Suppose you lose your house to the bank, but before you leave the keys on the counter, you invite scores of artists into your home.

Suppose they show up.

For 28 days, strangers dance, paint, sing, weld, drum, drape, read, record and hang out in every room of your house.

Suppose you film these goings-on, including the moment when a young couple took a bubble bath while doing their taxes.

Suppose you anger your wife and neighbors.

What have you done?

You've turned your life into a giant performance-art spectacle, Portland style.

Charles Wittenmeier, 44,

is a TV ad director who captured the 1990s go-go consumerism with award-winning commercials while enjoying L.A.'s luxe life. Millions of people have chuckled at his Super Bowl ads for Coke and Budweiser. He's won awards at film festivals in Cannes and London, and his work is in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art.

But when the spending spree ended in 2001, his career tanked, so he bailed on Los Angeles and bought a $1 million house on the slopes of Mount Tabor. Work never picked up, he made some bad investments, and five years later, he lost his one-of-a-kind house. Now, he and his wife are divorcing.

It's as if some cosmic director called "Cut!"

But not Wittenmeier. For 28 days in May, up until the final hours before the bank took his house, this colorful, media-savvy guy did what he does best: Using his house as a "set," he found the talent, hired a co-producer and watched his creation unfold for the camera. Artists, mostly in their 20s and 30s, some unemployed, filled his house day and night. A friend, Jordan Kinley, 23, became another producer, using Into the Woods, a company known for making videos of local bands. No one got paid.

All the activity in the house, except maybe the drinking and casual drug-taking, was videotaped. Sometimes audiences watched, sometimes no one did.

Was it a joke?

No, Wittenmeier said, even though he conceived the idea on April Fools' Day.

Sitting alone in the empty house after his wife moved out, he realized his life had become a line in aTalking Heads song: "How did I get here?"

"The house had become silent," he said. "Deafening silence. I said, 'This cannot end this sad way. Open it up, use the house to celebrate the space.'"

The story of a successful director who loses everything fascinated Kinley. Watching Wittenmeier fill his upscale house with cash-strapped, idealistic artists added another layer to the story. "His life is an example of the larger issues of advertising," Kinley said, suggesting that the film could be seen as a cautionary tale.

Wittenmeier was something of a prodigy ad director, if such a thing exists, creating his first spot at 21 and joining the Directors Guild of America two years later. His quirky take on consumerism influenced the aesthetic of TV advertising in the '90s. "I took to it, and I burned out," he said. "It's a fickle business. I never said advertising is evil, but as Americans, we've been sold a bill of goods, and I helped sell it."

"This was a super-stressful thing for him," Kinley said. "He was making six, seven figures since he was in his 20s. He thought the money would keep coming. Now, he's forced to deal with a reality that he missed."

Wittenmeier loved his wood-and-stone house, he said. For almost 100 years, it has clung to the north side of Mount Tabor, with views of downtown and Mount St. Helens. Previous owners have tended it well, judging by the gleaming hardwood floors, leaded-glass bookshelves, beamed ceilings and Rapunzel-friendly casement windows.

But when love leaves, the feeling of home leaves, too.

The rooms emptied, the warmth cooled, children's voices faded. The Wittenmeiers tried to refinance. No go. Assessed at $1.2 million, the house cost $100,000 a year to maintain. With the impending divorce, they put the house on the market, where it sat for eight months. No offers came, so they walked away.

We all move on. At best, we are stewards of our houses, brushing on new colors, repairing fixtures, planting gardens. When it's time to go, we take our memories with us. Wittenmeier will have some unusual ones.

"Could I have saved the house? Possibly," he said. "Would it have been the dumbest thing? Probably."

The neighbors were not amused by the loud music and comings and goings, fearing a commune had moved into their upscale neighborhood. Most unhappy was Juli Wittenmeier, Charles' wife. She felt that her house was under siege, that strangers had turned private loss into public spectacle, she said.

"I would have preferred to endure this process in private and without throngs of people and accompanying publicity that have invaded this time in my life," she wrote in an e-mail. "To say that I am disheartened by the disrespect shown to this home is an extreme understatement."

As the project began, activities at the house were loose and unstructured. A makeshift production company formed to stream live music from the living room to the Web. The team included Miliken Gardner, an audio engineer, who used money he'd saved for traveling this summer, and Jeff Hylton Simmons, a Web broadcaster Kinley met through Twitter.

Local artist Chris Haberman curated the visual arts activity, inviting 75 artists, including a Web developer from Brooklyn, N.Y., to collaborate and use materials they found at the mostly empty house. A few people slept there. People took turns buying food.

But as the neighbors' and Juli Wittenmeier's displeasure grew, the rules changed. "Charles and I agreed that the music should stop at 7 or 8 p.m.," she said. "I knew the neighbors had been calling the police and filing noise complaints as well as having parking issues. When we made the agreement to take down some of the art, we also agreed to stop the music earlier. Also to try and curb the 'party house' atmosphere."

Charles Wittenmeier, a stocky man who speaks quickly and bluntly in Hollywood shorthand, said he understands his wife's feelings but believed the artists' work had merit. "They're educated musicians and artists, they have interesting ideas, they understand new media," he said. "I'm a student myself."

One of the artists was Walt Curtis, a well-known Portland poet. One Saturday, his hair wild with excitement, he filled a bedroom with his rowdy voice, a glass of wine at his feet. Curtis, 68, is the author of the autobiographical "Mala Noche," which director Gus Van Sant turned into a 1985 film. Feisty and jovial, Curtis enjoys the spotlight, having shared the stage with other beat generation writers -- Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Ken Kesey.

"The dream burns away, nothing remains except ashes and the rain," he read loudly from a yellowing page. He stomped the floor and stabbed the air with a finger while Dusty Santamaria strummed blues chords and three videographers recorded the scene. A dozen people watched.

In another bedroom, spectators sat on the floor to hear a guitarist and accordion accompany a puppet show. Actors spoke verses from "The Prophet" about love, joy, sorrow, children and houses. Overhead, Luna Littleleaf, 20, had hung dozens of pieces of lace, turning the room into a cocoon.

It could have been a '60s flashback.

Ding. A bell rang.

"Speak to us of love," intoned a puppet with Einstein hair. ".. Your house shall not be an anchor but a mast ... Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself ... Your house shall not hold your secret nor shelter your longing."

Forty years ago, "The Prophet" was a handbook of the counterculture. Today, it seems just as potent for young people like Littleleaf, a tall, earnest woman with soft brown eyes. "The Prophet" is her favorite book, she said, revealing a quote from it tattooed on her foot.

After the show, the '60s vibe continued when two guys sang Bob Dylan's "Lay Lady Lay."

As May progressed, the house turned into something no one expected: a battleground. Charles kept his three children, ages 5 to 9, away from the house; he shares parenting duties with his wife. But the artists, caught in the middle, responded to the tension between the owners in their own ways.

"We're all stuck in Charles and Juli's divorce," said artist Tim Combs, 42. "The context of this place is inseparable. Every day, events influence what's going on here -- conversations, who gets to do art, how do we keep them happy to continue. We're sucked into the nostalgia of their stuff left behind, the tension of what can we use, how do we deal with the events, how are people reacting. A couple of days go by, and some event causes things to change."

Fittingly, Combs chose transitions for the theme of his installation in the side yard. He found three branches from a downed tree on the property and anchored them in the earth, their cuts raw and exposed. Pink rhododendron blossoms blanketed the ground around the branches, which resembled stick people and represented Mother, Dad and Kids, he said. He called it "Running Forward, Looking Back."

It's a metaphor for change, he said. "This is rooted in the day, light changes, cold colors to warm colors, the sun moves, but this stays. The father is making sure the kid is doing OK."

Kinley and his crew shot 450 hours of footage. It will take him seven or eight months to edit, after which he hopes to submit the film to festivals, perhaps South by Southwest, a notable film and music festival in Austin, Texas. A book and an album could emerge, too.

Juli Wittenmeier probably won't watch it.

"I really wanted the whole project to stop," she wrote after the project ended, "but the part that Charles was truly excited about was the music. I wanted him to be able to create what he wanted without just throwing everything away. I felt that most of the other art was mediocre at best and I think he agreed. I think the project was getting away from him. He was happy to have me be the 'bad guy.' I did feel like they were destroying the property and taking advantage of a beautiful setting, as well as taking advantage of Charles' best intentions. I wanted the whole thing out, but had to compromise. If he could finish the music part then everyone else would get out.

"Just one last thing -- for all of their talk of doing something positive in the house, in the end they left it filthy. Full of trash and bad art that they didn't even want. Showers broken, toilets clogged. They left Charles to clean up the mess. Nice 'artists.'"

Charles Wittenmeier downplayed the problems. "Possibly there were some people who took advantage, but I made sure it got cleaned," he said. "The shower was broken when we lived there."

Ultimately, it wasn't about the art, whether it was good or not, Kinley said. "It was about the doing. The final outcome didn't matter."

Charles Wittenmeier didn't like all of the art, but nothing made him cringe. "We never said it was the Tate. Who cares, and who knows? Some of it isn't great, but some is."

He's not proud of losing the house, the divorce or the mounting bills, he said. He'll stay in Portland, where he's renting a house down the street near his kids' school. But at least for a while, he found a way to turn sadness into something else.

"I met people I would not have. Little pockets of inspiration and trepidation. I'll have a huge electric bill, but other than that, it's the cheapest film ever made."

Was it worth it?

"It added some closure," he said. "I still stand by my initial idea. I'd do it again. I had no expectations. All I was concerned about was that no one got hurt. I'm happy I got to see some performers I never would have got to see. I met some artists who were committed -- I'm trying to be more committed in my work. No regrets."

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