Features
Anthony Garth & Guilty Simpson
By Travis R. Wright
Jan 29, 2008, 11:04

Anthony Garth
On The Cutting Room Floor

It’s imperative to mention at this point that Anthony Garth is a Detroiter through and through, and just like directing a video for Detroit diehard rappers (somewhat of a forte of Garth’s), he has to be cognisant of how much “Detroit” he allows into any given project — if the city shines through too much, it may alienate your audience. ”There’s a fine line,“ says Garth. “You don’t want to feel … local … and I don’t mean that in a bad way, but you want to feel internationally accessible. I know [the Detroit hip-hop community’s] love for Detroit because I have it too. We all want to stay here and we all love the city and want to get Detroit the respect that it’s due, but at the same time you want the video to feel bigger than Detroit. Some of the bigger artists to come out of Detroit in recent years — Kid Rock, Eminem and The White Stripes — I think it was very important for them to do that, as well,” he says.

Garth, like many native Detroiters, is a straight shooter. As we sit at Motor City Brewing Works, to which he lives next door, it’s easy to recognize that he’s level-headed, ambitious and, perhaps most of all, grateful for where he finds himself in life. The first time I heard Garth’s name, it was attached to The White Stripes. In fact “Hotel Yorba” was the first video he shot, the first project that really put him on the map and it proved to be a greatly humbling experience, as well.

“It was weird, I had just done my first music video ('Hotel Yorba') and it went straight to MTV and I’m thinking, ‘Man, I’m the biggest music video director on the face of the planet right now.“ Garth pauses and laughs at the younger, naïve version of himself circa this turn of the millennium happenstance. “On the night it premiered, I was tending bar at the Magic Stick serving someone a beer the minute it came on TV. It was surreal. Then reality set in fast.” Garth, now more pragmatic on what to expect in the industry, directed a couple other Stripes videos, all of which, compared to the work he’s doing now, have a really raw feel. Sure, budget had a lot to do with that, but it’s also a grit that gets lodged in the tooth of most artists of any type who work out of the Cass creative enclave.

Garth wanted to break into hip-hop. His feet were, well, damp, but he wanted to soak them in a music and culture that had always heavily appealed to him. “I really wanted to break into the rap world because I was just the biggest fan," admits Garth with a certain exuberance. “Listening to The Electrifying Mojo — that was me, man — every Sunday night I was taping that shit,” Garth says. So it was with Detroit rapper T Da Pimp that Garth would make his first rap video; girls, booty shakin’, booze and cars … all the elements were there. At first, T Da Pimp was a bit skeptical of Garth, but Garth was down for the cause and more than capable of making a rap video. The final product was a music video for “All These Girls” which would go on to run on late night BET for a year straight and would also help solidify Garth’s rep in the rap game.

This rep would bring him to work with several others, including the recently signed to Stonesthrow Records and one of Detroit’s grimiest rappers, Guilty Simpson, who Garth is set to shoot a video for in the next couple days. But before coming home to work with Guilty, Garth was in Nashville working with country music hottie Carrie Underwood. The Underwood project is another of Garth’s highly stylized, heavily CG projects, not unlike the stellar work he did last year with Real Detroit’s Artist of the Year, Black Milk, for his single “Sound The Alarm.”

“The Underwood project is really a short movie more than it is a music video. It’s going to open up her shows on her upcoming tour," Garth tells me. "We built a 40-by-40 yard desert and brought in real snakes and a hawk, but the sun is massive and the clouds are crazy, ripping apart. Something I want to stress though, whether it’s a project like this, or shooting a commercial or film, it’s always a collaborative effort. It couldn’t come together without a lot of work from a lot of people.” One of those people is Nick Porcher, a 21-year-old self-taught CG animator who works with Garth on most projects these days and will work on Guilty’s video. “Nick’s a real talent," says Garth. “Together we build these different worlds and surreal atmospheres. We really connected, he’s helping me take shit to a whole new level — the Guilty Simpson video is gonna step it up to a whole new level, too.”

The Guilty Simpson track, “Getting Bitches” (“Riches” on the clean version) is a project that I can tell really excites Garth, who has become the “go-to guy” for the upper-echelon of the Detroit rap community. “The first minute I heard the song, which Black Milk did the beat for, it blew my mind,” admits Garth with a telling grin. “Visually, I knew I was going to be able to do something incredible. It’s about passion and loving to make music videos. Sometimes you can listen to a song a hundred times and no idea comes to mind and other times, like this, you hear it once and the bulb goes off.”

Garth re-adjusts in his seat, now angled a bit more towards me, he lights another P-funk, takes a sip of beer and delves into Detroit rap. “The cool part about that whole camp: Guilty, Phat Kat, B.R. Gunna, Slum Village and other camps, too, like Bizarre, is that they give me 100 percent creative freedom. I was with Guilty last night and he was like, 'So, what are you gonna do exactly?' I started to break it down a little bit and he was like, 'You know, you do what you do and I’ll do what I do and it’s all gonna be great. I have no worries, man.’”

The Guilty video will entail a 14-hour day of shooting on film (as always with Garth), which will then propel him and Porcher into three solid weeks of animating. “We’re really building the video after the shoot. It’s gonna be a grimy video for a grimy artist,“ smirks Garth. “There’ll be some ladies in it for sure, but it’s really based on visual composition. We’ll be doing a surreal driving scene with blurred images of women and money stacks — it’s more grimy than the Black Milk video but it’s also a whole other world.” With editors Adam Pillon and Chris Chynoweth on board, Garth is confident that with his ties in the community he can make a thousand dollar budget look like ten grand — it’s all about work and dedication. “If the artists and the editors, whomever, is willing to work ‘til four in the morning, I’m always down for it,” says Garth, whose most recent canvas is that of the green screen. “I’ve shot at least 30 projects within the city — I’ve used everything and shot everywhere in this town. I tapped the city out.“ And though he may feel like shooting in and around the city is creatively stunting at this point, Garth finds daily inspiration in Detroit. “There’s something that keeps me here. I can’t put my finger on it. I lived in L.A. for years and was doing great work on movies like Slums of Beverly Hills and The Big Lebowski ... I had my ins. I still go out there for work, but it’ll never be home,” Garth says, finishing his beer. Lupita, Oslo, The Magic Stick and great friends keep Garth grounded in Detroit, a director who can’t wait to work with more Detroit artists like Obie Trice, Dwele and Trick Trick, yet also hungers for global talent like M.I.A.

From shooting Aldo commercials in the streets of Buenos Aires to flying 120 miles per hour in a helicopter directly at the face of a small mountain in northern Michigan just inches from the water, only to pull up at the last minute to get a dramatic shot for the Pure Michigan campaign, Garth has had his share of “mind-blowing” experiences, but what keeps him in demand is his down-to-earth approach. “I’m just a kid from Detroit, do I deserve all this?“ Garth questions. “But I’m in an industry of workin' hard, and I work really hard. No one’s gonna knock on your door,“ he says, and with the hip-hop frame of mind, Garth concludes, “It’s a hustler’s game — that’s why I can connect with musicians so well, we’re both hustlin’ in the same game.”  | RDW

More info: anthonygarth.com