Out-there-a-stan

The Beirut story is long and complicated. Yes there were bombs going off... in the suburbs. Yes I was pretty much required to go back to my hotel every night and stay there and watch the Discovery channel and eat Fatoush. Yes the lovely folks at the production company did have an office pool regarding which neighborhood would be bombed next. Yes Moneer the Egyptian creative director who is based in Dubai with the agency refused to shoot in Beirut. At one point the shoot was cancelled, then was to be moved to Kuala Lampur (?!) then Moneer was instructed to not be such a wussy by his boss, strap himself into his flack jacket and get his hiney over to Lebanon. Yes I saw Dubai and was completely freaked out. Beirut is on the radar but Dubai... what hath Allah wrought?

The big questions is why? Why did I do it? Why is there Dubai? Why are people seemingly so intent on screwing up things?

Answers:

1. Well it just happened. I got these really strange boards via email and the next thing you know I was booked. And I needed the job. And I think I have this strange desire to see odd places in the world and in general I like people and am fascinated by other cultures. It is probably related to eating camel and living with the Saharawi.

2. You got me. But I think it has something to do with pure unfettered evil. Greed. Exploitation. Insanity. All the big corporations are there. There is the world's biggest indoor ski area. The biggest market in the world for private submarines. It is usually 50 degrees. The sun is eternally behind this wall of white that is in fact the sea boiling away. Inside buildings, cars... it's proudly 15 degrees. The brown skinned people who are building Dubai are for the most part slaves. They hold their passports. They do not have the benefit of air conditioned Mercedes SUVs. Its like working on Mercury. Why? Tax free zones? No workers rights? Big bucks? Swank restaurants? Starbucks? Ample cheap big screens?

3. In general I don't see this in kids... well most kids... It seems to be a something we think is required of as adults. Table alignment and fork placement. Believing in a concrete definition of God. Killing people because they think that eating with your left hand is the sign of the devil or that the holy ghost did or did not impregnate the mother of God's son... which is a conceptual problem because I count 3 separate deities and what is supposed to set the world's largest religion apart from tree fornicating pagans is that it's monotheistic.

Being waste deep in advertising I have come to see that most of these big international mega-corporations do not care squat about anything other than the quarterly returns. It's not like everybody who works for them are blood thirsty capitalist with horns and tails. Its just people with families and responsibilities who need a job and have been conned into thinking that this is the right path. Heck I have derived my income for longer than I care to admit on these various entities. (See the answer to question one for a clearer description.)

We have got to carve out a different path for our kids. My 7 year old daughter's school has offered her Chinese lessons. She is taking them because she wants to learn another language but the school is not offering them so she can hang out with Chinese folks and better understand dim sum, the school is offering them because "its' the future". Well it's a future that I don't want to go to. Sweat shops cranking out more and more crap for Wall Mart. Phony pharmaceuticals that kill people. Zilch environmental concerns. Human rights? What's that compared to a DVD player for 20 bucks? Why are we turning a blind eye to this stuff. Why is the world not looking at Dubai and cringing?

It's taken a while for the Beirut job to sink in. While I was there I never had one moment that I felt unsafe. I had grave doubts about doing a spot for a powdered soft drink for the Saudi's because the agency and client think it would be just the thing to compliment the pre and post daylight gorging that goes on during Ramadan there. But I felt like I was on adventure. I felt lucky to be seeing a place like Beirut up close and personal. I loved the crew and still miss them. The Lebanese are absolutely amazing and lovely people. But now a couple of month's later I really don't know what the hell I was doing. It was dangerous. There were really bombs. The army was on seemingly every street corner. I got frisked on the hood of car by a young soldier with a machine gun.

What's odd though is that I'd go back to Beirut in a heartbeat. There is something about the place and the people. It's a dark and perhaps dangerous intoxication. Here are links to my flickr accounts and some pictures I shot on my cel phone or DV camera.
Beirut
Dubai

Tang in the desert part 2

Well Lebanon is in no way in the desert. It´s lush and truly beautiful which only makes the "situation" there even more ironic.

Since I have returned the "situation" has only gotten worse. I picked up the paper yesterday to see front page photos of UN "peacekeepers" all of them from my adopted country frantically dragging a wounded or dead comrade away from out of focus flaming rubble. Yeah "the situation" is mostly "in the south" but considering that the country is, accordng to the CIA fact book, 4/5th the size of Connecticut, that's sort of like saying that it´s over there just past Ikea or Walmart. And considering that a few bombs went off "in the suburbs" of Beirut while I was there I guess the notion of down there "in the south" had moved a pretty close to home.

Mas tarde...

This just in... Breakfast drink commercial director held hostage by HezBullah...

Folks. A strange turn of events. I thought I was going to Lebanon, Oregon, not Lebanon... Lebanon. So I am in Beirut. Staying at a hotel, listening to somebody saw concrete in the next building which sounds exactly like somebody sawing concrete in the next building back home in Barcelona. The big news is that first day here featured according to CNN, "The Worst day of urban warfare in the last 30 years." remember... Beirut... the 70s... Civil War? Ouch.

Why am I in Beirut? Well I met a girl... no seriously... I met a boy. A boy named Gary. Gary reps me for places other than Germany and Spain and Belgium. Belgium... No that's not right, Belgium is available again. Gary is a great guy. Gary is a Scot. Which usually, in my book, automatically means great guy.

So I get on of Gary's calls. let me be clear about this, in a business seemingly teaming with scoundrels, nare-do-wells, charlatans and posers Gary is a true gentleman. OK he's not one of those prissy kind of gentlemen with lacquered nails and an extended pinky finger he's a Scottish gentleman. Which means that he waxes poetic, tells great stories, turns a phrase with exquisite delicacy is straight as a ruler and I suspect, drinks.

So he says he has some boards. Great! I say as slunk around trying to be a proper father, husband, adult white male and not freak out as the old financial gas tank hovers just slightly above reserve. May I send you an animatic? Sure I say. An animatic is this thing that agencies use to work out exactly how they will steal an idea they got from a Argentinean spot from 1982. But seriously an animatic is sort of an crudely animated series of drawings that the agency uses to convince the "Client" the guys who make the stuff and want to sell the stuff that their idea is sound and has a high enough percentage of frames in it that include the label of the stuff (roughly 97.672). Gary has always had huge problems with the Internet. I have no idea why but things like the provider's server suddenly goes down for 3 weeks because somebody plugged in the salad spinner and the hairdryer at the same time or some balkan trojan horse viral CPU suckering worm has run rampant through deepest reaches of their backplane, bootstrap, USB, ISO 12-0067(a) and caused a CRT, CPR, EEG heap panic. All I know is that it takes awhile to get things and that Gary has on occasion sent me screen shots proving that he indeed did send me a note telling me that the Latvian spot for a combination douche and hair removing product has gone to a Chilean Porn director solely because he said he would fly economy and promised not raid the mini-bar.

So days pass, Gary's ISP gets another hamster for the server and I get this really weird little movie. It has guys wearing funny clothes and speaking this strange language. I don't know what the hell it is. So it turns out it's a spot from an production company from Lebanon and their client and agency in Dubai and there stuff to sell... "Tang." To be continued...

Revisiting the Velvet Bowels of Advertising Part 7: Oregon Lottery Poet and Chuck

So here are parts 2 and 3 of a Oregon Lottery Campaign. Again I now marvel at the writing. Well I marveled then but "then" I didn't much to compare it to. Pretty much everything was of a similar caliber of shall we call it "genius."

Come on, a grease monkey taking his lottery winnings and building a time machine to visit Lewis and Clark... and Chuck? A "Hotdog on a Stick" girl writes a poem about her trip to France in a Dodge? These days most things are so beat up by the process that the good ideas have been hunted down and strung by their petards long before they get to me. Whatever spark is left is yanked out by it's roots either at the preproduction meeting, on the shoot, in the edit or the dreaded post post nether-world where the wife of the brother in law of the secretary of the brand manager from the Andorran district office gets to say that they don't like the left eyebrow of the extra who 50 feet behind the talent and is on scene for 3 frames... and thanks to the lack of balls, hutzpah, guts, fear of not getting paid, call it what you will, the agency and the production company will honor their opinion, the shot will be yanked and/or 6 thousand dollars worth of flame work will be done to "fix" the offending eye brow. I learned long ago to do my cut just shut up. It's process of erosion. Good stuff gets killed. Bad stuff gets through. Why does this happen? Is it just human nature? Oh well... there was a time when good was good and bad was bad and stupid was stupid. I offer a big thank you to those that let me be part of those times.

A break from the tedium of the past. The tedium of the present: My Bio.

Sometimes I think I just don't take the commercial biz seriously enough. I've been requested to write a bio for the new web page for the nice company that reps me in España. I written quite a few of these things. They always end with something warm and tingly but the best of these I think was the one I wrote for GAP in Munich. Gap reps me exclusively for the area just outside thier office, between the post office and the drinking fountain. Beyond that I'm up for grabs.

Here goes:

"He was born long, long ago in place called Portland, Oregon. His father was a lumber jack and his mother, a school marm. His grandpa whittled him his first camera when he was just a bug. Unfortunately at 13 he developed a desire to sing show tunes and cook. After the 50th rendition of Oklahoma and a failed attempt at a souffle he was shipped off to the Rumsfeld Academy for Wayward Skinny Boys of Potentially Confused Gender. He was made a man of. He had a dual major: Body hair and ladies dream. He drove a 1972 burgundy Plymouth Roadrunner. Bored out V8. Hemi. Kragers. Jail followed. Sentenced to 11 years for assault with a deadly battery. In jail his ability to sing show tunes made him very popular. He organized a prison playhouse and directed and played all the roles in Chekov's Three Sisters. He escaped while touring grade school cafeterias across the southern states of America. After stealing a reel from a drunken has-been director in Sarasota, Florida he self financed a spec spot for Waymeyer's Nipple Cream using 37 disposable cameras and an inflatable crocodile. Back to jail. Out on special souffle dispensation he moved to Spain after misunderstanding the term, “Tapas Bars.” He will be survived by his daughter Zoe and wife Benedicte. He desires to own a dog and a IPOD."

I still don't have a dog.

Revisiting the Velvet Bowels of Advertising Part 6: And Now for Something Serious: "March of Dimes"

There was a period before "Bud's Dance" where I seemed to land on the radar enough that I at least got a couple of boards. Up until my full embrace of the comedic "Cloudy Bright" sun over your shoulder esthetic as presented by Kodak on every box of film that they every made I was obsessed by light. Which I suppose I should have been since I was a lighting guy for a decade before my decision to be a director... a decision that understandably nobody concurred with.

But folks at the Coats Agency gave me a chance and I did a few spots for them that all featured what I used to refer to as, "dark, teutonic photography." Basically the idea was to make things as vague and indistinct as possible. I think the inspiration for this look was the work of Matt Mahurin, particularly his video for Peter Gabriel's "Mercy Street." In this video there is one shot in particular that continues to haunt me. A hand enters the frame and pulls out a drawer. The hand is extremely over exposed... so over exposed that the grains seems to scattering like sandy particles. Like every thing else in that video it's an amazing shot.

I guess the early photographic work of Edward Stiechen also was an inspiration. I found his dark indistinct shapes to be very, very compelling. My mind could wander in the obscure tonalities and try to distinguish shapes and images. I guess it's sort like when we as children try to see images in the clouds.

I guess in this spot I was trying to realize a pretty misty concept... I was simply trying evoke the magic and wonder of the inception of life. Nothing like biting off more than you could chew.

Having a child of my own I have come to the conclusion that young kids do seem to be close to something that we as adults have lost touch with. Up to around the age of 4 or so Zoe always had lots of imaginary friends. At one point I think there were around 12 in the car with us. The 2 favorites were Rahoo and Raha. Rahoo was always good and Raha could behave pretty badly. Sometimes we would set a place at the table for one or the other or both of them. After awhile I really started to think that maybe they were real. As strange as this sounds it also crossed my mind that maybe all these imaginary friends were entities that Zoe had known when she was on... gulp... the other side. I know it's all a little gooey but looking at this film again and I realize that I was trying to visualize how I felt about the moment that life begins and how it actually might be more of a crossing point.

From a technical point of view all the shots are in camera. We did crazy things like hang the camera on a jib arm the shoot into a mirror that had water running down it then into another mirror looking at various babies who where lying on a big mattress topped turntable which we could rotate. Often we were not looking down but across and shooting into reflections of water which cast on simple foam core panels. We also had a rotatable glass disc mounted in front of the camera. On this disk I had random densities of... vaseline!... which I could rotate in and out of the frame. Since we were always using long lenses the actual goo could never be seen but the images sure could get vague and dreamy.

Again Ray DiCarlo was there. He designed the baby mover, the mirror tricks and the water tanks for projecting ethereal water patterns. I think there we maybe three or four of us on the crew and that it took us around 6 hours to shoot. We also had at least 5 stunt babies all of whom got drunk and made a mess of the waiting room.

The other thing is I can't remember that we had any sort of a pre-production meeting or that I drew any boards what so ever. Ah... those were the days.

Oh the music is by Arvo Part as performed by the Kronos Quartet. Great stuff... so great that it only is on my cut as it was too expensive to acquire for the actual broadcast version. Arvo, Kronos... forgive me I stole your music for my version. Oh and one more thing, we tried to get Blythe Danner to do the voice over. She wouldn't do it.

Revisiting the Velvet Bowels of Advertising Part 5: Cel One Food and Cities

Here's the final 2 spots from the Cel One campaign. Again, I'm amazed at the writing. Carl you should be writing books. Heck maybe you are? But then again maybe your talents are best represented in this medium. 30 second chunks of perfection...

The thing is I think ideas work in succession and that creativity is really viral. The client wants to sell something. The agency wants the client. The agency wants to do good work. They hire talented people to come up with the creative stuff. The talented people come up with ideas. The director reads the script. he thinks of ducks and little smokies and grilled cheese sandwiches served in his Grandmas fish plates which were given as a Starkist Tuna promotion 5O years ago. 1. Without the product there would be no reason for this work. 2. Without the writer there would be no idea. And 3., without the director there would be no sushi on the set... just kidding. It's a big stew. And when the ingredients are good and combined with care the stew is really tastey. And is again more than the sum of its parts.

The thing about spots is that when they are good they work on many levels. The client gets to sell something. The agency gets to be successful and grow and offer a space for creative types to work. The creative types get something to be creative to do and exercise their poetic craftsman muscles and directors and actors and the crew get to add there skills to the mix and work on stuff that they are proud of. An everybody can pay there bills and hold there head high and have things to talk about.

Mona Mensing, wardrobe stylist, would like her work to be mentioned. I am happy to comply. Here's the deal. Often as a director people want you to have an opinion about everything. Which cup, what color and sometimes which socks. Listen, I don't know everything. I don't know which collar is currently fashonable. I don't know that you don't wear 2 different plaids. I don't know that it's not OK to wear a brown belt with black shoes. And again I really want the end result to be more than the sum of it's parts. OK the little man inside might hop out at any point and say that putting a towel on the shoulder of the talent is really dopey but I want the people that work with me to have a point of view. Maybe I'm just lazy. Mona always did an amazing job on wardrobe. She had a point of view. She always got it and I guess got me. She made it easy and her finger prints are all over the spots. Thanks deary I still have Moultrie's cardigan and I right now I'm wearing the bathrobe you made for "Oregon Lottery Christmas". Is this admitting that I steal things from shoots? Yeah. doesn't everyone?