There is undoubtedly some parallel universe where Jonze never made feature films and just does stuff like this for a living, and only 4,000 dudes know he’s a genius: He’s credited as a codirector on Girl videos like 2003’s Yeah Right! - an HD reimagining of the form, featuring wild green-screen-assisted stunts and an Owen Wilson cameo - and 2012’s Pretty Sweet. Both of these videos were released by Girl Skateboards, a company Jonze cofounded in 1993.Įven as his Hollywood profile grew, Jonze never quite left the skate-video world behind. In 1993’s Goldfish, when a guy in aviators and a comical ’70s wig chases skaters through the streets, it plays like a cocktail-napkin sketch of “Sabotage” the sequence from 1997’s Mouse in which Rick Howard skates around town in a mouse costume while pedestrians do double takes is pure Jackass. Jonze was a daredevil who’d skate alongside his subjects to get shots other videographers couldn’t he cut skate sequences to John Coltrane, the Jackson 5, and “Three Is the Magic Number” as well as Black Flag and Hüsker Dü, already pushing against the conventions of genre.įrom a historical perspective, though, the interstitial, non-skateboarding-related material on these videos is more important, because you’re watching one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of his generation perfecting his aesthetic on a beer-money budget. Video Days, released two years later, featured riders sponsored by Blind, including a 21-year-old Jason Lee, and went on to become one of the most-imitated skate videos of all time. He made his first skate video, Rubbish Heap, in 1989.
Jonze soon transitioned from shooting freestyle BMX riders to shooting skateboarders. Career Arc Tracking your favorite actors, athletes, and public figures. A few years later, the trio of Lewman, Jenkins, and Jonze would edit the short-lived Sassy spin-off Dirt and help steer Grand Royal, the Beastie Boys’ toweringly influential pseudo zine. He started writing and shooting photos for the Torrance, California–based BMX magazine Freestylin‘, edited by Andy Jenkins and Mark Lewman, and moved out to California to work there full-time after high school. What we do know is that Jonze grew up in Rockville, and more specifically in a bike store called Rockville BMX, where he worked during junior high and throughout high school. The story persisted in part because in order to correct it, Jonze would have had to talk to reporters about his actual background, which might have led to follow-up questions about how his experience (whatever it was) has informed his work, a road Jonze has never been keen to go down. The Spiegel family sold the company before Jonze was born, but for years he was still being described as “heir to the $3 billion-a-year Spiegel catalogue business” in magazine profiles. His real name is Adam Spiegel his father, Arthur Spiegel III, was a descendant of Joseph Spiegel, who founded the Spiegel mail-order catalogue in 1865. The surprising thing about his films is how humane they are, how good Jonze turned out to be at grounding flights of conceptual fancy in real human emotion.
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Jonze’s non-feature work is proof despite centuries of evidence to the contrary that art-for-hire gigs can be a safe space for wild, creative inspiration working in tight forms like the music video or the TV spot never seemed to cramp his style. If you’re lucky, you’ll find sponsors - whether it’s Absolut or any of the countless other companies for whose products Jonze has directed strange, funny, even beautiful TV spots - who’ll pay you to do your work and get out of your way. In some ways, Jonze’s clout aside, this is a fairly prototypical 21st-century creative life. This October he oversaw the first annual YouTube Music Awards telecast - kind of an ideal gig for the guy who essentially invented viral videos before there was a YouTube on which to distribute them - and directed that show’s best production number, which featured Greta Gerwig doing exuberant Frances Ha dance moves to live music by Arcade Fire. Since 2007, he’s been the creative director of Vice’s VBS.tv.
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He hasn’t made a movie since 2009, but during that time, he’s never seemed absent from the public consciousness, because he’s always doing something - an epic Beastie Boys video starring action figures, a dark twisted fantasy in which Kanye West exorcises his wicked side by extracting a sad mouse-puppet from his stomach, or a heartbreaking 30-minute sci-fi film about young robots in love that also functions, somehow, as a commercial for vodka.
It’s almost hard to believe that Her, in theaters this week, is only Spike Jonze’s fourth feature film.
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