BAZ AND FLASH TALK TIME

BTS from the beginnings of 'The Get Down' series on Netflix

ON THE SET OF ‘THE GET DOWN’ WITH BAZ LUHRMANN, HERIZEN GUARDIOLA, GRANDMASTER FLASH, JUSTICE SMITH AND SHAMEIK MOORE.

In my creative career I’ve worked on all sort of projects in various mediums. Some I toiled on and quickly forgot. People come and go in your life for a very intense period and you never or rarely ever see them again. But my time on the Netflix series, ‘The Get Down,’ is one of those projects that lingers, both because the series was based in a time very precious to me and because I made many very important friendships through working on it.

‘The Get Down’ was set in the late ‘70s and looked at the era when disco was dominant in New York and what we now call hip hop was being born. In that era I first met Grandmaster Flash, a detail oriented scientist of sound, who was not very interested in the macho posturing around him, but deeply invested in the technology of the day. We remained friendly and in the ‘90s would work together on HBO’s The Chris Rock Show, where I was a producer and he played the intro and outro music.

When I joined ‘The Get Down’ as a producer/writer one of my jobs was to connect creator Baz Luhrmann with hip hop’s pioneers. Flash and Baz created an immediate bond as the filmmaker, whose films often feel like a mash up of music and image, felt a real kinship with the Bronx DJ. In 2015, early in the show’s development, Baz took Flash on a tour of the soundstage where we’d shooting and a most extraordinary conversation happened. It was a meeting of two creative minds where one was explaining their language of sound and the other was tried to understand it in cinematic terms. The fruit of this connversation was harvested in episode one of ‘The Get Down’ that Baz directed, which is actually a feature lenght film. Check out this talk and then watch episode one of the series to see how many of these ideas were manifest on film.

By the way there are more episodes of my “ghost” music site series now up on YouTube, so if you clickl these links check them out.

Also I’ve known Kamala Harris since she was the district attorney of San Francisco. She’s smart, capable, and a believer in the American Dream and of the justice system. She is the anti-Trump in term of her ethnicity, intelligence, and sense of empathy. This is great new start for the campaign and America. Can’t wait to see these two debate.