“My Name is Adam…”

Adam Spiegel, Richard Coufey, Conrad Vig; just who is Spike Jonze? Director, skatepark godhead, studio honcho, thespian, dancer, media mogul; for once, the much abused epithet ‘renaissance man’ just doesn’t quite cover it.

His new film ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ has endured a troubled production, but despite a lengthy development process, reported studio meddling and the overarching technical challenges inherent in mounting so beloved a story on such a grand scale, Jonze has found time to keep his usual dizzying array of other plates in the air.

From garage-rock to Curious George; from Jim Carrey and drunken duels to sketchy bluntsides and Kentucky Waterfalls – Spikeworld has it all. Any attempt to fully map out its labyrinthine topography would be like catching lightning in a bottle, so take a deep breath and a pinch of salt while we/Adam lee Davies try/tries, at least, to sketch out the vague outlines of some of its major continents…

 

The Board of Directors.
Jonze has lensed some of the most iconic, stylish and innovative skateboard videos of all time. His first film, ‘Video Days’ (1991) for Blind Skateboards, is shot through with the exuberance of youth, shards of early morning Californian sunshine and a nascent directorial flair. Featuring a young, spunky Jason Lee, it captures the Blind crew getting way gnarly back in the day and is still cited as an influence on ‘boarders nearly 20 years later. Later there was ‘Hot Chocolate’ (2004) for Chocolate Skateboards - which comes across like ‘Rollerball’ meets ‘On the Town’ - and an explosive ad for Lakai Footwear that suggests that if he ever tires of directing thorny existential puzzlers he could make a decent living helming balls-out action flicks.

Towering over all else in the field, however, is the film he made for his own Girl Skateboards troupe, ‘Yeah Right!’ (2003). Co-directed with Ty Evans, it features scads of noggin-bogglin’ action, some clever in-camera trickery, a pinch of green screen fabulism and a sly cameo from semi-pro Jonze look-alike Owen Wilson. Andrea Kurland, editor of LWL’s skaterly sister mag ‘Huck’ maintains that ‘Yeah Right!’ is “ingrained in most people’s minds as one of the most jaw-dropping turning points in skate celluloid.”

 

Studio, Chief.
Created by Jonze, Michael Gondry and Chris Cunningham, the Directors Label was launched in 2003 to huge acclaim. Distributed by Chris ‘Island Records’ Blackwell’s Palm Pictures, the label’s initial three DVD releases collected together music videos, adverts and other general goodness from this golden triumvirate’s respective careers.

Gondry’s set rounds up some his best music vids and also finds room for the loopy short ‘Pecan Pie’ (2003), in which a pyjama-clad, Elvis-fixated Jim Carrey drives around LA at night in a bed-car hybrid (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjDY1Tfozu4), while Cunningham’s features selections of his various art installations alongside his dismaying collaborations with window-licking avant garde techno-urchin Aphex Twin.

Spike’s volume collects together his music videos for the Beastie Boys, Björk and The Chemical Brothers as well as taking in his short documentary about would-be rodeo riders, ‘Amarillo by Morning’ (1998) and ‘Torrance Rises’ (1999), a mock-rock-doc chronicling Richard Coufey and the fictional Torrance Community Dance Group featured in Jonze’s endearingly lo-fi ‘Praise You’ video for Fatboy Slim.

2005 saw volumes featuring the work of Anton Corbijn and Jonathan Glazer amongst others hit the shelves and there are plans for further releases covering Hammer&Tongs, Jonas ‘Spun’ Åkerlund and Roman Coppola.

We Love You Long Time!
The blog-o-sphere is a demanding mistress. Without commitment, wit and constant vigilance, any personal blog can become as stagnant and meandering as a river of unholy shit. Happily, the blog that Jonze set up to chart the artistic development of his new film  - www.weloveyouso.com - is fresh, entertaining and buzzing with ideas: when you’re jacked in to as many creative grids as Jonze, the joint is always going to be jumping.

As well as offering a loose-leaf approximation of the amount of work and creativity that goes into the making of a modern movie, weloveyouso also highlights the designers, artists and general goofballs that have inspired Spike over the long gestation of ‘Wild Things’. For every article on the development of children’s fiction through the 20th Century there’s a video of the filmmakers throwing their hardworking editing couch into the skip; a piece on the lost art of letter writing is swiftly followed up by one detailing the disturbing 70s Polaroid art of Lucas Samaras. Though endlessly discursive, everything – mostly everything –in some way relates back to the matter at hand.

The latest entry at time of writing was a link hawking all-in-one wolf suits based on the ‘Wild Things’ costumes. Freaky, furry and frankly rather worrying, they’re entirely in keeping with author Maurice Sendak’s weird and wooly world.

TV, Or Not TV?
Depending on your point of view, internet TV is either a desolate playground for obsessives and oddballs or a grass roots nursery of left-field ideas and alternative opinion. It can, of course, be both, and in his role as Creative Director of online station VBS.tv, Jonze is making a fair fist of turning out a channel that’s as provocative, spirited and free ranging as anything on the web.

Owned by the achingly hip Vice Magazine and sponsored by MTV, VBS’s mission statement is to commence “Rescuing you from television’s deathlike grip”… with yet more television.

A screengrab of the station’s programming taken on 27/09/09 yields a discussion with BBC war correspondent Ben Anderson about his film ‘Obama’s War’, a natty docmentary on virtual-reality hamster balls, an interview with Detroit garage-rock mainstay Mick Collins and ‘Drunk History’, in which a well-known episode of American history is narrated by a guest speaker after they’ve had a proper skinful. The edition in question sees comedian Mark Gagliardi down a bottle of Scotch and stumble around his apartment relating the famous duel between 19th Century politicians Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton while Michael Cera mugs away in the background in a powdered wig.

It’s hardly essential stuff, but it’s all a good deal better thought through and executed than virtually any other such site on the web.

Publish, Or Be Damned!
Starting with his work as a photographer for sick-trick BMX rag ‘Freestylin’’ in the late-80s, Jonze has always devoted a good deal of his attention to magazines. In 1988, he and the other members of his BMX wrecking crew Club Homeboy, Andy Jenkins and Mark Lewman, created the magazine ‘Homeboy’, a short-lived assault of news, bikes’n’boards and creative photography. ‘Dirt’ magazine followed in the early-90s. A boys’ only version of cult proto-Grrl Power teen-scream mag ‘Sassy’, it managed only seven spiky, sporadic issues, but still sends men of a certain age and bent into misty-eyed reverie.

Jonze also managed a stint on the Beastie Boys’ legendary ‘Grand Royal Magazine’, the first few issues of which were a sensation when they first saw the light of day in the early 90s. Still highly collectible, the mag is now perhaps best remembered for igniting an ironic obsession with the mullet hairstyle (http://www.fortunecity.co.uk/southbank/pottery/3/grandroyal.html) that went on to saturate the internet – indeed for many it seemed for a long while that looking up photos of ludicrous American lobster cuts and Canadian soccer-shockers was the only practical, valid purpose of the world wide web.

Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon?
Jonze ensured his place in the flip-trick firmament when, in 1993, he – along with lipside luminaries Mike Carroll and Rick Howard – co-founded the Girl Skateboards company. A creative market force for some time now, Girl’s bread and butter has always been in making the actual bits of wood you stand on, but they have long since diversified into churning out all manner of boss wheels, fly accessories and rad clobber.

With a logo based on the ladies bathroom sign, Girl specialises in celebrity skater-endorsed boards that feature bold, colourful and ever so slightly demented designs that currently range from blissed-out satyrs and cackling spiders to willowy pencil sketches of ponies and cartoons of disabled OAPs being pushed down stairwells. But although they are major players in the hugely lucrative skate world and have a range of ‘Wild Things’ special editions in the pipeline, Girl are fairy laid back when it comes to marketing. “From this side of the fence,” says Andrea Kurland of ‘Huck’, “they always seem content with just doing their thing and never pushing themselves onto the masses. I guess they understand that if you’re into what they’re about, you’ll seek them out for yourself.”

Keeping Up With The Jonzes.
When all’s said and done, what impresses one most about Jonze is not the sweeping breadth of his interests, his phenomenal industry or his ability to effortlessly switch between a wide range of disciplines, but the depth to which he invests himself into each and every project.

As well as everything else, he has found time to star as the easy-going redneck grunt Conrad Vig in David O. Russell’s 1999 Gulf War satire ‘Three Kings’, to co-create TV’s ‘Jackass’ – which is just skateboarding without the boards, when you think about it – and produce both the excellent documentary ‘Heavy Metal in Baghdad’ (2007) and Charlie Kaufman’s sinfully indulgent navel-gazer ‘Synecdoche, NY’ (2008).

This October, New York’s Museum of Modern Art will present a Jonze retrospective celebrating his work as “director, producer, cinematographer, writer, actor, choreographer, and sometime stuntman” entitled ‘Spike Jonze: The First 80 Years’. It’s an appropriate name for an exhibition centring on a man who has packed more into his first thirty-nine years than many of us would manage in a thousand lifetimes.