Today, Burbank; Next, the World

Burbank nice guy Bob Rogers can sometimes sound like a modest Hollywood film producer: “I want my work to touch the mind and the heart. I want to tell stories.”

Or he can talk like a techno-philosopher: “The man who owns a hammer sees every nail as a problem.”

Or like a cinematic dreamer: “I want to think beyond the rectangle.”

Sounds like heavy stuff out of Burbank. But unlike Oakland, there’s a there there as Rogers and his neighborhood go for bigger prizes.

For Rogers, that will be as immediate as Monday when he’ll do what other merely mortal producers can only dream about: premiering two movies on the same day, all that at the opening of Expo ‘92, Spain’s six-month World’s Fair in Seville.

Burbank’s fate is yet to be determined.

What is happening to both tells a lot about the high-stakes dreaming and high-risk enterprise that are as much a part of show business as bright lights, big names and agent fees.

Up until now Bob Rogers & Co. has been one of several hundred seemingly anonymous show business enterprises that are sprinkled throughout the great plains of Burbank, hidden in the shadows cast by such brighter beacons as Disney, Warner and NBC. The smaller independents are the so-called suppliers and support structures to the stars--set makers, costumers, stunt companies, animators, film processors, special-effect makers, caterers, actors on call, writers on line, directors on hope.

In 10 years, the Rogers company has caught its big wave. This year it completed “World Song,” a unique, short feature film that General Motors backed for the U.S. Pavilion at Seville (also to be shown at the Columbus, Ohio, “AmeriFlora ‘92” exhibition next week), and “Mi Pais Vasco,” a 360-degree, single-camera, single-projector film for the Basque National Pavilion.

“Mi Pais Vasco” was produced along with Iwerks, another of those Burbank specialized companies. Rogers is also doing something only the Big Boys have done so far--designing and building an entire theme park. This is the $70-million Space Center Houston at the Texas NASA visitors center that will open this fall, featuring two large-format movies the company is developing along with behind-the-scenes tram tours and first-time demonstrations of astronaut activities.

Not bad for this former CalArts film school student who was cut free three different times by the Disney organization--first as a high school-age Disneyland magician, then as a screenwriter, later as a designer--and each time, he recalls, being told he would never work for that organization again. (More recently he completed an animation project for--you got it--Disney and its animation tourist facility in Florida.)

The successes of the Rogers company, this year renamed BRC Imagination Arts, could serve as an industrial-grade role model to economically challenged Burbank, facing the loss of Lockheed and its aerospace pals.

More than 25% of the licensed businesses in Burbank are connected to entertainment pursuits, ranging from contract television and movie writers to mail-drop entrepreneurs and small film producers. The city thinks it can improve on 25% by waving tax incentives in the faces of the Hollywood crowd. Most Los Angeles-area cities tax movie studios on a percentage of gross receipts. Not Burbank, which has had a single tax long before Jerry Brown found a cause. Burbank competes with a flat-rate business tax plus a per-head charge based on the number of employees each company has. That way a large studio pays only a predictable $9,000 to $11,000 a year in taxes just to be in Burbank. Individuals pay only a $25 registration fee and a $65 annual tax.

For Rogers, there’s another Burbank plus, and that’s talent. Like most small entertainment companies, BRC operates with a small central core--at most perhaps 30 full-time employees. As projects develop, free-lancers from the huge Southern California talent preserves are called in.

The two BRC World’s Fair films are examples of how this worked for Rogers. “World Song” is a compelling, almost dialogue-free film that in its 14 minutes captures universal experiences: the common threads of birth, family, love, marriage, work, aging and dying. It was shot in more locations than most 90-minute feature films--Jamaica, North Africa, Spain, California--mostly on location, rarely in studios. It has more than 200 different scenes, each averaging only four seconds. It was shot in four weeks, mostly overseas, a tribute to plotless storytelling.

“Mi Pais Vasco” (“My Basque Country”), the Basque Pavilion film, demonstrates something else, something about thinking “beyond the rectangle.” While it is like many World’s Fair films, a technological advance that uses the Iwerks 360 camera and projector system capable of displaying a film on a circular, seamless screen (other 360-degree films use as many as nine cameras, nine screens), it is basically storytelling, a road film about a vacationing Basque family.

Planning for the film began last summer with two months devoted to research and story development and to wading through levels of concerned governmental experts. The first rough cut was made last December after 20,000 feet of film was shot in three demanding six-day work-weeks.

Beyond the fair but not beyond Burbank, Rogers sees himself continuing as storyteller. And in Houston he has a whole universe to explore and to tell stories about, an entire NASA environment. Space Center Houston is sponsored by a private support group.

“The message becomes the message here,” Rogers says. “We first thought about what we wanted to communicate, what stories we wanted to tell in tours and in demonstrations and in our movies. Then we figured out what we needed to design and make to tell those stories. We designed an entire environment, something that will be a rewarding experience and that will return something not only to visitors but to the space program.

“Big screens and other dramatic devices are fine. But after the first thrill and the first three minutes in a spectacle movie, you have to have a story or the audience leaves.

“You have to be about something.”