Spark: A Burning Man Story
[no sound]
[mysterious drum and flutes, ]
[Drum and flutes continue, ]
[MICHAEL MIKEL]
I drew a line on the ground.
And I said, "On the other side of this
line, everything will be different."
And everything has
been different.
[ "Feel the Love" by
Rudimental]
To a lot people who aren't here,
this is just a big party
in the desert.
But really it's a place where
you can explore
the possibilities of what we
would create on this world
if we weren't so busy with
our 9 to 5's.
[TOM PRICE]:
The place is an idea.
And that idea is that people have
permission to be whomever they want to be.
That's so powerful
and so alluring,
that people go to the
worst place in the world,
just to get a little
taste of it.
[WOMAN]:
Burning Man is all about"Why not?" overwhelming "Why?"
Why not dress differently, act
differently, think differently... why not?
[LARRY HARVEY]:
We use the wordethos, and ethos means a way of life.
This is all about identity.
It's hard to belong.
And that's really, in creating a city here...
talk about a powerful sense of place.
A cosmic sense of place.
[MARIAN GOODELL]: We had drawn all
these people like moths to the flame.
They were having these
transformative experiences.
But what if they were more
than we could handle?
[HARLEY DUBOIS]:
People say, "What,you do Burning Man all year round?
Which is insane, of course, because I feel
like I do five or seven people's jobs.
And if we do our job well,
no one even knows we exist.
They don't see
the infrastructure.
[CRIMSON ROSE]:
There is no book on
how you do an event called
Burning Man.
We sort of made it
up on the fly.
Is this going to work?
Let's try it.
[WILL ROGER]:
I did have someadvice from circus carnies
and designers and architects
and people like that.
[GOODELL]:
The ten principlesare guidelines.
You know, it's
something to work with.
It means...
Everyone is invited to come
and play and build and do.
Helping each other find that
little spark of creativity.
It means being responsible for
yourself,
and also being
responsible for others.
I am holding the
decommodification.
Gifting.
Pick it up,
even if it's not yours.
You brought it in,
you can take it home.
[GOODELL]:
You know, we have very intimatepartnerships, you know, the six of us.
Michael Mikel met Larry in 1988.
And then Larry briefly
dated Harley.
And then Crimson came along
and brought Will in.
And then I came along and was
brought in by dating Larry.
So then what you have are, you
know, intimate relationships.
[LARRY HARVEY]:
I'm not really a joiner.
And I like to stand off
See I never had to
join anything, people join me.
You know, that was
my solution to that problem.
[TV static]
[Man]:
Your first...Well, I've had enough!!
[man laughing]
[HARVEY]:
I really wasn't an artist.
I had a very, very modest, small
landscaping business.
I was hanging out with
a lot of people,
all of whom were,
in their spare time,
writing novels or painting
pictures or playing music.
So it was sort of a
Bohemian scene.
We had a friend who was
a carpenter, you know, and uh...
I just called him one day and said,
"Let's burn a man on the beach."
That's all it amounted to.
I think he may have asked me
to repeat my statement.
[drumming and jingling]
And along the way,
we called a few friends.
[drumming and
jingling continues]
[people chattering]
[woman] Stay back!
[MIKEL]:
In 1988, I heardabout a group of people
who were going to go
down on the beach
and burn this wooden figure.
And at the time I was involved
with The Cacophony Society.
We did things like
parties in unusual places,
stage plays in
abandoned buildings,
We'd do pranks.
[JOHN LAW]:
Anything could happen.
You don't know-you have no
idea what's gonna happen.
Not necessarily fun, or great,
but it could be.
[LAW]:
Could be frightening, could betransformational, you just don't know.
That's the spirit of Cacophony.
[MIKEL]:
We loved to dressup in all kinds of costumes.
And Burning Man takes a lot of
that from The Cacophony Society.
[HARVEY]:
Michael Mikel and John Lawattended some of the beach burns.
That crowd were
connected to others
who'd been out in the
Black Rock Desert.
And using it for
artistic purposes.
It sounded to me like
an ocean you could walk on.
[Mysterious desert music]
[LAW]:
We drew a line in thedirt and stepped across it.
And it was entirely
transformational.
[
And it was primarily the
environment and...
and a set of free spirits
that made it so.
[HARVEY]:
The diversions availablewere very modest in number and scale.
[chuckles]
[drumming continues ]
[engine roaring]
[gunshot]
Real slow, perfect, real slow.
Keep coming,
right at that speed.
Hold that pose.
[people yelling, cheering]
[drumming ends with
cymbal crash]
[cheering and howling continues]
[welding sparks]
[KATY BOYNTON]:
I have a degreein child development.
And I was a nanny
for years and years.
Burning Man definitely
changed my life.
Once I got on the playa,
I remember, we hopped
on our bikes.
and I practically slammed
on my brakes and went,
"Oh my god. What is this place."
I walked away from
Burning Man going,
"I need to learn how to weld
'cause I've got ideas."
[MARCO COCHRANE]: There's so
much work involved in it,
that I needed people who were
just tenacious lunatics.
Katy was one of the many
miracle people who showed up.
And worked, just full-on,
10 hours a day, 7 days a week.
[sparks buzzing]
[BOYNTON]:
When I was comingback from Burning Man,
I had this
vision in my head.
I had this idea of this
heart that had been
exploded and pieced
back together.
There's so many things that
break our hearts.
And that's what we do.
We pick up the pieces
and we put them back together
and we keep going.
I want to take large
pieces of sheet metal
that will lay over top of it
and be welded together,
riveted together.
In my head it's going to be
about 12 feet tall.
So, that's it.
OTTO:
How's it going, Avis?It is going very well, sir, we're
getting a lot of work done.
Okay. Are you helping
with the muralists?
Or are you out
painting out there?
Right now, sir, I'm just
trying to locate a cigarette.
Here's a cigarette.
[OTTO VON DANGER]:
I'm a veteran.
I've put my life on the
line many times
for people of this nation
and I really hate seeing it go
down the toilet
like it is right now.
Wall Street has affected a lot
of people in a lot of ways.
And I figured,
if I'm going to do this,
I'm going to do it right
and I'm going to do it big.
Burning Man is a great venue
to build giant stuff
and blow it up.
[VON DANGER]:
There's five buildings involved.
They range from 50 feet tall
to 72 feet tall,
so it's a huge piece.
Think about building a block in
downtown in a major city,
that's basically what we're
doing out of wood.
So this is the bull, this is going
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"Spark: A Burning Man Story" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 22 Dec. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/spark:_a_burning_man_story_18611>.
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