THE BROTHERS STRAUSE
Whenever i get to voice my opinion about Los Angeles and the business, I like to start out by saying there are three types of people here: those who actually work in the business, those who think they’re working in the ‘business’, and those who the rest of the world thinks is the business.
Providing you actually want to have a normal life here, you gravitate towards the first group.
To the uninitiated, they’re a bit hard to distinguish from everyone else waiting in the morning line at Starbucks. But if you know what to look and listen for, they’re as easy to spot as a leased Bentley on Sunset Blvd.
On one particular morning, I had the chance to stand in line at my Starbucks and engage two of the most unassuming and most successful people in town. Gregg and Colin Strauss, co-owners and founders of Hydraulx, the only digital effects company that can give ILM a run for its money and the guys who brought down the Titanic. Literally.
Way back in the end of the twentieth century, 1996 or so, James Cameron had put the call out for an iceberg. A big iceberg. One that could carry his epic masterpiece and take down a luxury cruise liner. The Strauss brothers got the assignment.
“Actually it was Cameron’s Abyss that got us interested in special effects in the first place,” explains the older Strauss, Gregg, “We were kids of Lucas and Spielberg, but that water creature was a call to action”
“We deconstructed that effect until we understood how to make it,” brother Colin continues, “and then we’d try to make our own version. We’d literarily reshoot and produce entire scenes in our parent’s basement until we got it right. I was thirteen and Gregg was fourteen”.
The Strauss boys grew up about an hour drive from Chicago, in a house that cost slightly more than their first really powerful computer.
“Our dad worked for IBM, and when he got laid off, we used his severance to buy a real digital animation system. All in, the system’s cost required all of the twenty-five thousand dollars he got,” Gregg informs me, “just five thousand less than the thirty thousand dollar house we grew up in”.
“But within a few weeks,” continues Colin, “the system started paying for itself with odd animation gigs.”
GREGG: “I would scower (SP?) the yellow pages looking for commercial houses, production companies, ad agencies. We’d get a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars for one offs back then. Simple stuff. But we’d use the money to keep remaking effects we’d see in Hollywood movies. Those we’d put together and use for our sales reels.
“Even though we were producing impossible effects with what we had, we kept losing jobs to companies in Santa Monica, because of something called “Shutters”. Not only did we not know what that was, but we had no clue what a Santa Monica was either!”
COLLIN: “Yeah, that was the crazy thing, all the big local jobs were going to effects companies out West. Shutters, we found out, was this beautiful hotel on the beach in Santa Monica, where most of the effects houses were back then. We totally got it. If the ad agencies awarded their contracts to companies in LA, they’d get to be in Santa Monica for the process, which meant weeks on the beach in the warm weather, 500 count hotel sheets, and room service.”
The opportunity to relocate to California came after the guys were invited to speak at the Siggraph convention in Los Angeles. Colin had become an advisor to a computer software company, and the two were treated to an all expenses paid weekend. At the convention they were given their first Hollywood break, a few scenes in John Landis’ The Stupids.
GREGG: never went back to Illinois, but Colin was still getting animation jobs, so he stayed and continued to make money out of his parent’s basement until a fate intervened.
COLLIN: “Gregg had made friends with some guys who had more computers then we did, so he was able to go after bigger jobs.”
GREGG: “I’d heard about the trouble FOX was having finding an digital effects team to pull of a complicated scene in Eddie Murphy’s, “The Nutty Professor”. I started a campaign to get us the gig, but trying to convince studio execs that my 18 year old brother working out of our parents basement in Illinois could pull off such a task. (SENTENCE FRAGMENT) Eventually I wore them down enough where they gave me the original plates from the raw footage.
The dedication and commitment the brothers had to each other allowed the project to be completed on time, under budget, and beyond the wildest expectations of the studio. The movie stealing moment, in which Eddie Murphy’s character bloats to a thousand times his own weight and destroys a room, became their calling card and led to the creation of their first Hollywood company, Light Matters. Gregg was 20 and Colin was 19.
COLLIN: “It wasn’t so much of a company as a small group of us with a bunch of computers that took over the entire east side of an apartment building.”
GREGG: “We had nine rooms, and cables running out the windows to connect our computers together. It was using that set up that we undertook the task of building the iceberg in Titanic.”
After Titanic, the brothers opened their first office in Santa Monica. Commercials, and that iceberg, lead to music videos.
COLLIN: “Things definitely got crazy when we started making music videos- Britney, Destiny’s Child, Back Street Boys- we were working all the time. And then someone asked us to direct one.”
GREGG: “We were in our early twenties, and the notion of directing was something we figured we’d look into later in life, but they offered us a half million to direct a Vitamin C video, and we gave it a shot. They bit on our treatment, and from then on out we were directors.
What took us to the next level was this video we did for a little known band (at the time) called Linkn Park. That video for “Crawling” was huge, and the album sold like five million copies. After that this up and coming band called, Nickleback, hired us. After those bands broke, and the videos got tons of airplay, Hollywood took notice.
COLLIN: “We started pitching features right around the time the bottom dropped out of the music industry. Napster killed music videos. The first film we directed was Alien vs Predator.
“We’d done a lot of stuff for FOX including Day After Tomorrow and X-Men 3. That was a big one for us, because we got to really show off the other side of Hydraulx – Lola, a company that’s become the industry leader in digital age rejuvination.”
They wouldn’t name names, but they said Lola gets tons of work digitally altering the looks and age of celebrities and musicians. That’s what I like about Mid-Westerns. They can keep a secret. Which is apropos because of their latest project, HIDDEN.
HIDDEN is the Hollywood remake of a classic Schwarzenegger project- not a movie, but the infamous Santa Monica restaurant/lounge he started and the brothers bought into last year.
COLLIN: “We wanted a place we could bring people, and be treated right. We wanted amazing food and an amazing space, but we also wanted it to be approachable and down to earth. We’ve been approaching it like a movie, with a great story to tell and have been working hard to get the right behind the scenes crew together.
“Ok” I say to them, “so pitch HIDDEN to me as if the place was a character in one of your films”
GREGG: She’s beautiful, sexy, tasteful, sophisticated, but really approachable. Like a Southern Bell.
COLLIN: No, she’s the really hot girl next door. Complex, classy, down to earth. Surfer chick who can hold her own with the boys, but knows fine wine and the difference between a porter house and a double cut filet mignon.
You can see the Strauss bothers’ amazing work in movies like 300, and this seasons sure to be blockbusters, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Adam Sandler’s, Bedtime Stories. If you want to meet the guys, they’re usually holding court Thursday nights at Hidden for their Mojo Mac ‘n Cheese night.
Check out hiddenrestaurant.com
and hydraulx.com for more.
By Kene G
