Member Profile: Jim Cypher Written by Lisa Smith

I watched SCAT fairly regularly. I was working two jobs, and joining SCAT was on the top of my list of things to do once I had some free time,” SCAT member Jim Cypher recollects. He was motivated to join when, he says, “I was hanging out with creative people and one of them made a video for CCTV (the community access television in Cambridge) called The King of Records about a character who sold used records. It was made on a budget of about zero dollars.” Jim was encouraged by how good this video was, and it broke him out of his “perfection fallacy” mindset he describes as “paralyzing. If what I was doing wasn’t perfect, then it isn’t good.” Joining SCAT, he decided to create something that might not be perfect, but he was going to do something he liked and made him happy. Thus Jim’s alter ego, Joey Daytona, was born.

Jim, a vintage car and hot rod enthusiast, attends car shows and car races throughout the Northeast. He videotapes the events and the people he meets, then edits the footage for his show, Joey Daytona’s World of Adventure. Under a deadline to produce a show, “I got in this mode of producing, shooting and editing by myself, and it couldn’t be perfect!”

Jim enjoys producing his show. He can be true to his vision, and he doesn’t have to bother to coordinate with other people. “Sometimes working with other people is like herding cats,” Jim says with a laugh. “I learned all aspects of production— the lighting, sound. And sometimes you end up with happy mistakes.” When asked for an example, he volunteered an editing experience, “I must have made a subconscious juxtaposition of shots. When people saw it, they laughed. I didn’t realize it would be funny when I edited the show.”

Sometimes people ask why he doesn’t add commentary to the show. He explains, “I let the viewer filter the message rather than having a running monologue telling them what is what. The pictures tell the story. I think the SCAT audience is intelligent, and they can draw their own conclusions.”

Joey Daytona’s World of Adventure is on hiatus because, Jim explains, “there isn’t much going on in racing in this part of the country, so I took the winter off.” Meanwhile, he decided to produce a Hot Set show. He reasons, half jokingly, “I wanted to use the bully pulpit of a live call-in show to create something I wanted to see.” The immediate feedback from a live audience is what drew him to Joey Daytona Live. His image only seen in the glass reflection in the Hot Set window, Jim describes it as, ”a multi-media show. The music is strange and off beat, and I switch between the copy stand with images, the camera, and pre-taped video. It’s a little dizzying. I keep it going even if there are no calls.” He calls it ADD (attention deficit disorder) TV.

Although he scoffs at celebrity, Jim was delighted one day as he was walking across the parking lot of Johnnie’s Foodmaster. Jim heard someone yell “Joey”, and he thought nothing of it and kept walking. The man yelled “Joey” a second time, and that’s when Jim realized the man was yelling to him. Jim stopped to talk to the man who said he liked Jim’s show. “I was flattered!”

In 2002, Jim produced a poignant short video entitled Going To Shanksville, about his experiences during his trip to Shanksville, Pennsylvania for the one year anniversary of the crash of flight 93 on September 11th, 2001. He recalls, “It was emotionally draining. I took the heroism of flight 93 to heart. The video was an afterthought. I only brought a still camera to the memorial. (He didn’t bring a video camera out of respect to the people who were mourning.) I didn’t like the way the media was putting their cameras into the faces of the people who were crying. It was undignified.” He feels that the media went in already knowing the story that they were going to get. “Television has only one angle on a story now,” he says with a bit of disgust. Incidentally, Jim shared his heartfelt experiences while in Shanksville with the Somerville community live via telephone for SCAT’s A Community’s Response to September 11th.

When asked if being a member of SCAT has lived up to his expectations, Jim says, “Yes! And then some! I love the people—the members, the staff, and the kooky people who walk by the HOT Set window and wave ‘Hi’.”

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