By: Doug Mackey

When the feature-length documentary Rainier: A Beer Odyssey premieres at the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) on Monday, May 13, it will be the culmination of five years of hard work, all made possible and set in motion by a true Tacoma Miracle.

Writer/director/editor/archivist Isaac Olsen and writers/producers Justin and Robbie Peterson hatched the notion up in 2019. Having created primarily local, music-related documentaries, Olsen and the Peterson brothers were working separately at first. This is the project that would bring them together.

“They’ve got these restaurants, see?” Olsen says of the brothers. “And they’re collectors.” (Tacoma-born Justin and Robbie own Peterson Bros. 1111 and The Valley, and they have a stake in Peaks & Pints.) “We collect ‘breweryana,’ if you want to call it that,” one of the brothers, who are identical twins, notes. For the purpose of this article, all quotes from either of them will be attributed to “Peterson,” as the author could not definitively discern their voices from one another on the audio recording of this interview, even after 20-some years of friendship.

One day in 2019, the three of them were sitting at 1111 in its Tiny Rainier Museum, watching a video loop of all the irreverent Rainier ad spots that entertained and enchanted locals from the mid-’70s to the mid-’80s. Fearing the bootleg disc might be lost or stolen, “They had me make copies of (that) disc,” Olsen says. “But these are just crappy bootlegs. The only reason they’re all on YouTube and out there is that somebody stole them (from the ad agency).” Altogether, the twins had amassed 120 Rainier ads from the classic period, 1974 through 1987. 

Olsen, however, began to wonder, “Where is the original film for this?”

Eventually, he took the time to sit down and watch the lot. “Like a good movie, I got sucked into it. I was watching them and just got this thought––and this is the skill for this type of documentary work—you have to be thinking about ‘Oh, that’s interesting. Maybe we should make a call and do something with that.’ So, I was watching them, and like, you could string them all together, and that’s all you’d need to do to make a great movie. So, I said (to Justin and Robbie), ‘We should do that. We should just make, like, a nature movie, but with all the ads together. We should try to find a better-looking tape copy, and that might be something cool to do.’ And they never miss an opportunity to follow through on one of these.”

Thus they set to work, calling Kurt Stream, who worked at Rainier. “He said, ‘That sounds like a good idea. I bet I could sell my bosses on this idea.’ That is, making some kind of project in which their product is at the center,” says Olsen. “So, we kinda did it the right way: They gave us a letter saying, ‘You can do whatever you want,’ basically.”

“We’re surrounded by primarily music people, so the only names anyone could give us were Joe and Manny Hadlock at Bear Creek Studio,” famous for recording several grunge-era classics. “[Manny] laid out in two paragraphs basically what the movie is.” By this, he means all the primary characters and the narrative structure, in chronological order. “But I still didn’t have anything to go on, because I was looking for the original motion picture film.”

Rainier, however, didn’t have it. It had been lost to regime changes, business closures, and the general vagaries of time.

“So, I was looking for film. That was the whole thing of the project,” Olsen stresses. “If we could find the film on which it was shot—the source––then it would be worth it to make the movie. If not, I wasn’t interested. So, we were getting ready to go on our quest, but we didn’t even have a chance to go on our quest. It was an idea for two weeks, maybe, before the quest was over.”

That quest ended before it began…because of A Tacoma Miracle.

“This is where it gets convoluted,” warns Olsen. “It is kinda unbelievable.”

“At the same time, I made friends with this kindly old gentleman who works at the Washington State Historical Society (WSHS) Special Collections.” It was actually legendary cut-and-paste graphic design luminary Art Chantry, and he told Isaac, “You should talk to Ed at the museum.”

“He’s a great guy,” Peterson adds.

Olsen became a volunteer, and Ed Nolan “just happened to mention to me they had Rainier tapes. ‘Maybe I’ll show you sometime.’” This was just weeks after getting what Olsen calls his “marching orders” from Manny Hadlock.

“So, one day he took me into the vault, just like out of a bad movie, and flicked on the light, and there were film cans in total disarray, but you could walk up to them and see ‘Rainier Rooney,’ ‘Rainier Frogs,’ ‘Rainier Motorcycle.’” Olsen was gobsmacked. “The whole thing is crazy. Basically, everything I was looking for, in a matter of weeks, I found right here in our very own city. It’s just one of those things that just doesn’t happen.”

Ed had responded to a call in 1999 as the Rainier Brewery was abandoning its famous freeway-side building in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood. He accepted all the film as part of a gift to the museum, along with files, records, and a painting. Before that, the photographic lab went out of business, which then passed the original materials on to the production company. When they, in turn, went out of business, Rainier took it.

Olsen stresses that “Rainier tried to get the film to a good home. Film is unwieldy. It weighs tons. It’s a liability. It’s not that Rainier, when they left, was careless. They simply didn’t really know what to do with this stuff.”

Peterson adds, “They had video prints. It’s tempting [for Rainier] to say, ‘We’ve got all this on tape,’ and throw the rest away.”

The thing is, once it reached WSHS, the film was never archived comprehensively. So, it was dumb luck, or cosmically aligned, or a just plain miracle that, as Olsen says, “Everything we needed was sitting right here in town,” and that their connection to it was “this one guy who asked me in passing, ‘Hey, what are you working on?’ Even after all the research we’ve done, we haven’t run into the person who made the deal with Ed.”

Olsen and the Petersons ended up partnering with WSHS collectively as Rainier Movie, abbreviated as RM. They would spend their own money as part of our movie budget to digitize the film. In return, they were given permission to use any of the material in the documentary. (At the end of the day, WSHS will retain all the digitized files and make them available as part of their archives—eventually, the public will have access to everything.)

“Whatever you call this mystical experience… in movie terms, it seems a little bit cosmic,” Olsen muses. “With a break like this, you’ve got to do the story! It was here the whole time in the City of Destiny! That is the cosmic event that gave me the gumption to say, ‘Okay, we should be the ones to do it. I know what to do. Let’s go.’”

From that point forward, RM created a business plan, secured insurance, hired lawyers, and compiled the necessary paperwork. “After dotting Is and crossing Ts, I got my hands on the stuff. That was late 2020,” says Olsen.

“The best moment of the entire production, for me,” Olsen adds, “was the day we brought the film to our studio from the museum, and I had a chance to crack open all the cans.” (An unintended beer reference, perhaps?) “Because at this point, it was all speculative. Maybe the film was in horrible condition.”

Olsen went through everything. “I got a pair of white gloves, and thought I was hot shit rolling film through winders. The most joyous part of the whole production was every day I’d go through fifty cans, and I’d basically write down, ‘Found that,’” because he was familiar with the material from the aforementioned bootlegs. As a bonus, among the completed commercials were inter-office films made just for salesmen, outtakes, and behind-the-scenes footage. “We had 95 percent of everything!”

Basing the documentary around the footage, the three all wrote the questions in preparation for interviews of the main players in the documentary narrative.

“Everyone was a dream to work with. Everyone was the best. There’s not a clunker in the bunch,” Peterson gushes. “Every interview and every new piece to the [interview] collection that we acquired led to more questions––and then the next person we interviewed had more questions…” Round and round it went, until they had what they needed to augment the footage. “They have a backlog of this folklore that needs to get out,” Isaac notes, “and they never get the opportunity. All these guys should have their own movie.”

The interviews that they initially conducted persuaded other folks, who were reluctant at first, to join the production. “We were vetted, basically,” says Peterson. They eventually even convinced Gordon Bowker, who co-founded Starbucks, to sit before the cameras. A real coup.

In addition to the interviews, special segments were scripted, shot, and voiced, creating a montage of spectacular, fast-cut, often analogous imagery that was rendered in various types of media, from crisp hi-def video to 35mm film and jerky VHS—an Olson hallmark. He estimates there are upward of three cuts per second.

“The editing: That’s my style. If it’s a movie about ad images… a movie should reflect its subject.” He had to determine which ads were worth showing for the full thirty seconds and which could be shown as excerpts as an ‘impressionistic illustration of something,’ such as those that were primarily parodies: of Rambo, the Blues Brothers, Folgers Coffee commercials, et cetera.

As opposed to most other documentaries, Rainier: A Beer Odyssey “was not interview-dictated.” Olsen explains. “We got the film. That is what dictated all the decision-making. I hate it when you can watch a documentary and see the ‘dress pattern,’ where they did a lot of interviews and shoveled in some filler here and there. I like it to be a little more ambiguous.”

One thing Olsen and the Peterson brothers want to make perfectly clear, however, is that their film is not about Rainier Beer, per se, but about the ad campaign created by Terry Heckler and Associates. “It’s an epic advertising achievement in the ’70s and early ‘80s, and these are the people who never got the recognition,” Peterson points out.

The one person featured prominently in the film who’s not associated with the campaign is John Keister of Almost Live!, the local SNL-ish satire show that ran on KING-5 TV from 1984 to 1999. “He was basically our idol growing up,” explains Peterson, “so meeting him was probably one of the highlights of my life. You can’t just have the people who made [the ads] say how cool they are. You need the voice of fandom, and you need the voice of ‘I’m from here,'” which Keister provides.

Olsen continues. “The three pillars of the movie are the film itself, Terry’s personal collection—his storyboards, photos, drawings—and the third one is the photography of Frank Denman.” Ironically, throughout a lickety-split two-hour running time, its main character, Heckler, remains something of a mystery. It’s all by design.

The good times at Rainier didn’t last forever, and like all good things, Heckler and Co.’s ad campaign came to an end—or, rather, was killed off. Who was the bad guy who spoiled the party? Alan Bond, a corporate thug whose appearance, the Peterson brothers point out, is “presidential.” The Australian billionaire bought Rainier (er, “leveraged acquisition of the diversified regional brand owner,” that is) and tanked it.

“He’s the perfect guy to destroy it,” notes Olsen. Bond’s own company’s industrial videos (which Olsen also acquired) queasily resemble the ads that replaced the classics we know and love. “I think the most important part of the whole movie is to see visual norms like that. Because the whole point of showing all the old Rainier ads up through the ’60s and ’70s,” and then Bond’s ads that followed, “is not because they’re unique, It’s because it could be any beer, any corporation… The point of going into the weeds on all that advertising stuff is because it’s universal.”

It’s that ubiquity, that boring sameness that the Rainier spots bucked, and bucked wildly. Ironically, as Rainier soldiered on with the eye-rolling “the only beer we drink ’round here" campaign, Budweiser stole their frogs.

The truth remains. These beers all taste essentially the same. Only the advertising makes any one of them different. For thirteen glorious years, thanks to these iconic ads, the different beer around here was Rainier. Heckler and his team carried on post-Rainier campaign, morphing their running beers into running clams for Ivar’s, and even returned to Rainier for one final year. But the glory lay in the classic years.

Rainier: A Beer Odyssey, however, ends on an uplifting, somewhat bittersweet note of nostalgia that’s planted firmly in the present. The ads have left a legacy, but it is one its creators didn’t seem to fully comprehend until they saw the final scenes of the documentary. “All the old timers we’ve shown this to had the same reaction to the ending: ‘Really!?’ Even they are not aware of the saturation of what they did.”

The film’s SIFF premiere is at Seattle’s Egyptian Theater on Monday, May 13, followed by a matinee on Thursday, May 16. “We ‘re doing something big and marvelous for opening night,” Olsen assures. “We don’t quite know exactly what yet.” Will it involve the three giant promotional Rainier bottles that the fellas have recently acquired? “How could it not?”

Fear not, T-Towners. Olsen, Justin, and Robbie assure us there will be a Tacoma premiere before the year is out—a showing for the city where Beer Movie Miracles happen.

Follow Rainier: A Beer Odyssey’s journey and premiere on Instagram: @RainierBeerMovie