Helen Stickler
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Helen Stickler


Helen Stickler - Director. '91 RISD Graduate, FAV (Film - Animation - Video)

Films

About working with Shepard

From Supply and Demand

I first noticed Shep's original black-and-white sticker on a light box at RISD in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1989. I remember cynically thinking that the use of be word "posse" was another attempt by the suburban bourgeois to mimic hip-hop culture, because there weren't too many kids from the 'hood at that school. But because the sticker was absurdly idolizing a professional wrester, the clash of cultures and adoption of trends we one of me points it made.


Later, I saw Shep's giant Andre face over the mayor's election campaign billboard, and was impressed - the scale was significant, and alignment with a political gesture we subtle social commentary.


In 1994, I finished debuting my short Queen Mercy and wanted to follow it up. At the same time, Shep was plastering Providence with a parody of Coca-cola's ad campaign for a new product called OK Soda (a test product now off the market).


Shep's wheat-pasted poster campaign had spread off campus, a bold move for most art students at that time. At one intersection Shep placed an OK poster on a light box, and as I sat at the red light looking straight at it, my eye traveled the short distance to the original Coca-cola OK billboard high in the sky. The commentary was direct and inescapable, creating a heightened awareness of the environment we take for granted every day - the white noise of commercial advertising.


A few weeks later, I went to Shepard's studio in Olneyville, introduced myself, told him I wanted to make a documentary about him, and we shot the first scenes that night on a trip to Boston to post OK parodies on the subways.


The doc was completed in about three months, and debuted to great success in March 1995 at the New York Underground Film Festival (at that time run by it's founder, director Todd Phillips). At the time, not many people knew who Shepard was, but many had seen the campaign or would start to notice it after watching the Film.


I spent the next two years relentlessly searching out every underground venue, film festival, micro-cinema, museum, college, bar, gallery, punk-rock tour, and art-house theater across me country that would screen it. I made dubs in my living room and lived at Kinko's and me post office. Eventually I managed to get be doc in the Sundance Film Festival in 1997, where it took off to a new level. Andre the Giant Has a Posse has continued to screen for over 10 years now. It was described in 2003 by Village Voice critic Ed Halter as "Legendary ... a canonical study of Gen-x media manipulation. One of the keenest examinations of '90s underground culture."


In many ways, be short influenced my first feature documentary Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator, which was also about an urban legend among underground skateboard culture but of an entirely different sort. l was very happy that Shepard was able to do the graphic design for the poster for that Film.


Shepard has done a few works tied to Helen Stickler. They are the promotional poster for her 1997 documentary Andre the Giant Has a Posse, the video packaging for Andre the Giant Has a Posse and the promotional material for her 2002 movie Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator, including the 2003 print Stoked.

Andre the Giant Has a Posse promotional material