PORTLAND
THE PILOT
Searching for the Motherlode
The Portland pilot sizzle reel · Watch on YouTube
SEARCHING FOR THE MOTHERLODE
In 2013, we took a ragtag production crew to Portland, Maine, to find out whether “Searching for the Motherlode” would work outside our own heads. The idea was two guys in a van, following leads to musicians, hearing their songs and finding out how they wound up doing what they do. I was in Provincetown, Portland was within reach, and I already had connections through bands I’d booked into Boston clubs and musicians who had settled up there. We had somewhere to start.
We found a whole lotta good songs. Each introduction opened another door, and the people we met gave us more reasons to keep looking. That was the premise we had come to test: could we arrive somewhere, follow the musical connections and come back with something worth sharing?
The sizzle reel was our answer. We distilled the Portland footage into a pitch for a television series and sent it out, hoping somebody would see what we saw. It captures the early version of the search—the songs, the people and the possibility that the next introduction might lead to something extraordinary. Before the Key West-to-Fort Kent expedition, Portland gave us a way to show what searching for the motherlode could look and sound like.
