With a Hi-8 camcorder strapped to his helmet, 31-year-old bike messenger turned documentarian Chip Williams spent the fall of 1992 crafting a 22-minute video that portrays a trio of his coworkers as eloquent peripatetics rather than two-wheeled vectors of disaster. Going beyond it-takes-one-to-know-one, Concrete Rodeo delivers the dizzy itineraries of messengers threading the Loop and offers insights into their maligned maverick subculture.
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“It’s a service industry,” explains Curt, a messenger who wears a red beret sporting a Boy Scout insignia. “By definition we’re servants and we’re treated as such.” But it’s not all bad: “It’s sexy. It’s the closest I’ll ever be to being a rock ‘n’ roll star. That’s what suckered me in, in the beginning.” With theatrical flair, he poses a syllabuslike list of pseudo-ponderous inquiries: “Am I avoiding preparing for a future by living exclusively in the now? Am I avoiding adulthood? Am I–as bike boy–a boy eternal? Is this job going to kill me or is it going to keep me young forever?”
Concrete Rodeo emerged from the wreckage of Williams’s forays into writing a movie script for his master’s project at Columbia College. Employing bike messengers as his characters, he said he was going for “a French existential story–kind of like Pickpocket meets The Bicycle Thief.” Then one day as he got on his bike to go to work, the solution hit him like a CTA bus–why not do a documentary?
