Every now and then, just for shits and giggles, I do a search to see if any of the animated things I've done YEARS ago while I worked at Ovation Films pop up on YouTube. You'd be surprised at what I've found... long forgotten things like McGruff The Crime Dog, The Berstain Bears Play Ball, Deck The Halls With Wacky Walls... and lo and behold, someone posted a drug PSA I worked on... "WASTED: a true story" - a 30 min live action Public Service Announcement with interspersed animated segments throughout.
It's always fun to find these - keep in mind I was only 19, this was my FIRST job - and here I was working in a relatively small animation studio at 33 West 45th street that looked pretty much like what you'd expect it to look like in the early 80s - an old building a few doors over from a greasy spoon diner where a guy was flippin' burgers on a grill - just around the block from the diamond district. I'd take the subway and a bus before that, all the way from College Point in Queens - this lanky, long haired kid who didn't look all that much different from the kid I was drawing (minus the bloodshot eyes, of course!)
Ovation Films was run by Art Petricone and Howard Basis - who I met a year earlier in '79 during my senior year at The High School of Art & Design as part of an Internship Program. When High School finished they offered me a job - and although I just applied to SVA I thought... Hmm... go to SVA with the HOPES of someday working in the animation biz - or ACTUALLY working in the animation biz RIGHT NOW! (seemed like a no-brainer, eh?) I actually ended up STILL going to SVA (at nights) where I'd frequently bump into my other friends - who all seemed to be working on one thing or the other - one guy (Hi James!) was working on decapitating zombie heads at Industrial Light & Magic... another (Hi Pierre!) worked with Neal Adams... my OOB brothers (Hi Dan, Joe, Mark, Lloyd) to name just a few, were all buzzing around - these were indeed magical times!
Okay, okay - but you came here for Wasted: a true story... sorry, I got carried away... Back in the early 80s PSA's were all the rage - McGruff The Crime Dog was Taking A Bite Out Of Crime and First Lady Nancy Reagan was kicking off her "Just Say NO!" anti-drug campaign. Ovation won out on the bid to the "Wasted" project and Howard presented me with the task of drawing out the scenes, depicting Tim (the real-life character of this story) in various scenarios of drug-addled decline. Tim going after his sister with a knife, Tim confronted by his mother when she notices her family heirloom candle-stick holders have gone missing, Tim smoking weed, Tim popping pills, Tim drinking booze, Tim hitting rock bottom, Tim not fitting in anymore with his friends - you get the idea.
Howard did the animation and as usual, I assisted him with the in-betweens. The ladies in the ink and paint department, which was within ear-shot of where I sat, were having a ball adding bloodshot eyes to the cell drawings when the client sent the note that Tim needs to look "more stoned".
I actually don't think I ever got to see the completed film until now - over 40 years later! Seeing it now I was reminded how the tail-end of the film was done by another studio - I had forgotten about that - who for some reason seemed to ignore how Tim looks in the beginning of the film, as if they had never seen the preliminary drawings, and they drew him unrecognizably different - but perhaps that was the whole idea? It was, after all, meant to show how getting high changed Tim into an "old man version of himself".
I believe the last sequence animated by Howard was when Tim is in such bad shape he sees the Devil itself - just before the animation style seems to slip into this weird, dream sequence with photographic backgrounds and a stumbling figure that appears to have been a live action segment that's been rotoscoped - very reminiscent of what Ralph Bakshi was doing in those days. Suddenly it turned into a very different film altogether.
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| Me, as drawn by Bill Davis |
I also remember that nobody liked the pacing of the live-action segments. Tim and his sister seem to tell their stories in slow motion - the viewer begins to feel stoned just LISTENING to them - and that was when it first came out! It did not age well... recent reviews of the project have called it "cringe-inducing"... and it's prompted many reaction videos on YouTube and even a re-dub.
And yet, back during its premiere, when its prime audience was older elementary, junior and senior high school students, as well as teachers, parents, counselors and law enforcement authorities - "Wasted: a true story" had won awards. It was part of a cooperative effort of the public school system, the American Council for Drug Education, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments - and back when they were still counting these things the project involved 7,400 teachers and 184,000 students and their families in 592 Washington-area schools. But that was then... today a staff writer at The Merry Jane warns "This Anti-Weed PSA will make you LOSE YOUR MIND."
Well - if YOU'D like to lose YOUR mind as well I've included it here below for YOUR viewing pleasure - - or displeasure - - whatever... Don't like it, you can blame Nancy Reagan.
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