In September 1970, Parks became head of the audio/visual department of Warner Bros. records. This department was the earliest of its kind to record videos to promote records. Parks made the department up by himself and had few employees at Warner Bros. Together they made more than a dozen promotional films documenting artists including Ry Cooder, Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Captain Beefheart. They were by nature documentary films, which could be rented or bought by any accredited music school. Parks later described the department as "promotional—but they could create an income stream for musicians who were hard-pushed into tours that required drugs to sustain them." Although each production ran for about ten minutes and required at least $18,500 to create, one exception was a video for the Esso Trinidad Steel Band, which ran about forty minutes. It also happens to be one of two films known by Parks to have survived since then, the other being a promotional video for Ry Cooder.