2007 Bio

Eric Saks is a filmmaker, producer and writer. Saks works in the convergent fields of mobile technologies, broadband platforms, motion picture home video, feature film screenwriting and direction, and has a long history in the media arts world.

SCREENWRITING
Curtain of Pink Death Productions, a writing partnership with Gil Reavill, has realized numerous produced, optioned or speculative screenplays. Saks and Reavill also work together doing prose editorial services and ghostwriting under the moniker Level Head Media, concentrating on non-fiction projects. In 2007, they began creating multi-media EPKs (Electronic Press Kits) for authors and writers, specializing in “movie trailers” for books showcased on the Internet.

As a screenwriting team, Reavill and Saks had their original feature screenplay Dirty, directed by Chris Fisher for Silver Nitrate Productions, starring Cuba Gooding Jr. and Clifton Collins, Jr., released theatrically by Dimension in spring 2006.

FESTIVALS, AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS
The 2008, 24/7 A DIY VIDEO SUMMIT produced through the School of Cinematic Arts at USC has invited Saks to be festival programmer, producer and consultant. (February 8-10,2008)

Saks has received a MacDowell Colony fellowship in 2006, a Durfee Foundation grant 2004, a Creative Capital Foundation grant in 2003, California Arts Council fellowship 2001, John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship 1998, Annenberg Foundation Grant 1997, and a NEA grant in 1996.

As a producer, he took experimental rock and filmmaking band, Loma Lynda, to the Frontier section of Sundance Film Festival in 2004, where they debuted a feature length projection performance, Destroy Rock Music. Saks has produced short-form mobile content for production companies such as Art & Industry and Ghost House Pictures. Saks has produced and directed DVD documentaries for all the Hollywood movie studios as well as at Criterion.

MEDIA ARTS PROJECTS
Saks produced the Untitled: Darkness and Untitled: Infinity collaborative filmmaking projects for the design firm, Belief and the Broadcast Design Awards (BDA) in 2000 and 2001.

Saks periodically teaches and has appeared as a lecturer, presenter, panelist and artist in residency at events such as RES Festival, the Sundance film festival, and Chino Men’s Correctional Center.

EXHIBITIONS
Major media arts exhibition site list for Eric Saks:

REDCAT theatre, LA; Museum of Modern Art, NYC; MOCA, LA; Smack Mellon Studios, Williamsburg; 1950-2000 American Century, Whitney Museum, NYC; California Century at LACMA, LA; Pandemonium Festival, Tate Gallery, London; David Zwerner Gallery, NYC; Marc Foxx Gallery, LA; Sara Meltzer Gallery, NYC; Broadcast Design Awards 2000 & 2001, RES FEST 200&2001 worldwide; Sunshine Noir: L.A. Art, Armand Hammer Museum, LA; PBS “Independent Focus” Broadcast, NYC; LA Freewaves, LA; Broadcasts on KCET, Los Angeles; Art Space, NYC; Long Beach Museum of Art, “New California"; 4th, 6th, 10th - NY Video festivals at Lincoln Center, NYC; Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley; LACE Video Annuale, LA; Rotterdam film festival, The Netherlands; RE:Solution Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark; EZTV; Dallas Video Festival; The Other Cinema, SF; ATA Gallery, SF; Impakt Festival, The Netherlands; “L.A. Freewaves” broadcast on KCET, LA; The Edge Television broadcast pilot series; The Video Galleriet, Copenhagen, Denmark; US Environmental Film Festival, Colorado Springs, Colorado; Edinburgh Film Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland; Films Charras, NYC; San Francisco Cinematheque

Best known media arts project titles of Eric Saks:

Come to See ‘Ya, Dirt, Don From Lakewood, Dust, Fax Attack, Forevermore: Biography of a Leach Lord, Hello? Palimpsest Telephony Situation, Jet-set Download - Untitled:001-Darkness, Love Machine, Orange is the New Black, Replication - Untitled:002-Infinity, Smooth Warming, Suddenly I Burst into Another: The life of Henry Tanner, Sunny Prototype, Tobacco Geezers / Yellow Pages, You Talk/ I Buy

Tobacco Geezers project

An extract from writer Holly Willis for a Creative Capital Foundation Brochure 2003
The Yellow Pages / Tobacco Geezers

Los Angeles-based media artist Eric Saks has been at the forefront of digital media culture for over a decade, fashioning an eclectic film- and videography that combines live action, animation, and digital manipulation; creating a series of large-scale media installations; working at cutting edge companies such as Voyager and the design firm Belief; curating shows and DVD compilations of video art and experimental film; and earning numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the Annenberg Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

With a keen eye for the roiling anxieties disrupting contemporary America’s relationship to all forms of technology, from the seemingly innocuous telephone to the more insidious surveillance devices dotting urban street corners, Saks has built a body of work that deftly limns the contours of an evolving technoculture. In his celebrated Pixelvision short Don From Lakewood (1989), for example, a series of prank phone calls to a hapless furniture salesman entreating him to deliver a sofa to Los Angeles perfectly sketches the complicit relationship between buyer and seller, as well as that between con man and victim. In Gun Talk (1991), Saks examines American firearm policies using an array of visual shenanigans held together by a moving first-person diaristic account of a shooting, while Hide (1990) is an amusingly ironic fake commercial showing paranoid viewers what to buy so that they can hide in their own homes.

In his latest project, The Yellow Pages, Saks has decided to tackle the World Wide Web. “I’ve been studying viral culture on the Net, and I’m fascinated with how efficacious passing on a single email to a friend can be to generate thousands of viewers overnight,” explains the quiet-spoken Saks, who notes that part of his inspiration was the very successful viral campaign for Buddy Lee Jeans. The Buddy Lee site featured a character called Super Greg who appeared in the jeans commercials, and while the website never mentioned the jeans directly, people stumbling across it would often draw the connection between the character and the jeans, then pass along the web address to friends. “My goal is to model the way the Internet passes around novelty culture and compels you to explore something you might not spend time with in other pop media—to use this model as a leverage point to get people to question new and old issues.”

The Yellow Pages will eventually include several interactive game components, but at this point, Saks is working on The Tobacco Geezers website [www.tobaccogeezers.org], which considers genetics and tobacco. Saks was initially inspired to do the project when he came across genetically modified nicotine-less tobacco. Startled by the implications, he began to ponder what this would mean for marketing tobacco to kids, and how you might warn teenagers about the impact of this new product on their health. Rather than making more straightforward PSAs (public service announcements), Saks decided to attempt to create a campaign based on viral marketing techniques in which issues would be raised, but indirectly. In one day short animations with a web address were emailed and 16,000 visitors went to The Tobacco Geezers website. Site visitors encounter one of the fictional website characters, Lee, who is obsessed with genetics, anti-smoking, and artificial intelligence. The next iteration of the project will similarly be cryptic, seemingly authored by someone investigating conspiracy theories and the corrupt, sweeping power of capitalist corporations.

When asked if this indirect route can be more effective than traditional PSAs, Saks answers affirmatively. “I’m wrestling with the idea that people want PSAs to change behavior, but it’s debatable if PSAs achieve that change,” he says. “Some people claim that many anti-tobacco PSAs actually promote cigarette smoking. But an enigmatic 30-second animation could be something that you’d want to see over and over again. Rather than just delivering a message, it will prompt viral discussion – if your friend tells you what he or she thinks it means, it might actually be more potent to change.”