The AVSQUAD Presents:
Some Thoughts on 25 years in the "A-V" Industry
by
Brien Lee
Prologue: Humble
Beginnings
This chronicle began in 1997, when I celebrated 25 years in
the industry. I am updating it and representing it now
because I've been around long enough to see patterns emerge
that might be worth sharing. Even in high-tech media, the
more things change, the more they stay the same.
When I began, in 1972, we called what we did "multimedia",
which essentially meant, "anything but motion picture film,
cause we can't afford it."
We were using two slide projectors, a dissolve unit, a tape
deck and a "pulse box". The pulse box timed the slide
changes to the soundtrack. The dissolve unit meant there
was always light on the screen. And the images slowly
dissolved at a constant rate of about a second and a half,
which added a kind of sequential hypnotic beauty.
The appeal of this kind of slide show was that it allowed a
great deal of communication for very little investment. We
were smart enough to know the importance of the soundtrack
to the success of the show (imagine Star Wars without John
Williams) and to the perception of our efforts as being
professional. We kept the entire slides horizontal, so as
to not break the movie-style wide screen look. Thus for the
price of a couple of rolls of film, some reel-to-reel tape,
a couple records, and some voiceovers, we created an
illusion. That's value added!
The "we" was my partner Ric Sorgel. We met senior year of
college. I "hired" him as a photographer on the yearbook. I
was photo editor my senior year, a post they gave to past
editor-in-chiefs. In second semester, all your
photographers took powders after their parents told them to
get their grades up. Ric walked in with a sample sheet and
a new Canon, I was stunned at the quality of his work, and,
after teaching him to print black and white in the basement
lab at the Journalism school, retired myself as
photographer and let him make me look good.
I had done slide shows in college. I was stunned by
people's reactions to them. In freshman, sophomore, and
junior years, I had produced picture and music shows for
the publications year-end banquets. A professor, Louis
Belden, had introduced me to the Kodak dissolve control,
which took two slide projectors and added a dissolve effect
so that one picture from one projector would fade into the
other when both projectors were pointed at the same screen
area. I had done most of this work myself, with the notable
addition of some excellent photography by Chuck Danis, a
J-school student.
.
The difference senior year was that Ric and I created our
first show together not out of tablescraps but instead with
photography and a soundtrack that tried to tell something
of a story. The Dean of the school -- he was not entirely
well like or understood-- was retiring. So were the
seniors. It had been a contentious year, this being the end
of the '60's and all that. We tried to bring everyone
together with our show.
At the Top of the Marine, a Milwaukee restaurant at the top
of the (what else) Marine Bank Building, a couple of
hundred students and professors and Jesuits heard a variety
of editors, students and activists rag on about this and
that. Being Milwaukee, the beer was flowing freely.
Finally, after a bunch of awards and a dinner, our show
ran. When it was over, there were tears, applause, and a
general sense of love in the room. Hey, everyone was even
sorry to see the Dean go (we had a little sequence of him
driving his VW bug off into the sunset). Ok, the booze
helped. But Ric and I looked at each other and said,
"Hmmmmm…"
We talked about starting a business. I went home for the
summer, to New Jersey. Ric lived in Milwaukee. Although I
had been a summer reporter on my hometown newspaper, The
Home News, I wanted to come back to Milwaukee to start the
business. Fact is, I had to come back to Milwaukee since I
was short 3 credits. Ric was too. In remedial language
class (they have you read Don Quixote in English) Ric and I
planned the business. We would produce slide shows, for
money. For whom, we didn't know. We'd talk more after he
holidays.
I went back home for Christmas, without a firm commitment
from Ric. His father, a famous Milwaukee industrialist, was
after him to get a real job. I was going to avoid all that
parental pressure by moving to Milwaukee, which my wife and
I did, saying goodbye forever to job offers from Central
Jersey. We returned to Milwaukee, with little cash and a
lot of hope, and with no sign of Ric. Finally, second week
of January, he came back from a skiing trip. He was in. And
he had a couple of slide projectors! I had the tape deck.
We looked around for a used dissolve.
On February first, he and his girlfriend at the time helped
move my wife and I from 23rd street (Dahmer territory) to
Cass Street (Northwestern Mutual territory), and our new
one bedroom efficiency apartment ($135 a month). We called
the company SLI Multimedia.
(ORIGINAL
LAYOUT OF BUSINESS CARD)
SLI stood for Sorgel Lee Industries. It sounded big on
those bingo cards you fill out for free information in the
back of trade magazines. We got a PO Box at the main post
office (Box 135), and used my phone number as our office.
My wide answered the phone, and Ric worked out of our
"studio", his studio apartment at Northridge Lakes.
Nothing happened for a month. Ric's dad was already saying,
"I told you so".
We knew we had to scare up some business. We weren't sure
how, and we weren't even sure what. Luckily, some friends
came through. Ric's friend Mike Kiefer ran an aluminum
fabricating company called, oddly enough, Kiefer
Corporation. We were paid $135 dollars to produce a
ten-minute slide show touting this company's kitchen sink
fabrication capabilities. The Marquette College of
Journalism, always interested in a success story, hired us
to produce a graduation banquet show for the 1972 class,
for $150 dollars. We were on our way.
We found a printer on 27th street, running a print shop out
of his basement. The end result made it obvious we were his
first customer.
FIRST
BUSINESS CARD
Drunk with power (and with Andre's Cold Duck, our
Celebration Liquid of Choice), we "hired" my friend Dave
English to make cold calls for us. We paid him $10 per
contact, which led to many meaningless contacts. And, not
quite clear on what we were selling, we convinced a mutual
friend Mark Weber to design a "twin-dissolve box" to hold
our slide projectors, cassette deck, and dissolve control,
thereby making us look more official. We found out some
months later that it had already been done. It wasn't the
first time we let technology wag the dog.
As part of our agreement, I insisted that despite Ric's
fairly comfortable financial status (his father had set up
a nice trust fund for him) we would always be 50-50 in the
business. This meant that, in essence, since I had no dough
to put into the business, he couldn’t either. This may seem
laughable today, when cash is everything, but things were
slower then, chopped meat was 59 cents a pound, a 16 piece
Muerer's chicken bucket, with potato wedges and a banana
cream pie was 3.99, and a cold sixer of PBR was 1.99. We'd
survive.
Dave
English, Barbara (Lee), Mark Weber (what's he lookin at?),
Ric Sorgel, and me
(represented by the flash in the mirror), celebrating
something on Cass St.
The closet in the background would serve as my first
recording booth.
I'm writing this, I guess, because I believe web pages
should be updated and I haven't been updating this one
much. So, stay tuned, as I attempt in each week to write a
revisionist history of my career. To help it fit the A-V
Squad theme, I'll cover the changes in technology,
storytelling techniques, personalities (mine and others),
and the various attempts I've had at making it big. I'm
generally kind to everyone, so don't be afraid to look this
over if you think you might be in it.