The battle with Bloomberg was my gateway drug. I wanted another hit. A bigger hit. Seth and I both craved another splash in the media, and we wanted to do it on a grander scale
“You should tag Mount Rushmore!” Seth suggested
“The White House!”
“The New York Stock Exchange?”
We hired a blue-chip film, TV, video, and commercial production company called Smuggler to lead the charge on our next target. They brought in a hot- shot named David Droga, who looked a little like Bono’s lost brother. He came to our first meeting with a picture of Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, as seen on Google Earth
“Gents,” David said in his brash Australian accent, pointing, “this is the home of Air Force One.”
Tag the president’s plane? The idea had such an allure. And what better nemesis could we have than George W. Bush? The well-past-9/11, sloppy, overarching, “mission- accomplished” George Bush. He had an approval rating of something like 3 percent. We would tag it with “Still Free,” which, on a literal level, was the tagging of the lead characters graffiti crew in Getting Up, but it clearly had broader and deeper resonance
Just looking at that image gave me goose bumps
“There’s a golf course next to the base.” Droga pointed to the map, like a general in combat. “The weakness is on the perimeter. That’s our entrance.”
Our lawyer was in the room, and his face went ashen. “This could get you thrown in jail.”
“It’s just a hoax,” I said
“Marc, they shoot people for ‘hoaxes.’ Look at the Patriot Act. This is a bad idea.”
My PR guy, Ken Sunshine, said, “I’m going to sit this one out.”
It’s too bad, because they missed a fun ride. My lawyer was only partially relieved that we weren’t actually painting Air Force One—we faked it. We found a private airport that flew freight 747s out of San Bernardino, California. So we rented a 747 and painted one side of it to look like Air Force One; the other half still had “Joe’s Freight” or whatever on it. We filmed actual footage of the perimeter in Maryland, we filmed us approaching the freeway, and then we filmed the rest of the footage in San Bernardino
For a split second, we thought about tagging the actual Air Force One, but we knew that would be impossible. You can’t do it. The real Air Force One has a rope on the runway that encircles the plane, and if you cross that rope, you get shot. We debated on whether to include that detail in our video
“The cops should be shooting at you!”
“And then you return fire!”
“That’s not the vibe,” I said, laughing, knowing that if we had Schwarzenegger-type gunfire, it would look corny at best and like a terrorist video at worst. Besides, almost no one knew about the rope
We did everything under a veil of secrecy, swearing our crew to silence. The entire thing felt rebellious, wrong, and intoxicating. On the night of the stunt, in the middle of production, as we shot the scene where we cut through the chain-link fence, a police chopper suddenly flew overhead
Oh shit. The chopper flew circles in the darkness and then shined a spotlight on Air Force One. Soon another chopper appeared; they probably thought that Air Force One had been grounded, and that it was a national emergency. The whole night had the thrill of danger
Staring at the choppers, I reached quickly for my phone, dialing the owners of the runway. “You need to call the police!” I yelled. “Tell them that this is part of a movie production!”
Soon the choppers floated away. (Since we were only an hour from Hollywood, they bought the whole movie thing.) We filmed until dawn, my team did some digital voodoo in postproduction, and we actually worked hard to make the video look cheaper, grittier. Thanks to Google Earth, we had a perfect rendering of the Andrews base hanger, so we used computer-generated imagery CGI to overlay it onto our video. That’s why when the video went viral, most of the experts thought it was real—they recognized the hanger
CNN had Wolf Blitzer reporting on the story. The US Air Force even thought that the plane might have been compromised, as Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Alexander, a spokesman for the Air Mobility Command’s Eighty-Ninth Airlift Wing, told the press, “We’re looking into it.” And soon, once the media traced it to me, my name popped up on TV show after TV show—starting to fulfill the promise of “Marc Ecko in 2010.”
We got lucky with the timing. YouTube 2006 was a different creature from YouTube 2013. Back then, most of the videos were either overly produced ad agency stuff, or user-generated content, like dancing kittens. Viral videos were still an immature medium, and we exploited that
More importantly, more than any hoodie or T-shirt, or big splashy outdoor advertising, for that matter, this helped make people feel something. It was the right time, the right place, the right nemesis, the right conversation. It wasn’t about Getting Up or Marc Eck
