It’s a Tough Job, but Somebody’s Got to Do It
To say that Axis deBruyn’s career path has been frenetic is like saying Bill Gates has a little money. Today, deBruyn owns his own company at the age of 36, and he has a gratifying career as a freelancer. We caught up with him to talk about how he got started in the industry, how he got through the dot-com bust, and how he found his niche in Las Vegas.
PLSN: You’re from the Bay Area; is that where you got started in the industry?
Axis deBruyn: Yeah. Basically, I got started in junior high school. [Laughs] I was the only student who knew how to run a Teac reel-to-reel tape recorder. That’s how they did their musicals — they had them on tape — and the kids sang along to the tape. Since my father was an AV enthusiast — he worked for Radio Shack — I actually knew how to cut and splice tape. Eventually, it ended up being where I would have a spotlight in one hand while I’d be pushing play on the Teac machine as well.
In high school, no one knew anything. I became the de facto technician. I was probably the only kid in high school who actually had keys to the building, so I could get into the building by myself on the weekends. Basically, the head facility person told me that if I broke anything, I would be the one fixing it anyway.
Because you were the only person who fixed gear?
Simultaneously, I was the head of the theatre, the audiovisual technician for the school, the DJ at all the dances, and every time a teacher had a problem with a VCR, I got pulled out of class.
It was funny because the school district didn’t have that many theatres, so I was actually paid to do shows at my high school. Like when they had the SATs, I was paid to open the theatre on Saturday and turn the lights on. So early on I thought, “This kind of works.”
Is that when you realized that there was a niche there?
Yeah.
Did you start working immediately after high school?
No, I went to college briefly. I went to Cal State Hayward, on the hill. Every summer they had an audition for their summer stock theatre, which is three shows, and of course, they needed technicians, too. So they had a High School Tech Olympics as part of their admissions process. I went up there representing my school for that; I won, and they basically enrolled me in the school right away. So, two days after graduating high school at age 17, I was stage-managing a show in college.
You literally started college immediately after high school?
Yeah. I had two-and-a-half years of college, but my grades were terrible because I was undisciplined. I was doing seven shows at the same time, plus outside events, and I was getting paid. I was always working while my fellow acting students weren’t. At that point, Governor Gray Davis ba-sically doubled the tuition at Cal State, and I couldn’t afford to go anymore. So I got hired by the Berkeley Repertory Theatre as their assistant technical director, right out of college at 20.
How long were you there?
I was there for one season. I was a bit young for them to hire, and I don’t think they realized it at the time. All the stage hands that I was, by de-fault, in charge of were in their 30s and 40s and weren’t too thrilled to listen to a 20-year-old kid telling them what to do. I also didn’t have any hy-draulic expertise, and that’s really what they needed because they started doing a lot of automated effects.
What did you do next?
I kind of got into the freelancing world and worked for several companies — Musson Theatrical being one of the main ones. They do a lot of theatre installs — probably more theatre installs than anybody in California. So anytime a district got a new high school or elementary school, I would go out and help install the main drape, the electrics and make sure all the instruments were focused. I was primarily a technician in the shop, pulling lighting orders. Eventually, it would be, “Hey this client needs an LD for their church show. You’ve got a budget of five grand, so pull what you need and go take care of it.”
Did you have control over the shows you were doing?
Pretty much; it was just on the cusp of moving lights, and they had just gotten (High End Systems) Intellabeams. I was the only shop kid who knew how to use them because the old-timers were still programming on (ETC) Expressions.
For how long did you do that?
Well, I worked for several other companies as well. Recession hit the area in ’91 and ’92, and they had some lay-offs. So I did freelance work for some concert companies and primarily worked the B-circuit — state fairs and such.
That could be a great experience.
For a 24-year-old kid, it was great. You get thrown the keys to the truck, and (you’re told) to come back in a month and bring back the cash.
What’s the oddest thing that happened to you while you were doing that?
I did the last Selena tour before she died, and it was her, Gloria Trevi and Enrique Iglesias. It was a U.S. Western leg from Oregon down to San Di-ego, and San Diego was the last part of the tour. The Mexican promoter handed me — in front of the crewmember, who were sketchy at best — $30,000 in cash, in mostly ones and fives. So I had this paper bag with $30,000 in cash, and I was like, “Great. I’m not making it back out to the truck.” [Laughs]
You must have learned a lot doing that.
When you have no other resources, you learn to do it yourself.
I agree. When did you switch over to doing industrials?
A start-up company called New Dimensions out of San Francisco hired me. They were doing mostly Chinese music acts because they were a Chi-nese-owned company. But they also did movies because they were partners with this company, Phoebus Lighting in San Francisco, who at the time didn’t own any moving lights. They were primarily an all-Martin house — they had the Roboscan 1220s and PALs — and they hired me right away to do the movie Striptease in Florida for about three months. It was tough, let me tell you, surrounded by strippers all day and lighting a na-ked Demi Moore. [Laughs]
From there, I went to a huge rock show in Hong Kong. That was a 400-unit moving light show, primarily all Martin, with no conventionals whatso-ever. That show ran for 28 straight days, literally, because they didn’t tour in China at that time. The roads were bad, and the flights weren’t much better. I ended up doing a few of these shows in China.
They also started to get corporate work because they were right down the street from the Moscone Center. They saw an opportunity to start doing trade shows, and it quickly became 80% of our work. I became their trade show specialist, and then production manager; I did that for a year-and-a-half or so. I then went back to Musson and did trade shows for them for about another year-and-a-half, and basically, that’s all I did for them. That was part of the boom in ’98 and ’99, when trade shows got huge. Most of our clients were all dot-coms — Intel, 3Com, Cisco — and they all had huge booths and a massive presence on the show floor.
From there, an AV company that was providing the same kind of booths, decided that rather than giving the margins away, they would do it them-selves. They hired me to run their lighting division and gave me a budget of about a half million dollars to buy gear. I bought the gear and did that for two years, until the dot-com bust. It almost killed the company, and they went from 101 employees down to 24 almost overnight. The height of my work with that company was at Comdex in 2001 where I designed 22 booths.
How do you design 22 booths and make them all look different?
The bigger booths would have more of a (branding) scene with a marketing company involved. Plus, most of them would keep the same rig from year to year. The smaller ones were mostly graphic and product lighting.
How long did it take you to get ready for that show?
That show was almost a month of prep to get everything prepped and partitioned in the shop. We’d load trailers and store them in the lot. Also, we had to subrent a lot of gear, and I’d go and make sure that those systems were prepped as well.
Up to this point, it seems that your career has been about overcoming adversity and forging your own path. When did you decide to start your own company?
Basically, I was laid off a month before 9/11. Because I’d been to Vegas so many times, I had a lot of contacts there. In the Bay Area, the dot-com bust was huge, and it put a lot companies out of business. So there was no work there, and that’s when I began freelancing in Vegas.
My wife, Sarah O’Connell-deBruyn, is a theatre director. San Francisco has the artistic scene she wanted, and Vegas does not. Eventually, she came around to thinking there wasn’t a choice. So we moved to Vegas. She took over a small theatre company and grew that into a bigger opportu-nity. Now, she’s a professor at a college, and I light all her shows there.
Do you think you have found your niche in Vegas?
Now, I have a really balanced career, and I really like it. I just got off a couple of tours — I did Pearl Jam with LD Kille Knoble this summer in Europe, where I was the systems engineer and festival operator, and then I was just a programmer on several legs of Elton John’s U.S. tour for LD Kevin “Stick” Bye, including (Elton’s) 60th birthday show at Madison Square Garden. With the industrial shows I do all the time here in the con-vention center and various ballrooms, I have balance; I do rock ‘n’ roll, I do corporate, I do trade shows and, through my wife, I do legit theatre. I do all four branches of lighting at the same time.
Sounds like a lighting dream.
[Laughs] When I can sleep!
