‘Hype!’, Ultimately, Is One Person’s View

In the fall of 1992, Doug Pray was just another film-school graduate trying to get a toehold in the movie industry.

Then his friend and fellow UCLA graduate, Steven Helvey, proposed an idea: Why not go to Seattle and do a documentary on the music scene there?

Pray, who had made music videos for such Seattle bands as Flop and The Young Fresh Fellows, dismissed the idea immediately.

Now, four years later, Pray is busy doing interviews in support of “Hype!,” which opened Friday in Spokane and a select number of other American cities. The film is, of course, a documentary that resulted from Helvey’s idea.

So what happened to change his attitude? Essentially, Pray’s reluctance had been based mainly on the fact that, even in ‘92, the notion of Seattle being the center of the grunge-music universe was old news.

He proceeded only after deciding to tell a different story.

“There was no movie to be made unless we could do something that was remarkably different and interesting and intriguing to the bands themselves,” Pray said recently in a phone interview.

So after making a series of exploratory phone calls, Pray began doing on-camera interviews in January of ‘93. Much of his efforts at first went toward convincing the Seattle music community that he wasn’t just another guy out to exploit them.

“I think there was a lot of fear that we were just two guys from L.A.,” Pray recalled. “‘What is this, Hollywood coming to Seattle to do the grunge story?’ There was a lot of resistance to that.”

He broke that resistance down gradually, mostly by asking such questions as “Who are you sick of?” and “What is being consistently misrepresented?”

Although he is originally from Madison, Wis., and was living in Los Angeles at the time, Pray was familiar with Seattle and its music. And what he knew of the city in no way resembled the Seattle that was being portrayed in the popular press.

Yeah, he admitted, the song lyrics seemed to be “angst-ridden. But what’s new about that? That’s rock ‘n’ roll. I just always had a blast up there, and whenever I read about the Seattle scene, it just seemed like nobody was having fun. It was a sort of dour, aren’t-we-hip kind of thing. It just didn’t seem true.”

His film bears that out. Interviews with such diverse personalities as the intense Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam and happy-guy Van Conner of Screaming Trees, along with a whole cast of record producers, engineers, writers, performers and fans, paints a picture of Seattle as one big, friendly and unpretentious musical family.

At the same time, he’s the first to admit that his film, too, isn’t the final word on either Seattle or its bands.

“It’s not a perfect yearbook,” Pray said.

For example, “Hype!” mentions but doesn’t emphasize the use of heroin. And the suicide of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, the city’s most charismatic musical celebrity, is related virtually as an aside.

Some critics have chastised Pray for soft-pedaling such issues and for overlooking the various “infighting, backstabbing, etc.” that went on.

He accepts it all as fair commentary. His intent, he said, was to make something that, ultimately, had a more universal message.

Which was, he said, to show “what it’s like to go from being an unknown, underground, small community of bands to something that changes pop culture throughout the world and brings the entire world’s press corps to your doorstep. It’s a really interesting process. It could have been about Haight-Ashbury or rap music or anything. But that was the story I was excited about.”

In the end, he said, the film is only one person’s view of what happened in Seattle, as told by the people who lived the experience.

“It was amazing and it was funny,” Pray said. “And, yeah, there was some dark stuff in there, but it’s just an amazing story.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo