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Shining a light on 'Burning Man'

From left, producers William Haskins, Mike Wilson and director Damon Brown were given access to the 2003 Burning Man.
Laura Skelding AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Austin documentarians try to capture the spirit of the annual communal mega-event

By Chris Garcia
American-Statesman Film Writer

Posted: August 6, 2004

You can get away with anything in the desert. This is where cars break down on naked highways and hitchhikers disappear. UFOs alight and murders are planned. Bombs test their atomic punch and religions are formed. Once in an odd while you'll spot a lone phone booth, upright on the moonscape, a totem of desert mystery. Like everything out here, amid the heat and the dust and the lizards, it might be a mirage. It probably is. And then the phone rings.

In the desert, you can also set fire to a giant wooden man and 30,000 people will show up and dance and scream and marvel at the quasi-mystical vision of massive, humanoid lumber crackling and buckling in an inferno that burns a hole in the black sky.

A mirage? No, because you can't make a movie about something if it dries up when you get close. And the annual bacchanalia that is the Burning Man festival -- marking 18 years this summer, Aug. 30 through Sept. 6, as a destination for strenuous free spirits -- isn't drying up anytime soon, as a new documentary attests.

"Burning Man: Beyond Black Rock" will have its Austin premiere Sunday night at Jo's on South Congress Avenue.

The maiden project of Gone Off Deep Productions, a small operation in a boxy modern building on South Lamar Boulevard, "Beyond Black Rock" is a movie of vision, and visions. While it is the first movie to show the backstage workings of the Burning Man organization as it mounts the weeklong colossus on a vast playa in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, it pops with the kaleidoscopic energy that whirls through the mega-event. Here a blur of half-naked bodies gambol in an endless desert night squiggled with light; there astonished people touch and play with interactive art installations in plumes of sun-streaked dust.

In that sense, the film (actually digital video) nails the unshackled kineticism of Burning Man, which an ABC newscaster in the movie gropes to describe as a "proto-apocalyptic, hippie, neo-pagan freak-fest."

It's been called such things and more. Even the Austin-based filmmakers -- producer Mike Wilson, director-editor Damon Brown and producer-story supervisor William Haskins -- had to overcome the flaky/fluky, hairy/hippie, buggy/druggy perceptions that so often befog the true label-resistant individuality fanning Burning Man's flames.

Wilson, a funny 33-year-old who looks like a beach bum washed ashore, went first. He left the festival seduced, emerging with eyes blinking, slightly overwhelmed. He shot video there for his now-gone DVD magazine, Substance TV, and wanted to expand it to something deeper, "so I could digest and understand what I had just experienced."

"It's absurd they'd been doing this for 17 years -- to me, the most significant cultural event in the country -- and nobody has told the story properly," Wilson says. Previous Burning Man documentarians -- and they are legion, including the recent feature "Confessions of a Burning Man" -- came away with superficial snapshots concentrating mostly on the counter-culture titillations on free display across five square miles of desert playground.

Wilson did not want to make an expos� of the organization, nor an arid travelogue, nor a "Babes of Burning Man" highlighting the event's inevitable topless participants. (That's not to say Wilson's movie eschews nudity; flesh is flaunted.)

For that and other reasons, Burning Man organizers green-lit Gone Off Deep's project, inviting Wilson, Brown, Haskins and freelance videographers from Los Angeles and New York to shoot the yearlong preparations for the 2003 desert gathering, and the event itself. It took Wilson nine months to convince the organization that his intentions were pure.

The event was shot on digital video by the Gone Off Deep Productions crew.

In exchange for full cooperation, the filmmakers granted event organizers final cut of the movie. In other words, if Burning Man folks didn't like the way the movie turned out, they could have, as a private organization, denied its release. But that isn't the case.

Andie Grace at Burning Man headquarters in San Francisco calls the current long cut of the film "fantastic." Grace, the group's communications director, who became an associate producer of the film because her involvement ran so deep, adds, "They've really captured something important."

Wilson, Brown and Haskins did not set out to be filmmakers. They worked at Wilson's gaming company Gathering of Developers, which started in Dallas and moved to Austin three years ago. Wilson sold the company and launched Substance TV, a periodic anthology of short documentaries and music videos focusing on independent artists. They honed their filmmaking chops shooting stories for the magazine.

Gone Off Deep Productions was formed to make "Beyond Black Rock," and Wilson hopes more films will follow. This one was budgeted at $150,000, a number that doubled by production's end, after almost 200 hours of video was shot. Where does a small company get the funds?

"That would be me," says Wilson. "Dumb, dumb, dumb." His rue is part jest. Wilson financed the film with money from the sale of his gaming company, and is confident he will at least break even. Rough-cut screenings in Dublin and London went well and the filmmakers hope to make next month's submission deadline for the Sundance Film Festival.

The movie presents a panoramic view of the Burning Man experience, from the aftermath of the 2002 festival through the planning and construction of the 2003 version, all the way to the climactic roasting of the 40-foot-tall effigy.

Composer Allen Robertson wrote the film's score after attending the festival. A "musical melting pot" of tribal percussion, techno, reggae, bluegrass, Celtic and more wafted through the gathering, all of it making an imprint on the soundtrack.

"You don't have many vehicles or other sounds you would find in a city setting," says Robertson, who is the musical director at Zachary Scott Theater. "Just these diverse sounds melding together. I tried to capture that unique diversity."

Outsiders, those who groan at the mere mention of Burning Man, may be robbing themselves of a great communal epiphany, the film suggests. Director-editor Brown, who has no plans to go back, felt the rays of enlightenment.

"I went in there pretty cynical about human nature," says Brown, 35. "Inside, I never heard or saw any cross word or conflict. You can't go to a Little League game without seeing a fight break out. But here were all these people existing under pretty bad conditions -- it's hot, there's dust storms, you have to eat what you can pack and cook it in a very primitive way.

The woman above is one of the 30,000 people who ventured to the Nevada desert for 2003's Burning Man gathering.

"You saw people making a cultural agreement to do certain things like not litter, not sell things and respect each other and the art that's there. To see that type of community, done on a scale of 30,000 people -- well, if they can make these types of cultural agreements, why can't we do that?"

We can't because we don't live in a temporary, clothing-optional Utopia constructed from outsize art projects on cracked desert earth. The wide swath Burning Man claims for a week each year is transformed into a virtual-opolis called Black Rock City. It is built by 3,000 volunteers and boasts its own infrastructure, street signs, transportation (bicycles only) and hired emergency services. With 30,000 residents, Black Rock City is the fifth largest city in Nevada while it stands, says an organizer in the film.

"Burning Man: Beyond Black Rock" casts the city as a fantastic rave (glossy-eyed dancing, glow sticks), crossed with a carnival (jugglers, stilt-walkers, rides), parade (floats, mobile bands) and a slice of downtown Austin (our famous cross-dresser Leslie, times 1,000). It's a mad, motley mash of happy people taking a vacation from the quotidian drone of life. Makeshift ritual and surreal sacrament pepper the place, conjuring the transfiguring powers of religious divinity or, well, a Grateful Dead concert.

The man. The Burning Man. He stands patiently all week atop a 35-foot-tall platform that pushes his height to 75 feet, waiting to fry. If he wasn't spangled in futuristic blue neon he would evoke those stick figures in "The Blair Witch Project," adding an eerie wrinkle to an already freighted strangeness.

Question: To what, whom, is it being sacrificed?

Another question: What in wasted wood does it, he, mean?

"It's whatever you want it to be," says Wilson. "Some people go burn their fathers, some people burn organized religion, some burn George Bush."

Flame meets timber. Whoosh. It is a spectacle, high drama, catharsis, death, rebirth, the world's biggest weenie roast.

So he burns. Flames claw the sky. People stare and shout, hugs are exchanged. He folds, then falls, and burns to ash that can be scooped up.

It's over.

Morning light cracks and the city is slowly dismantled. Exhausted crowds disperse and drive into the heat-rippled curve of the horizon.

People get to work. In a week, all traces showing this big spot in the desert once exploded with creative life vanish, like it was never there, a mirage.