The Natural Selection of Little Dizzle

Hhow David Russo Survives Outside

By Shannon Gee

David Russo has always kept almond milk in his refrigerator. He says if he didn’t make films he would be a dental hygienist. And he thinks Walt Whitman is the greatest artist since Shakespeare. One can’t be sure of the influence that almond milk has had on his work, but office hygiene and Walt Whitman figure in Russo’s first feature film, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2009.

“Whitman was a complete individual, the first slacker artist who indulged his body and his mind and was completely outside of fashion. The character of Weird William is my homage to Walt Whitman,” explains Russo as we sit down in one of the office building hallways that serves as a location in Dizzle. In this corridor, Dizzle’s band of janitors vacuum, gripe and mop like charming delinquents in the twilight hours after office-worker drones have left the building. And their boss Weird William supervises… wearing a dress.

There seems to be a bit of Whitman in most of the characters in the film. Dizzle begins with Dory (Marshall Allman), a data manager, who after experiencing an overload of white-collar office chatter inanity, fritzes out and quits. He finds a new career through Spiffy Jiffy, Weird William’s (Richard Lefebvre) janitorial company that is staffed by a misfit bunch that includes the hyper-sexual couple Ethyl (Tania Raymonde) and Methyl (Tygh Runyan) and the charismatic, motor-mouthed OC (Vince Vieluf), a struggling artist-amongst-the-urinals.

Why Russo chose janitors to be the protagonists in his very first screenplay and feature length film is one part personal history, and one part American. Russo began writing the script in early 2003, a couple of months before Operation Iraqi Freedom began. Russo himself was a janitor for over a decade and that post 9/11 brand of “you’re with us or against us” patriotism jogged some memories. “It brought me back to that feeling of being marginalized, of being a janitor,” he explains. “You’re a receiver of culture but not really a participant in the culture. So that point of view, that janitor’s eye view of the world, is sort of what I was really feeling at the time.”

The invisibility of Dory, OC and the gang make them an ideal trial group for a bit of nefarious experimentation run by Gary (Matt Smith) and Tracy (Natasha Lyonne) of Corsica, a research firm that test markets novelty gems like farting wine bottles and non-F.D.A. approved cookies that create the illusory comfort of freshly baked cookies still warm from the oven.

A steady diet of chemosynthetic cookies strategically and deliberately placed in trash bins (“Being a janitor, we ate out of the trash a lot. We did and we do!” says Russo), cause the male janitors, but not the women, to crave salt, experience horrible cramping and wacko hallucinations. This is where “Dizzle” drops into something markedly Russo-ian: dazzling imaginative sequences made in his distinct animation style, a hands-on, analog technique that has developed and evolved throughout Russo’s short films.

A self-described “weirdo animator,” Russo’s shorts have screened all over the world and have garnered several awards, including The Stranger’s Genius Award, and the Special Recognition Award given by the Betty Bowen Memorial panel for the visual arts. He went to Sundance with Populi in 2002, and Pan With Us in 2003, where Pan got an Honorable Mention. These two films have action that leaps far beyond the confines of any animation cell; from open fields to speeding pavement, Russo moves objects he’s painted or built (a bird drawn on paper that transforms to metal, an endless rolling carpet of shadowy leaves that stretch to infinity) effortlessly through never-ending landscapes. The process is painstaking, time consuming and uniquely his. “The opening sequence (of Dizzle) took me a LONG time,” he reports. The scene is a breathtaking journey of a bottle traveling in a smeary drift of blue and purple water. “People would be shocked [if they knew] how long it took.”

In “Dizzle,” the construct of Russo’s own imagination and the subject of the film are blue fish-like creatures that are borne out of the market research experiment … and the male janitors’ digestive tracts. They make memorable appearances and make for some good old-fashioned, slapstick butt jokes. “Giving birth to a little blue fish… is very much the feeling I get being a male artist in my culture,” he says when asked about what Little Dizzle, a single biogenetic specimen, represents. “The film itself … is Little Dizzle, the thing that gets born. It’s this misfit creature that I knew was going to come out malformed. I knew it was destined for possible oblivion.”

The possible oblivion Russo is referring to is “Little Dizzle’s” continued search for distribution after its debut. It is a film that defies description somewhat, but Russo wanted it that way. “There was a time when we as movie goers were more adventurous,” he says. “And I built my film for those people. I don’t really think there is a niche for me, but I’m just going to err on the side of vision, I’m going to err on the side of originality and just let the chips fall where they may.”

One chip has already fallen towards his next project. After the Blue Man Group screened Dizzle, they tagged Russo to work on their next project, a film to be shot so it can be shown in no less than 3-D IMAX. Their film about “the human brain and its functions within a musical operatic structure” seems like a natural next step for Russo. “I feel like I’ve been struggling with 2-D my entire life,” he explains. As a filmmaker who has created feverish and distinctive animation with hand crafted/low-fi techniques, it will be very interesting to see what Russo will do with some of the highest-fi technology around. “The more I learn about 3-D it’s like ‘oh my gosh,’ all my short films…they’re struggling to have a dimension they don’t have. So this is my opportunity to run off into the distance with that.”

Shannon Gee is a writer and documentary filmmaker; she produces the documentary series “Community Stories” for the Seattle Channel.
This article will be reprinted in ON SCREEN magazine, a publication of 911 Seattle Media Arts Center.