Throughout your career or just in life you meet various people that change you for the good. We’re all on a road to somewhere & meeting different people along the way is something special. Way back in the late 80’s I worked for an ad agency. It was a fun & exciting time for me, and it would eventually lead to me meeting my wife. But that’s another story for another time. Geordie McNeil was the editor at the agency, and he worked in my department. We were a small A/V unit that did a lot, and Geordie was a guy who had talent & wasn’t stingy on sharing his knowledge of editing. He was just that kind of guy. Geordie was a team player and he knew his stuff, and me being the junior member of the team I was always eager to learn everything.
We lost touch after I was let go from the agency such is the business of advertising. It is either feast or famine with ad agency life, and I learned what I could and moved on, but I used a lot of what I learned and a lot came from Geordie. He had been with the agency of Bozell & Jacobs for awhile and he and my boss worked on multi-screeners which aren’t used much anymore. It was a process where a bank of slide projectors as many as 12 or 15 projectors syncing up to music would present new clients with what the agency has done & what clients they had. It was beautiful to watch but a pain to program. This is back in the DOS days of computing, and there were different commands to shut one slide projector on or advance one slide on another. Those commands were downloaded onto a 1/4 inch audio tape as it played and for 10 or 15 minutes you had a widescreen presentation that was pretty cool to look at. We would also have a projector running our show reel in parts of the presentation. State of the art back then and I know one thing is that Geordie hated it, but could do it. He eventually became the agencies video editor. Geordie had a videotape A&B editor, which was a fancy editor that could do dissolves between shots. This is way before non-linear editing. I eventually learned the ins & outs of non-linear editing via a system called the CUBE, which was one of the first professional non-linear editing systems I learned. Back then hard drives were expensive and small, so I eventually had to digitize selected footage into the system where Geordie could edit it. I was happy to do that and become an assistant editor to Geordie, which was fine by me and it’s there that I learned a whole lot.
Geordie was very generous with his time & I couldn’t have found a better teacher. When Bozell merged with Kenyon & Eckhardt another agency it became Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon & Eckhardt. Talk about a mouth full, but it was at this point where I joined the team. Along with Harvey Fischer who worked with Kenyon & Eckhardt we formed a 4 person department that serviced a lot of the various departments including their sister agency Poppy Tyson. Harvey was an old projectionist with a union card & all. He also was their editor, so not to short shift Harvey he was just as important to me as Geordie. I had a small office right in back of Harvey’s and so I would bounce back & forth dubbing reels, digitizing footage, and cataloguing our tape library of our various commercials.
Later I would be relegated to graphic design and the agency brought their slide making in-house. I used a 486 computer and learned a program called Zenographics Mirage. The program used a tablet and from that I would image out my slides to a 35mm camera scanner. Then take that to the lab and get the film back and I would have to mount the film in glass slides. I was taken more and more away from the A/V work, and I wasn’t happy. Yet I still learned from Geordie & Harvey. Geordie was indispensable in me learning the new technology of “the Imix CUBE“. I excelled in it and took those skills to my next job as a production/graphic technician for a production house. But in that time I used Geordie for our own productions and he was a great help, and always available. It was because of these two mentors that I became a better technician & a better individual. I learned to have a life, and that was probably the best & most important advice I could get. Hindsight being 20/20 I have not found many people who were like Harvey & Geordie except where I work now, which is almost 20 years ago, so it was a long time till I met people who were decent. In the arts you find so few, and the corporate mentality does seem to be one of conformity and not individuality. Geordie & Harvey were two stand outs who helped me & who were fabulous artists & mensch’s.
It’s what’s missing sometimes as we grow into our career or just simple grow up. I was fortunate to have them in my life at that moment. Life is tricky that way. Being older now I am keenly aware of what makes a person a well rounded individuality. It will be 10 years to the date that Geordie passed away, and I was just beginning to re-connect with him back in 2010. He was excited to hear from me & we both laughed at our past adventures, but then I lost touch again. Life happens and he fell ill, and it wasn’t until 2019 that I found out that he had passed away. Life is a series of hellos & good-byes, and it is the good-byes that hurt the most. Two fantastic people who helped an enthusiastic kid from Queens. Funny how that works. I’m still railing against norms, and I have a feeling I have Geordie to thank for that. That beautiful non-conformist who loved the beach, the ladies & the sun. I’m sure he’d like that, and for Harvey who grounded my dreams in reality. I miss them and we didn’t have that much time to know each other better, but from the time we had together they made a difference to this dreamer. So thanks Geordie & Harvey you way more important to me then you thought you were, and for that I am eternally grateful.
So why bring this up here? Filmmaking is a group effort. No matter what Robert Rodriguez said in “Rebel without a Crew” you need people. Rodriguez had his team and they were all people he worked with before. A professor of mine once said take a good look at your classmates you’ll need each other and will do well to help each other. It helps to have mentors, so when it’s time to help others do so and be the mentor that hopefully you had. Experience is good, but experience with instruction is better. Eventually you may teach your mentors a thing or two. It’s how we evolve, and become better. Having said this it is rare to have that, and that’s why when it does happens be thankful. I am and I only wish I could thank them in person. As Stan Lee would say: EXCELSIOR!
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