By Ron Evans
A ragtag group of artists who used Rainier Beer, a beloved local brand icon, to change the nature of beer advertising as we know it, and as a result, changed the very fabric of advertising in this country. - Director Isaac Olsen
I’ve been wanting to start a pop-up movie night here in Wenatchee ever since RadarStation went the way of the Wild Rainier. Hosting movies in that space was one of my favorite things, and one of the best events we ever had was Semi-Iconic: The Dick Rosetti Story. Directed by Tacoma filmmaker Isaac Olsen, this surreal and hilarious look at the longtime Seattle radio DJ played to a packed, standing-room-only crowd—who then stuck around for an unforgettable Q&A with the filmmakers.
So when I heard that Olsen was working on a new documentary about the history of Rainier Beer advertising, I couldn’t wait to see it.
Who doesn’t remember those hilarious, be-legged bottles of Rainier sprinting through the woods, the legendary motorcycle commercial (see headline for sound effect), or the ongoing adventure sagas of Mickey Rooney? Okay, I’ll admit—I somehow missed the Mickey Rooney ads, which is wild because he did quite a few. But it’s all in the doc—a nostalgic deep dive into local history, breweriana, and the artists who shaped it.
Olsen is bringing this incredible film to the Liberty Theater in Wenatchee on February 28th. There will be a post-film Q&A with the filmmakers, and for one night only, Liberty will have Rainier on tap.
I chatted with Olsen to talk about how the project all came together.
First off, where did the idea for this documentary come from?
I still haven’t figured out how to compress this story down to a single sentence. My producing partners, Justin and Robby Peterson, and I are always brainstorming. They own a series of taverns in Tacoma, and Rainier is a big part of their mythology because they’re avid collectors too. So naturally, we thought that Rainier, the product itself, could be a movie (this is years before Barbie, you dig?), and the fact that Rainier has these famous TV ads just reinforced the notion. My favorites were the observational ones—where you get to watch Wild Rainiers graze in a pasture, cross the road, and even stampede.
“All we need to do is stitch these ads together,” I declared. “Just put them in the right order, and you’ll have a movie!”
As far as I could tell at that moment, the only available copies of the ads themselves were bootleg VHS compilations—most taped straight from television. The quality wasn’t so hot. A few official internal compilation tapes had also leaked from Heckler Associates (the legendary ad firm behind the commercials), and those looked a little better, but basically, that wasn’t gonna work. I knew these things were originally shot on film (both 16mm and 35mm) and that they originally looked like epic feature films. But where the film actually ended up was a mystery.
We knew it wasn’t at MOHAI (Museum of History and Industry), and after a few inquiries, we knew that Rainier, the company, didn’t have it. So I geared up to go on a possibly years-long odyssey to locate it. Our premise was: no film, no movie. If we can’t show the ads in their best possible incarnation, it’s not worth it.
So...I hadn’t even started my quest yet when I happened to visit this archivist, Ed Nolan, at The Washington State Historical Society, which is right here in Tacoma. I was working with Ed to find footage related to another project we were working on. But one day, he casually asked me what else I was doing, and I mentioned Rainier. And he’s like, “Oh!...I’ve got that stuff.”
It was really weird. We go into a room, there’s a shelf, and on the shelf are hundreds of boxes and cans of film, all marked RAINIER. And this wasn’t just the finished ads. It was outtakes. It was EVERYTHING. And the collection was not listed on their registry, so were it not for this random conversation with Ed, I never would have found it. How this project started was almost metaphysical, in the realm of the movie gods.
Isaac Olsen at work preserving footage for the film.
How long did the film take to complete?
Four years total, and three years of actual production work. Finalizing a contract with WSHS to digitize the motion picture film took a year, mostly hindered by Covid developments throughout 2020. None of the film had ever been transferred, let alone examined. Most of the cans were still taped shut. The deal was that it was up to us to raise the necessary funds to restore it. At the end of the process, we’d have a movie, and they’d have accessible footage in their collection that future generations can study and license. Win/win.
So once we finally got the collection (130 boxes and 89 cans) out of the museum’s storage and into my studio (November 2020), I worked continuously on the project for three years. It took one month for me to “log” the film—using the classic editor’s hardware—winding through every foot of it and making detailed notes. There were hundreds of hours. Out of that, approximately 22 hours were selected to be professionally scanned.
The documentary was finally finished in late 2023 and premiered in spring 2024. There was not one week within that time where something was not actively going on. This is a handmade movie.
You ran a very successful Kickstarter campaign to help fund the project. Talk a bit about that process—any tips on running a crowdfunding campaign?
I probably still know extremely little about what it takes to mount a successful fundraising campaign, for the simple reason that it took next to ZERO energy to get people interested in this project. Choosing your subject is half the battle. We pre-judged the local population’s appetite for a nostalgic exercise such as this, were correct in that assumption, and tried to move forward from there.
I guess the other key is not to promise too much that you can’t deliver. Try and keep it transactional. You want people to give money and feel special—that goes without saying—but you should take extra care to make sure the T-shirt or postcard they get in return is extra bitchin’.
Anyone who saw your Wenatchee screening of Semi-Iconic knows you have a very distinct directing/editing style that I feel at least borders on surreal. This is especially unique in the world of documentaries. Talk about your style in terms of mood and feel as part of your storytelling.
Deep down, I’m an avant-garde kinda guy. I think a movie should be a compelling flow of images in addition to being a coherent story. In my documentaries, editing is where the film is written, editing is where the film is directed, and I even re-compose how the film was SHOT through editing.
So...you have to enjoy editing, and these days, there’s no excuse for bad editing or even inelegant editing.
The actors—or in some scenes, reenactors—add a special element as well. Talk about writing/directing these scenes.
In the spirit of the Rainier-verse, we had to riff on and make fun of our documentary itself, and that’s the intention of those scenes. So much of the old footage features characters addressing the camera. My logical extrapolation from that is, Who’s watching this? Clearly, a sinister, black-and-white boardroom full of beer employees. That was an easy idea to arrive at.
The actors are all friends of ours of a certain age. My dad’s in there. Ed Nolan, the archivist, is in there too. I sketched out the compositions, and they were expertly shot by Karl Alsop, one of our cinematographers. Same goes for the bar fight sequence.
“Alfred” narrating some pertinent Rainier information.
Where did the idea of using an Alfred Hitchcock-like narrator/host come from?
This movie is essentially an embellished found-footage film, and that Hitchcock stuff actually existed—we didn’t invent that. People always tell me you shouldn’t confuse your audience, but I like to deliberately muddy the waters so that the new stuff we shot and the old stuff they shot are interchangeable.
I think that serves the material better. During the 12-year span of classic Rainier ads, Heckler Associates also created what were called “Sales Films.” Just as much budget was spent making these films as the ads themselves, which goes to show how much money was floating around in the Rainier account back then.
The Hitch film, along with several others like it, were segments used to showcase all the ads from the previous year. They were shown likely at annual meetings/parties for the beer distributors and were designed to boost the morale of the troops—to get them all jacked up to go out there and sell, sell, sell some more!
And the public has never seen these films; they were just for the sales force and are extremely rare. Ed Leimbacher, the writer of this and most of the actual ads, used the Hitchcock motif to get to the heart of beer advertising itself. He made the satire more biting than usual and really pulled the curtain back on his own profession. Therefore, I felt this was the perfect device to tell the story.
When I told Ed that, he said, “I feel...vindicated.”
One of the coolest things you put in the doc is these sorta cutaway scenes (no pun intended) showing how some of the magazine ads were cut and pasted together. There are all sorts of little gems like that along the way. Talk about creating and stitching all those elements together with the found footage.
These scenes you’re describing are what I think of as “coffee table book moments.” A book is a great format to present a series of deconstructed impressions that lead you to a final idea—like, in one case, a magazine print ad showing a giant mountain goat towing an even bigger Rainier beer bottle. Documentary filmmaking is an opportunistic art form, and you can only go off into a little flight of fancy like that if you have the material. In this case, amazingly, we not only had the final print ad but also all the building blocks used to make the original photo collage—the bottle, the wagon, and the mountain goat (stuffed, from a museum). So I was able to reverse-engineer the final image: re-print the elements, cut ’em out, and reassemble the collage in real time in front of the camera, just as it was actually done back then. The idea of these little moments is to unleash the energy contained in a single image and then build it back up. Some people call this “vertical editing”—the idea being that you’re going inside a moment, not extending a moment.
Mechanical paste up recreation of a magazine ad.
Who did the great little animation sequences?
The animated “Pouramount Pictures” logo is a mystery—some local animation house likely did it. The Rainier video game was animated (drawn by hand, nothing digital) by Marv Newland, most famous for his 1969 short Bambi Meets Godzilla and The Far Side TV special. We eventually got to meet Marv through this project.
Were there any major discoveries or surprises while digging?
I was blown away that we found hours and hours of black-and-white behind-the-scenes footage of the ads being created. I had absolutely no right to assume anything like that existed—but it did. Because of that, the ensemble cast works better, since you can cut to people young and old, and the audience can keep track of who they are.
The collection of Stan Warzcheka looks like it could have its own feature. How fun was it visiting that place?
Stan is an amazing collector and resource. He has since downsized his collection, so we were very lucky to be among the last to see his dedicated Rainier house-museum.
Was this a nightmare in terms of clearances and licensing for all these commercials, news clips, and other pieces of footage?
Actually, that part was a breeze, because Rainier holds the only veto power over how the material is used. Since they were supportive, we were allowed to use the footage and the brand likeness unhindered. We approached Rainier early on—even before we found the footage—with the help of Kurt Stream, our associate producer, so we felt emboldened to move ahead when they were on board. Rainier, now under the Pabst Brewing banner, has been amazing. They allowed us to retain our independence every step of the way. When they finally saw the film a month before it premiered, they were overjoyed—and we were relieved As for local news clips, that’s a straightforward business transaction. $90 a second.
Talk about the music usage for the film, which again adds major impact and a touch of the surreal.
Once again, all that source music (besides public-domain classical pieces) is owned by the Rainier brand, and we were allowed to use it. My favorites are the “soft rock” songs of the ’70s—just divine.
There’s so much to this film, and it has appeal on a lot of levels—local history, the advertising industry, old-school graphic design, marketing, etc. One of the big ones, of course… nostalgia. Watching these old commercials for the first time in decades really does tug at some strange part of your heart. How have people responded to that element of the film?
I really get off on showing an audience something they have an indelible memory of but thought they would never see again—that little jolt of recognition. Resurrecting stuff like this from people’s subconscious seems trivial, but it’s an extremely powerful, potent thing to do.
Obviously, the visuals and music often steal the spotlight in the commercials and jingles. But none of this could have ever happened without this kooky group of writers coming up with an absurd amount of classic material—they could have written for SNL in its heyday. Talk about getting to chat with these writers.
Originally, I wanted the movie to be nothing but visuals, with no on-camera interviews. But once we started meeting people, the component of honoring their work by formally attributing it to them became a major goal of the project. That said, the concept was always that the footage would be the main thrust, and the interviews would support it—not the other way around. Limiting the interviewees to under 20 people was important, too, because you want to get to know each one of them in a way that’s germane to each part of the story. Luckily, very few people were responsible for this huge body of work, and 90% of them appear on camera. A few were too shy to do an interview, and a few have passed away. But other than that, most are accounted for.
Was it tough getting anyone to sit down for the interviews?
I never pressured anybody (at least not strenuously) to do an interview. Most everyone didn’t hesitate and was happy to do it.
Did you get a chance to put on one of the bottle costumes? Are those rare at this point?
Justin and Rob, my producers, are better bottle wranglers than I am. They own three 6-footers and one 8-footer. There are still lots of bottles out there—you can find ’em if you dig hard enough.
Talk about any important screenings, festivals, or awards for the film.
We won the Seattle Film Critics Society award for Best Film Made in the Pacific Northwest (documentary OR narrative). It always feels good to get the audience AND the critics on your side.
Who painted the kickass poster image?
My uncle Bill (“Kahuna”) Henderson painted that for us. He’s the guitar player in Girl Trouble and a talented artist and model builder. He’s also responsible for the 2001: A Space Odyssey tableau, where the bottle stands in for the monolith—which was a miniature.
How will it ultimately be released/distributed, and when—if that’s not already happening?
We’re getting there. It was always important for us to provide ample opportunities for people in this region to see the film before we try to go national, because it’s so much more personal to us Northwesterners. That being said, I designed the film to play to a nationwide audience, and I hope that it does. In the meantime, demand to see the film here has been overwhelming and unceasing, so that’s what we’re focusing on for the first half of the year.
Rainier: A Beer Odyssey
February 28, 7:30pm
Liberty Theater in Wenatchee
Tickets available on Feb. 7 at
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