Words of a Klansman Used to Save African-American Lives
 by mvwire.com

With more than a decade of experience in the advertising industry, Jeff Labbé has made a career out of selling everything from jeans and athletic footwear to video games and mobile phones. His designs have been exhibited in the Smithsonian Institute of Design, and are part of permanent collections in MOMA and the Library of Congress. The awards have rolled in as well; with Clios, Emmys, and numerous other awards suitable for a design director at the top of his form.

Now a director in the L.A. office of the production company Fools and Horses, Labbé is taking his talents in a new direction. His PSA for the back-to-sanity.org website entitled “Klansman” recently won rave reviews at the Cannes Film Festival for its chilling message about black-on-black crime. The 30-second spot opens with a low-resolution medium close-up shot of KKK Grand Dragon Tom Metzger, who tells the audience, “They say I hate young black men, but the truth is quite opposite…” Metzger concludes his brief, racially-charged message with, “So keep buying your guns and killing each other just the way you are.”

MVWire recently talked to Jeff Labbé about how he was able to use the words of a notorious Klansman in an effort to save young African-American lives.

At the end of the day we decided to go with this piece which is brutally honest, what he was saying was honest, the effect was honest, (and) where he was coming from was honest. And who were we talking to understood that it was not manipulation but the honest truth.
-Jeff Labbé

MVWire: What is the story behind this project?

Jeff Labbé: A partner of mine through my last ad job at Weiden and Kennedy. His name is Kash Sree, who is now at BBH ad agency, (and) he called me up and said, “Hey dude, I have this script that I have been toying with that I want to know if we can do something with it.” He read it to me and it was so powerful that I felt that we had to.

(Kash) is Indian and he has run into several racial issues in his life. Anyway, in the long and short he asked me what we should do with it and after much discussion I talked to a few people about it and decided that the best thing to do was to create our own content and create a place that is called Back To Sanity.

We started building this (website)…where we can interview people and keep putting content on it and points of view about racism and black-on-black crime to make people more aware of this situation. So it started that way and became a personal project for both of us.

MVWire: …and the feed back from the African American Community?

JL: The NAACP was all over it; they really liked it but were scared to death to actually support it, but would support anything we wanted to do stopping black-on-black crime.

We received a letter from Afeni Shakur (mother of the late Tupac Shakur); she really thought the spot was amazing and it was actually raising awareness with black-on-black crime.

I have gone to a few prisons and done interviews with gang members (and) talked to a few outreach communities that helped gang members get out of gangs and basically get the word out there that black on black crime is insane and out of hand.

MVWire: Do you have other interviews that are on back-to-sanity.org?

JL: I am in the process of renewing it because we have a whole new set of interviews every once in awhile we take it down and renew it all and put it back up.

MVWire: How were you able to meet Tom Metzger?

JL: We did a casting call and I really didn’t want a Klansman there at first. I was scared to actually do the script, I hit a point where …. I could get a lot of backlash. Originally we were going to do it for the NAACP. We were going to do it (on) spec and send it to them.

After I got over that hurdle we started doing some casting calls and somehow through the Internet Metzger’s organization found out about it. He sent in a call sheet and I called him in like he was another actor—had no clue who he was… and here I am a director saying, “You should play a Klansman, not a hardcore knucklehead Klansman, but the ruler of the Klan.” He read the script and did a good job. He left and I asked to see the next person. Well, the next person happened to work for the CIA…he was a friend of mine (and) he said, “Jeff, did you know who that was?!”

Our worlds collided; suddenly the Klan found out about the script and it hadn’t been leaked to anybody. Here is the head of the Klan walking into a casting call (and) sits down with me the director and didn’t say who he was. How did he find out about it? What was he doing here? Why did he want to do it?

MVWire: For me the visuals caught my attention as much as the content of the piece. Could you talk about how it was shot?

JL: We struggled on how to approach Tom because once he came into the picture it legitimized the idea and made it 1,000 times better, but with that came … is the Klan going to fireball your house? ….once this gets out there what is going to happen? Too much exposure could be a bad thing.

As I was filming Tom I wanted to treat him with a certain amount of respect. Mainly it could have been out of fear a little bit of who the man was so I shot him very beautifully and then we were editing it and.. the editor Hank Corwin (from Natural Born Killers, a phenomenal editor) said, “I like it Jeff, but it’s just… I know a lot about Tom Metzger and this guy is dangerous.” So we decided to make him a bit scary and have his point so much more impactful.We took the footage and back shot and ran it on a TV and then we shot it again with a video camera, to make it kind of raw and tough and a little more subversive. It was always the plan but in the initial shoot… we had a small crew, we did this very indiscreetly, we didn’t want any police around or anyone knowing the head of the Klan was there because….years ago he was sentenced to pay a substantial fine because he was accused of inciting a riot in Oregon in which two people were killed.

It was shot it in a trailer park in San Marino (Southern California) just because we wanted to be quietly discreet, didn’t want to draw a lot of attention. We shot it on 35mm, looked at it and felt like it needed to be a little rawer. The reason we shot it in 35 is because I wanted to capture his emotion and then have the latitude in post to make it feel like it’s otherworldly or trying to make (it) angrier or more brutal. It was much easier to shoot him in that than to bring in video camera, (where) we would not have had the depth.

We loaded the film backend in the TV and shot it using an 8mm camera; shot it directly back against the screen. The editor…brought a lot of those ideas.

MVWire: You had mentioned that the spot played at the Cannes Film Festival?

JL: When they received they (said)—and this is pretty much a literal quote, “It is a piece that exemplifies American culture better than any piece they had received.” Because it says so much about American society in 30 seconds.