montage. I, run up the audience, like, all the way up the aisle. I go out in the hallway, I’m pounding on the projectionist. This is a rock movie. We need sound. We need sound now. And they can’t, like, rewind. You can’t rewind a projector. And they turned it on. And I don’t want to give grief to them because first of all, 30 years ago, whatever, 25 years ago, and it just, and I was so honored to be at Sundance, I would never, ever give them grief because it really, really was such a big deal to have a premiere there. And they got the sound going and I don’t know, it was like a minute. And so everybody who saw that world premiere had no idea what we’d spent, like, months on. And so it’s just one of those stories of, like, you know what? But we moved on. We had other screenings, it all worked out. It’s just kind of like, anyway, that’s more of a horror story

Steve Cuden: But you did finally see it with the opening and the right sound. Yes. No, in other screenings. You saw it?

Doug Pray: Oh, in other screenings. Oh, absolutely. No, it was fine. For the rest, I had a fantastic festival. It was great experience. I owe my career practically to Sundance because they accepted that film and it kind of helped kick off my career. And, you know, I mean, I haven’t been there for many years since, but it’s, it was just a great experience. But that was one, that was one kind of just crazy moment, you know?

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s terrifying, actually, is what it is.

Doug Pray: Yeah. The other thing is really just an image of, I made a movie called Big Rig that’s about truck drivers, about independent long haul truck drivers. I don’t know. I mean, do you have another minute? I’ll keep this short. Of course, this is really just an image of being a documentary filmmaker because you’re always in strange lands as a documentarian, you’re kind of often like the fish out of water going, what am I doing here? Why am I here at four in the morning? Or why am I here with these people in this living room? Or why? You know, and one of the strangest things was making this film big rig, which was actually produced by Brad Blondheim, who produced my second film, Scratch. And so it was me and Brad and we would just go fishing, so to speak, for interviews in truck stop parking lots, really, all across the country. We went to every single state we traveled. It was like a 40,000 miles journey. We did dozens of interviews. It was an incredible experience, but it was all about long haul, independent truck drivers. And the only way to get interviews, like to cast for them, so to speak, was like to kind of go up to trucks and knock on the windows or say, like, meet a truck trucker. You might like their truck, or you might say, hey, what are you hauling? And like, hey, and what’s that camera for? Oh, I’m a documentary filmmaker. I’m doing a documentary about truck drivers. The problem is you’re not allowed to film at truck stops at all. Like, you certainly weren’t in 2006, you definitely aren’t today. But in 2006, you know, it was already getting kind of more, corporatized and more laws and it was like the days, the old, like, friendly little neighborhood cafe truck stop. You know, that’s a thing of the past. They exist, but it’s really a thing of the past. And long story short, it’s just the image of there’s no solicitation, no prostitution, no drug, no selling drugs, and definitely no documentary filmmakers. We literally got chased out by, like, first people with broomsticks, like, get off our parking lot. And I was like, oh, my God, they’re literally chasing us and, like, running. Me and Brad, like, jumping into the van and, like, hauling off. And there was, like, a cop, and, like, it was just like, oh, my God, we’re getting busted for trying to make a documentary. But it was just like, the whole. It was just, like, for days. We just kept going, like, okay, you know, well, at least we, like, we weren’t prostitutes, we weren’t drug dealers, but, God, we were definitely documentarians. And that was like, what would they.

Steve Cuden: Have arrested you for? Would have been what? Trespass?

Doug Pray: Solicitation? Soliciting. I laugh. I laugh about it because it was like, there was nothing worse than what we were doing. Like, you know, it’s the evidence of everything else going on.

Steve Cuden: How did you resolve it? How did you eventually get the interviews.

Doug Pray: In that case, the trucker met. I had been in conversation with a really great trucker, and he was like, you guys better get the hell out of here. And he was like, but he met us and actually became one of the best interviews of the whole. Of the whole movie. It was this guy and his wife Loretta, and they were. It was just fantastic. I interviewed them from Memphis all the way to Cincinnati, and it was just really, really fantastic. I interviewed both of them. You know what? He was in his truck. She was, They were tandem. They were like, you know, driving together.

Steve Cuden: Did they let you sit in the truck with them while they were driving?

Doug Pray: Oh, yeah. The whole. The whole movie. If you watch the movie, it’s like. It’s as if you’re hitchhiking coast to coast, and you get in one truck and you get this really deep story and then you get in another one, you get a totally different deep story And there is an arc. There is a structure. It starts out kind of like happy go lucky. Like, oh, trucking’s awesome. And it gets dark fast because it really was about. It ended up. We thought it would just be a huge celebration of how cool trucking is. You know, those old trucking movies from the sixties and seventies, you know, like, whatever. And we thought it would be more like that spirit.

Steve Cuden: Convoy.

Doug Pray: Yeah, convoy. And trucking songs and CB radios and.

Steve Cuden: Smokey and the Bandit.

Doug Pray: Smokey and the bandit and. Yeah. And, you know, honestly, very, very quickly, we realized we were making a portrait of America, and it was not, a happy portrait. And these guys were hurting, and they really did not like all the regulations or the gas prices. They were getting screwed. And it really opened my mind to what later became a huge population in our country who is pissed off and really like, a lot. You know, I won’t go into the politics, but the very obvious politics we’ve seen in the last, you know, five, six years, kind of that. The seeds of that are throughout this film talking to struckers, because they really, they were legitimately getting screwed. They were. They. There were regulations that seemed unfair. They were mistreated on the highways by us four wheelers. They were. You just live with them for all. And we lived with them for months, and you just. It was really, really eye opening. It’s a, it’s, it’s a pretty dark film. It’s a positive film, but it’s dark in the sense that it’s. I don’t make political films, but it sort of became political without trying.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s very interesting. I would love to check that out one of these days. So, last question for you today, Doug. you’ve already given us a huge amount of information to chew on and advice throughout this whole show, but I’m wondering if you have a single solid piece of advice or a tip that you like to give those that are starting out in the business, or maybe they’re in a little bit and trying to get to that next level.

Doug Pray: I think it’s really simple. I think the people who have done okay in this business are people who are persistent, who just kind of don’t quite give up, despite the desperate struggles. I mean, I’ve never had a film that didn’t have a very dark moment where I really wanted out. And I hated the subject. I hated the film. I hated my edit. I hated the idea. I wanted out. I mean that seriously, because these projects take a year or two, three, four sometimes. Every film I’ve ever made, there’s been a moment when I was like, oh, my God, why am I doing this? this is wrong. I don’t know what I’m doing. This is wrong. This is a bad idea. You know, and somehow out of that kind of depth of despair, which I think is unfortunately kind of a part, of the creative process, somehow the idea that, well, just keep going. I don’t know. Just keep going. We’ll figure it out. Maybe I’ll take a little break. Maybe I’ll figure it out tomorrow. Maybe what that producer said was right. Maybe what that other friend of mine said was right, you know, starting to open my mind to listening to some outside advice, you know, because we get defensive and we get just sort of, like, lost in our ideas. And so somehow this idea of just persistence, of just not really ever giving up, I really think is one of the things I did. I just kind of never quite gave up, even though I wanted to. I definitely wanted to.

Steve Cuden: I think that that’s true of most art, is that most art and artists, you, know, you get in the middle of whatever it is you’re doing, and you’re not sure it’s going to work because you don’t really have the proper feedback yet, and it’s really hard to keep going. But, yes, I think you’re right. The real, true professionals and the real, true artists, they don’t give up. They are persistent. I think that’s really, truly wise advice. And if you do give up, then you’ll never know whether it’ll succeed or not.

Doug Pray: I would add one more part to that, and I think kind of not taking yourself too seriously, because to have the ability to self reflect and say, oh, this really is bad, or, gee, this is ridiculous, let’s just laugh this off and move on, because there’s many tragedies in every production and things like that, I think that’s also really helpful. I think that people who take it just way too seriously and like, I’m. I’m this and I’m that, and it’s just it, you know, some of those people become very successful, but I don’t think they’re very healthy.

Steve Cuden: I agree with you. I think that it’s still called show business. It’s not, it’s not exactly called the dirge. You know, you should be having fun. If you’re not having fun, there might be a problem there.

Doug Pray: Yeah, totally.

Steve Cuden: Doug, pray. This has been so much fun for me today, and we could carry on for hours more. But I can’t thank you enough for your time, your energy, and your wisdom, and especially for, doing the power of film. I thank you for being on the show today, and I’m very grateful to you.

Doug Pray: Well, thank you very much, Steve. I really enjoyed talking with you.

Steve Cuden: And so we’ve come to the end of today’s StoryBeat If you liked, if you liked this episode, won’t you please take a moment to give us a comment, rating or review on whatever app or platform you’re listening to? Your support helps us bring more great StoryBeat episodes to you. story beat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Tunein, and many others. Until next time, I’m Steve Cuden, and may all your stories be unforgettable.