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The musician was an unheard-of Canadian teenager who had come to New York for the day but forgot her guitar.
The filmmaker was an unknown hired by the kid’s record label to follow her as she performed for passersby on the city’s street corners and subway trains.
Their job was to collect footage that would be edited into a 10-minute video — known as an electronic press kit, or EPK — introducing music media around the world to pop star Avril Lavigne.
But first, they needed to stop at Sam Ash to buy a new guitar, recalls the South Philly native behind the camera that day about two years ago, known professionally as Cline.
"[Lavigne] made 16 bucks in a five-minute ride on the subway," Cline says, and the filmmaker hitched a ride with a rising star. Lavigne’s first album, Let Go, debuted last June and has gone multi-platinum.
"Avril was a big break for me," Cline says. "She was the artist that blew up that I was attached to. So my work got out there."
During that trip to New York, Cline also shot the photos of the singer, now 18 years old, used for the album’s artwork and another photo that became a billboard in Times Square.
Later, Cline convinced Lavigne’s label, Arista Records, to hire her to tag along on the musician’s first world tour and film a documentary chronicling her climb to the top of the pop charts. An hour’s worth of that footage was edited into a TV special titled Anything but Ordinary that debuted June 8 on ABC Family. (It will air again Saturday, 5 p.m.)
An extended version, also directed and produced by Cline, likely will be released on DVD in November to coincide with the arrival of Lavigne’s second album.
Cline grew up near 15th and Mifflin streets and attended St. Maria Goretti High School. She was born Caroline Germanovic, although for the last nine years she has been better known as Caroline Mayo — or simply Cline. The last name came from her grandmother, a former Vaudeville performer who shortened her surname from DeMayo to Mayo for the stage. The name Cline originated from her older sister and cousin who had difficulty pronouncing "Caroline" when they were little.
As a child she loved movies — whether it was watching the home movies her grandfather shot with his Super-8 camera, or staying up all night with her brother Butch and sister Jeannine watching old movies in her mother’s bedroom.
"I remember seeing A Clockwork Orange when I was like 9," Cline says. "That’s not a movie you really show your children, but I love my mother [Joanna DeTore] for doing that and just exposing us to everything."
Cline says her early success has been exciting, but at the same time she remains driven by greater goals. She feels she must maintain that focus, especially as a female working in a male-dominated industry.
"It is really difficult being a strong woman, being intelligent, having talent and having looks," Cline says. "Men don’t know how to process all of that. They don’t know if they should be picking me up or listening to my ideas, and it’s hard in the beginning.
"Then the women are even worse because they are threatened by you," she adds.
The filmmaker revealed she was in her 30s but refused to give her exact age for similar reasons.
When someone finds out Cline is in her 30s, they usually want to know what she was doing during her 20s. That uncovers another issue, another stereotype she feels she must overcome.
Cline worked as a model for six years, starting when she was 19 and was begrudgingly convinced by her boyfriend, Albert Colanzi, to go to the John Robert Powers modeling school in Center City.
"I remember crying," she says. "I didn’t want to get out of the car."
But she did, and the agency entered her in a contest in which she won a $20,000 contract to model in Japan.
Cline modeled around the world for six years, but says she liked it only for the first year.
She had already been thinking of quitting when Colanzi was killed in a car accident on North Delaware Avenue on Halloween night, 1991. Cline had been working in Los Angeles at the time and received the call from her mom at 6:30 a.m.
She lived in Los Angeles for two years before moving back to Philadelphia and convincing John Robert Powers to hire her to teach a runway modeling class.
Cline moved to New York in 1996 and found a job as a receptionist for Warner Bros. Records, despite that she lacked the basic skills required for the job, like how to make copies or send faxes.
She figured the job would teach her about the music industry and introduce her to the important players. And for three years, it did.
She met the company executives and the publicists for the label’s major musicians, like Madonna. She used to study the electronic press kits the publicists delivered to the office, teaching herself how to write press releases and getting ideas to film her own publicity videos, like the one she did for Lavigne.
Cline quit Warner Bros. to become a personal assistant for R&B; singer Maxwell. She toured with the singer for eight months. One of her responsibilities, she says, was to film each concert so Maxwell could study his performance.
Those clips, plus some of the bands she had filmed at nightclubs, became her portfolio. Chris Schwartz, CEO of Philly-based RuffHouse Records (now RuffNation Records), hired Cline to do a low-budget EPK for one of his artists.
Schwartz was impressed with her work and introduced her to people at Arista Records, who later hired her to work with Lavigne.
This week, Cline was in New York editing footage for an EPK and a music video for a white female Australian rapper named Jesse Moss. Cline describes her as "Feminem."
Next week she will be back at work in Los Angeles, where she shares a home with her brother — a DJ and an aspiring actor.
By late November, she expects to finish a side project she is working on titled Pashunk: South Philly Stories. She is funding the feature — a documentary that follows the lives of several South Philadelphians — and has been working on it for six years.
"No one can capture this the way a girl from South Philly can," Cline says. "People are going to be proud to be from there, and other people who aren’t from there will want to go there and see it and be a part of it."
Among the stories that likely will make the final cut is the plight of Janet Cedrone, daughter of guitarist Danny Cedrone, to get a gold record for her father. Danny played on Bill Haley’s hit song Rock around the Clock. He fell down the stairs in his house, broke his neck and died just before the song was released.
Another vignette features a "big marquee name attached to the Mafia" whom Cline will not yet reveal.
The documentary will appear at film festivals next year.
Cline also plans to create films that are not documentaries. She already has the first two parts of what she says will be an "epic" three-part trilogy mapped out in her head. She wants to make "films that touch people, the kind of movies that your hair stands up on your arms."
"I’m going to be a troublemaker," Cline says. "As a filmmaker, people are going to hate me … the government is not going to like me and the Pope probably won’t, either."
