Brave New Wild a film by Oakley AndersonMoore
76 min
For downloadable images: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4ofn6ekt9izfipa/AACCi_9neHrxj6TO9pCrVSzva For press inquires, please contact Alexander Reinhard [email protected] * (858) 3366999
Introduction
BRAVE NEW WILD is an offbeat chronicle of America’s Golden Age of rock climbing before and after the controversial ascent of the Dawn Wall in 1970. Some forty years later, Oakley AndersonMoore, the daughter of a pioneering climber, stumbles upon her father's old hi8 tapes, and sets out to answer the question: why climb when there's nothing to gain and everything to lose? Wry humor and an eclectic original soundtrack punctuate the delinquent antics of the Vulgarians in the ‘Gunks, the largerthanlife rivalry of Yosemite’s rock gods, and the fruit tramping, freight train hopping hobodom of her dad’s climbing life, making this film quintessential viewing for those who long for adventure.
What people are saying about B rave New Wild:
"This is one of the best films I've ever seen climbing or otherwise..." Cameron Burns, Author Postcards from the Trailer Park
"Speaks to a lot of us who yearn for vertical adventure & the song of the open road." Stewart Green, About.com
"The first time's a charm for director Oakley AndersonMoore." Brad Weismann, Denver Westward
“An outdoor classic is born.” De Escalada
“This movie goes places other climbing filmmakers have yet to even dream about.” – Ajax Greene
“A playful, unique tone that is rare in documentaries.” Robert Hardy, Filmmaker’s Process
Producer’s Notes
For decades, observers have asked the question, w hy do people climb ? It’s a dangerous and arguable very silly thing to do with one’s life. BRAVE NEW WILD comes as close to a poetic, comprehensive answer as you’ll ever get!
The film doesn’t hit you on the head with a oneline answer, but ruminates. As the viewer, you piece together thematic connections between stories of adventure, gallows humor, historical context, and coming of age to come up with your own interpretation. These themes are built from a collage of climbers from the early days of the climbing revolution in America: the classdefying Vulgarians in the ‘Gunks, the draft dodging Climbers Camp in the Tetons, the Rock Gods of Yosemite Valley (and the controversial first ascent of the Dawn Wall in 1970), and the personal story of the director’s father, a 1970s era climbing bum. The stories are loosely weaved together into an entertaining and thoughtful meditation that encourages the viewer to consider their own lives, and what’s motivating their own futures.
As the daughter of a climbing pioneer who grew up with climbing, the director approaches the film with admiration as well as irreverence — and finds a delicate balance between conveying the feeling of this world while still asking the tough questions. The film has a unique and playful, almost subversive, tone that is rare in documentaries but extremely well suited to the story of degenerate American climbing pioneers who eschewed the mores of society and laughed in the face of danger.
Alexander Reinhard, Producer
Q&A with the Director, Oakley AndersonMoore
Q: Are you yourself a climber? Do you consider climbing your passion? A: I learned to climb from my dad, and I do climb today. Quite terribly in fact, but I do have a great time! I enjoy meeting new climbers and outdoor enthusiasts everyday even as I am slogging up some route they quite speedily pass me up on. I think the accomplishment of leading a complicated and difficult climb (relative to you) is something very remarkable, and worth experiencing. So many of us lead our daytoday lives afraid to take risks. And while that’s generally a healthy way to feel, sometimes you need to take risks in order to understand who you really are and what your life can mean to you. With that said, I couldn’t claim to be as passionate about climbing as my father was at my age. If I was, I would not have spent so much time making a movie about climbing. I would have been out there doing it!
Q: How long did you spend making this film? A: I did the first round of interviews in 2008 – at one of the Gunks reunions in New Paltz so quite a long time!
Q: What’s it like to be a female filmmaker having made this film about a predominantly maledominated world? A: The first thing I’ll say is that what drew me to the climbing world of the 1950s 1970s is the nonconformist nature of climbers. (Even in terms of not conforming to each other, which is something that motivates much of the conflict in the film!) So while society at large exacts pressures on us about what ‘women’ and ‘men’ should be doing, those are often pressures the original climbers reject, or try to at least. Every person that you see interviewed in Brave New Wild made up their own mind about my ability to tell their story, and didn’t give a damn about me being a g irl. The second thing I will say is that there are very few women in this film (with exception to myself, narrating in deusexmachina fashion.) Elaine Matthews is the sole female voice. Where are all the ladies? Historically, the involvement of women in rock climbing actually went down in the 1950s and 1960s (the time period of the film.) This is partly because of tremendous shifts in notions of femininity and masculinity at the time. Without writing a novel here, you can look at movies to see the shift. Unlike the strong, independent women in films in the 1930s a la Katherine Hepburn, you see a shift towards more helpless bombshells 1950s and 1960s a la Marilyn Monroe. At the same time, masculinity was undergoing a major facelift. In the late 1800s early 1900s, having muscles and being privvy to manual labor was looked down upon as “working class” – a very dirty word back then. But after WWII, as America started to develop a robust middle class that it hadn’t had before, those notions changed. All of the sudden, working class stiffs going out to the cliffs and being crazy and being tough was more acceptable. (Not to mention possible because in the new economy working class people could actually afford to have a weekend to explore.) These are some reasons why climbing as a riskier, more macho sport in the 1950s took off. And also why you see fewer women at the cliffs leading climbs. Much of that changes quite quickly, as I address a little bit in the companion film I made called W ild New Brave (more about 1970s, with appearances from Lynn Hill, Sibylle Hechtel, and Bev Johnson.) There’s no doubt that women faced a lot of discrimination, particularly in the expedition world, and had to overcome a lot of societal preconceptions get where they did in climbing. As Lynn Hill mentions in Wild New Brave, when she was a kid, girls didn’t even wear pants! We’ve come a long way. The shifts in gender and the gutsy achievements of women in climbing is something I hope to address in a future film where I can give it the time and excitement it deserves. The last thing I feel I should say in terms of what it meant for me to be a female and make this film is this: I worked my ass off to make this the best, most authentic story possible. And on top of that, I had the balls [not literally of course) to tell the story from my point of view. To me, it benefits the film immensely. Some people will not like that. They will say, how come she inserted herself into this story? How come she couldn’t just get a nice narrator and keep it historical? There are certainly some climbers who will question if I had the right to tell the story with my voice. I encourage those people to ask themselves why they they think that a man, preferably a celebrity with a deep velvety voice, has more of a right to tell the story than I do? Documentary conventions often use a booming narrator as a figure of authority, sure. But this is not a conventional world. I, on the other hand, will lead you unauthoritatively through the film as that’s how I thought it should be, growing up breathing the ether of this world as a climber and a climber’s daughter. I have more right than anyone to make this film. And in doing so, I welcome people who appreciate good stories and recognize that this day belongs to those who seize it, regardless of gender.
Stylistic Approach
This documentary is playfully organized and edited to simulate the intoxicating, irreverent world of the story. The characters speak to us from flickering campfire or candlelight as we're transported to bright photographs and ephemeral footage. As the characters follow a comingofage trajectory, cartoons come to life, old book pages flip by, and original music delivers punch lines and floats the viewer by different places, personalities, and events.
Long Synopsis
Brave New Wild examines how the act of rock climbing evolved into a fanatical movement amongst the new middle class in postWorld War II America. Unlike aristocratic mountaineers of the past, who climbed mountains with caution and for national honor, climbing rocks grew into an American counterculture movement that embraced risk taking and individual selfexpression. Because it was dangerous, because there was no tangible reward in climbing, and because many times you could even hike to the top of a rock instead of risking your life to climb it, the sport was looked at with utmost curiosity and occasionally contempt by the rest of the country. The film paints a picture of the eclectic climbers from the 1950s1970s and tries to understand the world they created out of risktaking and antidisestablishmentarianism. The film travels to the three main cultural centers where rock climbing is growing simultaneously across the country: the Shawangunks of NY, ruled by a conventiondefying group called 'The Vulgarians', the Tetons, WY, where a cordonedoff dirt road is dubbed a 'Climbers Camp' and serves to disseminate information over campfires about the climbing movement, and Yosemite Valley, CA, where the largest rocks in the country offer the staunches challenges and draw the largest personalities. Rock climbers began to look at their sport as more of an artistic expression than a series of mountain conquests, and termed these early days the Golden Age of climbing. As Yosemite becomes the epicenter of the new climbing movement in America, two Godlike figures emerge. Royal Robbins, arrested at age 12 escapes the police and streets of Los Angeles for the mountains of Yosemite Valley.
Long Synopsis (Cont’d)
He quickly becomes the most graceful and dangerous climber the country has ever seen. Wine loving, mischiefmaker Warren Harding shows up and becomes Royal's natural nemesis, opposing the monastic devotion Robbins has to climbing by advocating an anarchistic style of anythinggoes. The two have a rivalry for 15 years, and as this Golden Age faces growing unease about the sustainability of their world, climbers are rocked by the pinnacle of the Harding/Robbins duel: Harding's controversial ascent of The Dawn Wall on El Capitan in 1970. The isolated world of rock climbing is shot into the public eye as Harding spends 28 days straight on the wall in the full view of hundreds of spectators and television cameras. Embedded in the story is Mark Moore, the midwestern father of the director, Oakley AndersonMoore, who abandons everything for climbing the same year that the Dawn Wall is shot into the national spotlight. Through a daughter's lens, we examine the extent at which climbing infiltrated his life as a disillusioned idealist; after once being a promising activist, he becomes a secluded fruit tramp with his dog Hobo as his only companion. While Mark tries to stay true to the dirtbag climbing philosophy, it's not always easy, or sustainable. Even the rock Gods, Warren Harding and Royal Robbins, find that despite taking the sport to new extremes and turning it into a commodifiable effort, the innocence of the Golden Age is limited. Is it limited by space, by mountains, by people, or by time?
Director's Statement
In the early 1970s, when my father would have been about my age when I started this project, he abandoned what appeared to be a promising future to become a penniless rock climber. I grew up getting glimpses of that life; some might say I grew up in the shadow of the mountains of my father's past, although I only interpreted that my father had a peculiar obsession with rocks. Growing up a climber's daughter, I was always struck by the dedication to what outsiders often see as such a dangerous and pointless activity. But I understood that to my father, climbing was far more than a 'sport' it was a way of life, an ethos, an alternative universe that ultimately made much more sense than the one we lived in. My father had once lived there, helped create that place, and seeing his name in the back of climbing guidebooks along so many first ascents, at the age of 23, I wondered if I could somehow get there, too. I read every book anyone had ever written on climbing, searched through old newspapers and magazines, memorized by heart the collection of Sheridan Anderson's climbing cartoons. I traveled across the country with my small and goodnatured crew in a '76 VW van to interview some thirty or forty strangers under the intense glow of campfire light. I interviewed scholars and relearnt American history from 1933 to 1978. Like most people that go down the rabbit hole of history, I came out with more answers than I had bargained for. But had I found an answer to the central question, why do people climb? Climbers, my father included, were unusual and unique, motivated by different reasons; the answer was the intersection of a thousand different people, places, and events. I wanted the film to be a reflection of that, to be made up of intersections of stories that accumulate into a world of your own interpretation. I wanted the style to be true to the eclectic nature of the people in the story, to be often tongueincheek and slightly subversive. The climber's philosophy was not about conquering stuff, making your country proud, or following the American dream. Climbing was a fierce expression of existence. I had embarked on a journey to understand my father, and therefore, the Golden Age and the world of climbing. Now I invite you to look at this world through the kaleidoscope and see if you don't find some meaning in that distant rock formation on the horizon.
About the Filmmakers Oakley AndersonMoore (Director) is from the small town of Ellensburg, Washington but spent half her childhood living in foreign countries from Brazil to the Philippines, and that mixed looking glass guides her style of storytelling. After graduating with highest distinction in Media:Film/Video and Theatre Arts at UC San Diego, AndersonMoore worked as the L.A. street blogger for Nike’s/LinkTV’s Play City campaign, using multimedia to profile inspirational youth in Los Angeles from activists to skateboarders. She is a feature writer at Nofilmschool.com, where she has interviewed directors from Werner Herzog to Kat Candler. Director Sally Potter (The Man Who Cried) called a workinprogress scene from Brave New Wild “a fascinating glimpse into the obsessive culture of rock climbing…” The film was one of ten accepted into the 2012 IFP Independent Documentary Lab, and marks Oakley’s feature documentary debut.
Alexander Reinhard (Producer) graduated cum laude with a BA in History and Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego where he studied under Amy Adler, David Gutierrez, and Robert Edelman. Reinhard first entered producing through radio, where he helped create several musical programs for the San Diego radio station KSDT. During this period he also became interested in producing film and cofounded the production company Little Sure Shot Films, LLC. He has produced the award winning short documentary Wild New Brave. His first featurelength production Brave New Wild w as selected for the 2012 IFP Filmmaker Lab and an official selection of the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in 2015.
Credits
Oakley AndersonMoore……………………..Director Alexander Reinhard…………………Producer Greg Burns……………………..CoExecutive Producer Mark Bertuldo……………………..Original Score Bradley Carter…………..Original Bluegrass Score Oakley AndersonMoore…………………………..Editor Nick Louie……………………..Director of Photography Sarah Conant……………….………..Graphic Designer Alexandra Fehrman…………………..Sound Supervisor & ReRecording Mixer Adam Keleman……………………………..PMD Sheridan Anderson…………………..Original Cartoons Oakley AndersonMoore……………………..Stop Motion Animator Sean Gillane…………………….Colorist Jay Taylor III…………………….Historian Kerwin Klein…………………….Historian Cam Burns…………………….Historian
http://www.bravenewwild.com
Featuring El Capitan (1970)……….Courtesy Fred Padula Sentinal: The West Face (1961)…………….Courtesy Roger Brown The Climbing Films of Paul Petzoldt…………….Courtesy NOLS The Climbing Cartoons of Sheridan Anderson……….Courtesy Michael Anderson Archival Interviews with Warren Harding………….Courtesy Roger Derryberry AndersonMoore Family Footage……………Courtesy Mark Moore
Brave New Wild Press Kit Photo Credits Handstand on Lost Arrow Spire. Photo by Claude Suhl. Mugshot of Joe Kelsey. Joe Kelsey Collection. Oakley AndersonMoore. Photo by Alexander Reinhard. Climbers looking at topo, Camp 4. Photo by by Glen Denny. Ed Cooper Photo of Infamous Nude Ascent, Shockley’s Ceiling. Photo by Ed Cooper. Royal Robbins Proofsheet. Sheridan Anderson Collection. El Capitan Screenshot. Film by Fred Padula. VW Roadtrip. Photo by Claude Suhl. Poco Vulgarians. Claude Suhl Collection.
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