Fil Manley
Mandy in production
Mandy and Tish
Mandy and Tish
Mandy and Tish
photo by Fil Manley
Nancy Wolf
Mandy
This was my sixth year working Bonnaroo as a photographer and writer, and I can’t explain to you how fascinating it is to be in the middle of a herd of photojournalists, gawking at famous people while struggling to inhale the monstrous cloud which is Bonnaroo in four short days.
Being in the press area is a trip. You’re surrounded by press writers, photographers, writers who take pictures, videographers and nerds of every stripe. On your left is a reporter from Rolling Stone and on your right is a reporter from Podunk, Omaha. Unless they hand you their business card, you can’t tell them apart.
The grounds are strewn with video crews, working for CBS, VH1, MTV, Rolling Stone, Paiste or Spin, doing video and photo shoots.
This year in the press area, people were setting up tents in a place that’s usually bare, and the shoot, or whatever it was, kept growing. At one point, I walked around behind it, when someone called my name.
I turned around and saw Leticia Wolf smiling at me. A home-grown guitarist and songwriter, Leticia has built a dedicated local following. She smiled and told me she was there with her sister Mandy, who was producing a photo shoot for the New York Times.
To add freakish coincidence to serendipity, it turns out a guy named Ben Van Allen was also working with them. Ben is another Chattanoogan who’s moved to L.A. and he’s also the guy I bought my first used Nikon from. I haven’t seen him in two years, but I was carrying two lenses I bought from him in my backpack.
When I first saw Mandy, she was wearing a computer on one hand and a cell phone on the other. Mandy is a driven, rock-obsessed, crowd-hyping musician and multi-media artist, who spent a lot of her formative years in Chattanooga, and has since moved on to L.A. after skipping like a stone through Nashville.
3 Star Productions of Los Angeles and New York chose Mandy as on-site producer for what is easily the biggest photo shoot ever to take place there. In just her mid- twenties, she managed a production crew of six, including photography, wardrobe, makeup and hair, production assistants and three tour buses jammed with over a million dollars worth of wardrobe and equipment. They spent the entire time doing fashion photo shoots with the biggest artists at Bonnaroo.
The entire photo shoot took place in three hastily erected tents consisting of a dressing room, wardrobe tent, and the photo “studio”.
Mandy soldiered through innumerable problems and setbacks and managed to successfully negotiate the vastly different needs of The New York Times, 3 Star Productions and Bonnaroo.
We talked about her giant photo shoot, and the long and winding road that led to her successfully completing it.
FM: You lived a big part of your life in Chattanooga. How did you get to L.A.?
MW: Leticia moved to Nashville first and I came out after to join her in songwriting and performing. I stayed there for a while, grew to love the town and the people, but then the tune of California called me with offerings of a great production career.
FM: Tell me a little bit about the company you work for in L.A.?
MW: It’s one of the top print and film production companies in L.A., 3 Star Productions. The owner of the company is from Nashville as well as a few others in the 3 Star family. I was hired after they saw the creative and hard work I did in Nashville on my own. They run their business in a really positive and conscientious way and for that I’m very grateful to be a part of it.
My mother passed away in February of a sudden heart attack. She and I were very close, and she was one of the most positive influences in my life. Losing her took away a big, special piece of my life. So working for a company that has so much heart and family love atmosphere means the world to me.
FM: You haven’t been with them long have you? How did you wind up working on such a big project so soon?
MW: I’ve worked really hard in the past year. I'm constantly soaking in as much wisdom as possible from the great minds at 3 Star. I’ve been a producer my whole life, whether it was producing family news shows with my brothers and sisters or music shows in the back yard. So I knew I was born to be a producer, but it’s something you can only prove in the film and print industry with time and circumstance.
I've always thought to myself, “Just be grateful, humble and ambitious and your time will come.” The Bonnaroo job came up on their books and it needed rescuing within 48 hours. They offered me the job, I said yes. They told me I was being thrown to the wolves. I laughed. My last name is Wolf. I knew I was about to face a colossal job, but I was ready. In reality, I had no idea how much work needed doing.
FM: Tell us about the production you worked on at Roo. It was a huge undertaking.
MW: It was a full photography studio, high-end designer fashion shoot, on-site at Bonnaroo, set up to shoot multiple big-name artists. So basically it was hot, hot glam in the hot, hot sun. The big question was, could it happen and could I manage it? I thought I could.
I’m from a small town, but I live out of the box. I’m fascinated by people, music, art and photography. I love style and journalism and I love having a career that lets me put my hands in it all. They sent me in at the last minute, to take over and make something great out of a big pile of confusion. I definitely had to put my hands in it ALL and straighten it all out.
FM: Bonnaroo was a bear this year. Was it as difficult for you and your crew as it seemed?
MW: It was one of the most grueling shoots any of us had ever done. It was a beast, but we just kept pushing and tweaking it to make it as good as it could be, until that last sweaty shot on Sunday.
At one point I took the initiative to climb on the roof of my studio tent to put a tarp over it, to protect our photo equipment and wardrobe from the rain. I was walking across these rails, on the roof of the tent in a sun dress in the rain. My sister thought I was going to die. It made me glad I was a gymnast and grew up with a father who was a hard-working architect who taught me how to roof and how to take risks.
I’m still having nightmares of wrong-sized tents and un-fed clients and artists who had to grasp that port-o-potties were their only option. I’m glad to have been a part of a beautiful, enormous project we overcame in one of the dirtiest and hottest festivals ever.
FM: Bonnaroo is difficult under the best of circumstances. Did you ever want to give up?
MW: I could have crumbled. A lot of people do, at Bonnaroo anyway. And they're not running on a 20-hour work day.
Under the pressure of being a producer, lying down seems like a nice option with all the obstacles you have to face in production. It takes a lot of inner peace and comfort in who and what your are not to break down when a hundred things are going wrong at once. Then throw in that you’ve been bathing with a water bottle in 100-degree weather, getting two hours of sleep a night on a wood tent floor, peeing by your tent because you can’t leave a million dollars worth of equipment and wardrobe unguarded and you still have to smile?
FM: You dealt with a lot of really high-end artists. Was that hard? My experience has been that some of them are extremely difficult to work with, but then you have some who take everything in stride.
MW: There was a time when it felt like there were a thousand people yelling at me at once asking “Why can’t you fix it all RIGHT NOW?” I did, as fast as possible. If a girl can embrace nasty Bonnaroo rituals and tarp a 15-foot tent in a sundress in the rain, surely any attitude can be adjusted. At least that's the philosophy that keeps me going.
Even after we put up the extra tents, people still complained that there wasn’t enough room, air conditioning, food or bathrooms. Oh and where were the real showers, more fans and more beer and on and on.
It took me four days to convince everyone that we could pull it off. I mean, it’s Bonnaroo, it’s dirty, and it’s camping. Everyone needs to camp at least once in their life. This just happens to be a last-minute job. Let’s just grin and fight through it and make it the most amazing photo shoot we can, with what we have. That was the mission and the idea I tried to get across to everyone.
After it was over, I felt this really strong sense of having not only persevered, but overcome, on a really deep level. It was a great feeling.
The crew was fantastic, my sister, Tish and Ben Van Allen, everyone worked really hard to make it happen and I can’t thank them enough.
FM: When can people check out the end result?
MW: On September 11th, it will come out in an amazing new edition of the New York Times “T Magazine”, their style magazine. It's all a dusty blur now, but at the time, I saw glimpses of something beautiful. It's going to be fantastic. It will be a moving piece of musical, style and festival history. It will definitely make all of the blood, sweat and mud we put into it worthwhile. I'd do it again.
FM: How do you feel now, looking back in hindsight?
MW: I’m grateful to 3 Star, to Bonnaroo and the New York Times for taking me to a place where I was forced to understand how much inner strength I can draw on. What I love about Bonnaroo, besides the music, is that everyone is covered with the same filth. It brings out the music inside you.
Amanda “Mandy” Wolf
Chattanooga, Tennessee
3 Star Productions
http://www.3starproductions.com
T Magazine
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/t-magazine/index.html
~Fil Manley
filmanley@gmail.com
The Complete 2011 Bonnaroo Lineup
Eminem, Arcade Fire, Widespread Panic, The Black Keys, Buffalo Springfield feat Richie Furay, Stephen Stills, Neil Young, Rick Rosas, Joe Vitale, My Morning Jacket, Lil Wayne, String Cheese Incident, Robert Plant & Band of Joy, Mumford & Sons, The Strokes, The Decemberists, Ray Lamontagne, Bassnectar, Iron & Wine, Girl Talk, Primus, Dr. John and The Original Meters performing Desitively Bonnaroo, Alison Krauss & Union Station, Pretty Lights, Florence + the Machine, SuperJam with Dan Auerbach and Dr. John, Explosions In The Sky, STS9, Gogol Bordello, Beirut, Big Boi, Scissor Sisters, Gregg Allman, Ratatat, Global Gypsy Punk Revue curated by Eugene Hütz, Robyn, Warren Haynes Band, Deerhunter, Opeth, Atmosphere, Old Crow Medicine Show, Bootsy Collins & the Funk University, Wiz Khalifa, Matt & Kim, Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, The Del McCoury Band & the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Mavis Staples, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, Chiddy Bang, Jovanotti, Bruce Hornsby & the Noisemakers, Loretta Lynn, Cold War Kids, The Walkmen, Devotchka, Wanda Jackson, Neon Trees, Portugal. The Man, Sleigh Bells, Amos Lee, Best Coast, Dãm-Funk & Master Blazter, The Sword, The Drums, The Black Angels, School of Seven Bells, J. Cole, Nicole Atkins & the Black Sea, Wavves, !!!, Junip, Freelance Whales, Justin Townes Earle, Ryan Bingham & The Dead Horses, Deer Tick, Band of Skulls, Sharon Van Etten, Abigail Washburn, Omar Souleyman, Twin Shadow, Kylesa, Man Man, The Low Anthem, Alberta Cross, Railroad Earth, Jessica Lea Mayfield, Smith Westerns, The Head and the Heart, Karen Elson, Beats Antique, 22-20s, Phosphorescent, Clare Maguire, Hayes Carll.