Remembering John Davis

Adventure Man

I went to the Memorial Service held for John Davis, who died in a helicopter accident last week. It was a crowded affair with a massive turn out. It was nice to see he touched so many lives, but it was also a little weird from the standpoint of us former employees at Classroom Video. He never really let on he had so many friends.

After the speeches were made, sharing the different sides of John, our little contingent started recalling the funny moments where we found ourselves confounded by some aspects of John. Put another way, while we held him in great affection, he was a difficult boss. He wasn't a horrible boss, he was more difficult-to-persuade, once he got some strange fixation in his head. I ventured to my former colleagues that perhaps he was a little Aspergers, to which they concurred and said they thought he was definitely on the spectrum. But such descriptions are too broad to paint a picture of the man.

My first encounter with John was at the job interview. He had his leg in a cast from an accident at a canyoning expedition. He was abseiling and attempted something stupendously difficult and broke his leg - on camera - and ended up having to be winched out of there in a helicopter. The footage, ended up in one of his videos. And so, he sat opposite me with his leg in a huge cast, telling me about what he thought about AFTRS graduates (not nearly as high an opinion as the graduates have of themselves) and the importance of working swiftly and cheaply.

He had a view on film making which was unique in this world - he was the only practitioner I met who wanted projects cheap, fast, and not necessarily the best-best kind of good. He wasn't interested in cheap and good, because fast was too important to be sacrificed; and he sure didn't like fast and good because he hated expensive. He also had the view that he would rather hire an intelligent person and teach them filmmaking rather than hire a filmmaker who couldn't be taught science.

As it turns out, he had hired a PhD in Pharmacology, who through sheer terrible people skills and generally low technical aptitude, failed to be taught filmmaking by John. In her stead, I was brought in, because I had all the skills. But more importantly to John - and  bless-his-sciencey-soul he is the only employer to whom this was a positive - I was a Med School dropout before I had attended AFTRS. He figured I could handle science content. He gave me the once over and said, "you look like a drifter but you also look like you're quite the talent. I'll give you a shot."
"Excuse me, a drifter?" I shot back, incredulous.
"When can you start?" he said, without even registering my shock. And that was John - sort of oblivious to what people thought of how he couched things, but very interested in how soon he could get results.

I know that reads like a terrible way to start, but it wasn't. He gave me a lot of rope to try many different things and many approaches. He gave me all the opportunities in making these educational videos I could hope for; and as I wrote on Facebook, you can't ask for more than that. He had a few rules: no mad scientist in coats, no show-and-tell donkey shows. Other than that, he was open to all kinds of whacky ideas. He liked whacky. He was a big fan of whacky.

He was also a non-stop action man. He would go to the UK to run the production house there, then fly to America and do a 5 city tour of educational facilities, pitch his product, share in ideas, come back on the dreaded LA-Sydney flight and go straight out to bushwalking. Sometimes he would come back with mixed footage of seemingly random things, and then somehow turn it into a programme. It was visionary, it was mad.

John Davis was indeed a man with a vision, as well as method to his madness. He was supportive of wild filmmaking ideas - as long as it could be done on a tight budget - and he loved seeing quality productions come out of his stable of producers. He pushed us very hard for the truth, facts, verification, verisimilitude of presentation, and just generally being able to back up claims. He was down on aesthetics for aesthetics' sake, and nuanced cultural discourses of the variety you find on university campuses. The vagaries of the arts were lost on him, but I was the one doing the arts & humanities programs, so naturally our discussions were "somewhat contentious" through to "difficult". They were difficult because he so wanted the arts to have black-and-white answers like science. Ironic then that what I had to offer him was a 3 programme series on 'Othello'.Yet together, our films won awards overseas. Even if it was a fringe area of filmmaking, collectively we did good work together.

The one thing I picked up working for John that I treasure, is that you have to come at most things, not just with a theory, but a method. In the sheer number of productions we churned out, we were forced to figure out how to do multiple projects on the fly, in parallel, and not lose the thread and make our deadlines. Sometimes it was better if you just had your method, and just forgot about theory. The Classroom Video production environment was conducive to figuring these things out. How to quickly bash a script into shape; how to quickly bash out a shotlist on the fly and make sure there's going to be enough to make sense in the edit; how to bash out a performance worth keeping, and how to judge when to move on to the next shot and work fast. And cheap! And make it look good.

That is sort of how I ended up working for John for nearly 6years, doing the thing that I loved, but at the same time fighting day-in-day-out for space and budget. In the final 18months of Classroom Video running as a production house, you could see him get tired and distracted. He wanted to develop software, he wanted to broadcast over the internet. In short, he wanted to invent iTunes, Youtube and Netflix, all rolled into one at the same time in one product and was wondering why he couldn't get it to work (pity the lone programmer working on this quixotic venture). Given the choice of continuing production and working on his pet project, he chose the latter; he sold up his business to a bunch of sharks, took their money and ran into retirement at the age of 60.
Thusly we got our redundancies and were shown the door. Shortly after that, he even gave up on the software thing.

At the memorial service, some of my former colleagues stated unequivocally that Classroom Video was the best work environment they had experienced in their entire career. I won't contradict them; It certainly was a lot of fun and learning for me as well. In retrospect, they were good days. After we went our separate ways I saw John only a couple of times. Time and distance did its thing as we drifted apart in life. I only heard through the grapevine that he ran for the local seat as a Greens candidate, and how he marvelled at the cut-throat nature of politics. At the time of his death he was working on a documentary about the terrible impacts of a coal mine and how we should all just drop using fossil fuels.

He's been gone now for over a week, and I can't help but keep casting my mind over my time with John Davis. My mind goes around and around like a zoetrope, with flickering memories of this moment, that conversation, this image, that argument... I can't switch off the memory machine in my head. Half of it is shrouded in the mists of time before 9/11 changed our world. I can reach back and remember how I felt about things and people; how differently things felt before 9/11.

I remember the time John and I went up to Newcastle to shoot a programme about electricity. Typical to form, he had no script, just a shotlist. He had a lot to say about the generation of electricity and how privatisation was going to work. We got driven around, shot things that were shown to us, shot an interview, and took the plane home at night. Around the point we were flying over Narrabeen Lakes, we hit an air pocket and there was great turbulence. In all my years of flying it was a pretty frightening moment. I looked to John sitting next to me, and he said without being prompted "when it's your time to go, it's your time to go."
That matter of factness was also John.

I can't imagine what the last moments on the fateful helicopter were like. I do imagine he may have even said that on the way down. I don't know.

Vale John Davis, you were one of a kind.