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?

Revisiting the Velvet Bowels of Advertising Part 4: "Energy is Power"

OK I just remembered. Before Bud's Dance, before the Oregon Lottery work, before the World Cup spots for Weiden and Kennedy, before the first taste of the sting of bad, expensive and lucrative big name national boards there was "Energy is Power." I'd known Darrell Williams for quite awhile. He was one of the guys at Marx, Knolls, Denight and Dodge advertising agency, which was one of the places I went once in a while when I was trying to make the transition from lighting director, AKA gaffer to director... what! I'd do a spot or show something that I shot as a cameraman or recut something and stop by. Darrell and the guys would come out. They would look. They would smile. They would ask a couple of polite questions, thank me and return to what they were doing. Ray Dodge, the guy with his name on the door, was a really sweet man. I remember having a conversation with about how he was troubled by doing a spot for a lumber industry lobby group. Integrity? When I think about the Portland Advertising community in those days I remember pretty much everybody as really decent people. At Borders, Perrin and Norrander executive creative director Tom Kelly went to the trouble to find me even though he couldn't read my phone number on the overly artsy label I used to have on my reel. There was Rob Rosenthal when he was at Cole and Weber and then Jim Carey who took over for him when he went on to start his own shop. And Darrell.

Let me say this right up front. Darrell Williams is a genius. Darrell Williams is one of the best writers I have ever read. Darrell can turn a bleach commercial into a warm, touching and needless to say funny exploration of the duality of human nature as seen through the eyes of a smart, slightly alienated 12 year old girl. Listen it's one thing to get to work on really whacked out creative at either end of the spectrum. Big money. Nike. No money. Oregon Lottery. But it's another thing altogether to consistently come up with brilliant stuff in the world of direct marketing.

On one potential project he had this idea that he and I would get cheap round the world tickets, a camera and a minidisk recorder and hit then very new ruta del Lonely Planet. In fact the minidisk recorder was the product. The story was about this cool, quirky, young vagabond and his recorder gathering aural souvenirs from the globe. Music, conversations, street sounds, Gitanos in the caves of the Sacre Monte in Granada, Inuit Throat singers, death metal bands in Helsinki, old ladies hocking fish in Indonesia.

OK, I have a minidisk. I love it. Others love it. But the concept and the product tanked. Why? Because it was designed to be an alternative to something that was basically perfect. The CD. OK it was smaller and like cassettes you could dump music on it but really who needed it. Nobody. But what this 3" x 3" x 1" wafer could do was record amazing audio. And what you recorded was available in a non-linear way... it was like a studio in your pocket. Darrell saw through the smoke of another corporate dance to sell yet another format to an unsuspecting public who had in a period of just a few years just dumped their records for cassettes and then dumped their cassettes for CDs. Darrell saw what the thing was good for. Darrell saw a huge army of pierced, dread-locked backpackers kids hitting the road to see the world beyond the suburbs. He wanted them to take these gadgets and grab sound like snap shots. Sound without images. Sound as an absolutely pure, unsullied medium. He wanted to change the world through audio and this cool little box. Millions of kids making mix tapes (disks) of little windows into the soul of man, passed around like trading cards, spreading a virus of understanding and compassion. It was brilliant. It was transcendent. Well, they, being the big they, passed. You wanna what? You're going where? I suspect they wanted a well scrubbed, cute teenage couple happily jabbering between "Call to Actions", pimping the box and the Mariah Carey catalog to that vast demographic perceived to have money to burn, no brains and nothing to say... American youth. If they had only listened to Darrell.

Darrell came up and I suspect comes up with these works of genius on an hourly basis. Being brilliant is as easy as breathing for this guy. It's in the wiring.

The road trip seems to figure into Mr. Williams world and it was one of these that he proposed to me over breakfast one Saturday morning. Why me? I have no idea but I'm glad he asked. Ostensibly he had to create a short film for the a trade meeting for the Bonneville Power Administration. He wanted to drive up the Columbia River Gorge. He wanted to take an very straight office intern who would serve as talent. We would shoot some stuff.

So we hit the road with a wind up Bolex, a cheap tripod incapable of panning and the intern. On the way up we talked about our childhoods, the business, our wives, his children, my pets, movies we wanted to make and music. As long as I have known him Mr. Williams has been this oracle of really great and often obscure music. And his taste is impeccable.

At that time I had been watching a lot of documentaries by Errol Morris. Although I found parts of his films to be mean spirited and not exactly fair to his subjects I was attracted by how he just let the camera sit there. No swank moves. No severe lens. Just a plain frame... an unadorned canvas. And the timing of his editing was just... off. Things were on the screen for too long. A guy would slowly walk across the frame, look at the camera, wait for very long time and then a pull lizard out of a garbage can. It was so designed but unpolished. I loved it.

I guess "Energy is Power" is the first time I tried to purposefully be unflashy. The guy stands there. He waits too long and gestures. He acts uncomfortable. He was uncomfortable. It's funny. The scale of things is off. 10 story power lines loom over an almost imperceptibly tiny guy. Metaphor? Probably.

I think too that in this film I started to play with a concept that I began to think of as "wet and dry." Energy is Power has a "dry" half and a "wet" half. Obviously the dry half is the stuff with the intern and wet stuff is the archival (stolen) stuff at the end with the music. Both parts are in there own way fine but when you combine them you really get something that is more than the sum of it's parts.

About the trip. I think we brought the bike so we must have had some idea in mind. We picked the inflatable punch bag up in the Dalles. The plastic pig too.

I shot the other material, the frying pan, the fan, the tea kettle, the spring in the studio of a friend the next afternoon.

We then hit the library and the video rental store gathering images to steal for the "wet" section. Darrell brought in a piece from "Big Audio Dynamite" for the soundtrack. See I told you he had great taste. We cut it one a Montage, the first non-linear editing system. Then on to sound design across the hall at Digital One. Then we had a beer and in the process of making this little gem had became friends. Here's to you Mr. Williams!

Revisiting the Velvet Bowels of Advertising Part 3: King

OK so after Cel One things were really started to get going. We were running the jobs out of our house. PAs and crew folks running up and down the 39 steps to the little old house on Gilham street. We had one tiny bathroom. It got a work out. Who cleaned the place? I dunno I guess we did. Yow.

Another set of three great ideas this time from Jim Carey´s band of loonies at Cole and Weber. Great simple idea. And no cuts. 1 take. No coverage nada. Gutsy! And... Cheap!

Norman Bonney one of my oldest friends came up from the Bay Area to cover my butt as assistant director. After his stint as an AD Mr. Bonney went on to be one of the countries best DPs.

The dog thing. Listen here's the deal. We were setting up and although I had an idea that I wanted a dog in the spot I didn't really have any idea of what to do with it other than be a prop. So I set the dog "Suzy" up next to the actor whose name I think was Richard and we did a rehearsal. So we figured out that it was really funnier if the King stood up from his lawn chair and then sat down again after his speech. So then I get this idea to have Suzy stand up and sit down exactly at the same time as the King. Now Suzy was just a dog, not a movie dog, just a pet. I ask Suzy's owner if she thinks Suzy could do this. She says that she's not sure but let's try. Suzy did it like clock work for over 30 takes! Why 30 takes? Well that's one of mysteries of advertising. I think we used the second take. We always use the second take.

OK regarding the background. At that time I was really interested in sort of secret deep background action. Originally we were going to have a forced perspective two story house built to go behind the fence at the back of the yard. I wanted to put people hanging out the window doing something. Accidentally dropping babies... I don't know. But since the house was maybe 1/2 scale we'd have to to put 1/2 scale people in the house. The solution... midgets. I got the idea from reading about a scene in F.W. Murnau's "Sunrise." Well the house idea turned out to be too expensive so that was it for the midgets. Until I came up with the idea of two midgets dressed as children beating the heck of each other in a wading pool again way back by the far fence wall. Since Richard was black I thought they would have to be black too. At that time Portland officially had around 17 black people living there and we had one playing the king. Basically there were no black midgets in the greater Portland area so that idea was out. The midget idea woud resurface in another Lottery spot, bu that is another story. However I had another great idea. Why not have this really big maple tree cross the frame back behind the far fence. You know, just loping along like it was out for walk or something.

So we took a construction crane and put a really big tree on this little skateboard wheel dolly Walt Dimick had handcrafted with his Dad I think. This in turn went on this track that was also hand built by Walt. Anyway we gave the dolly a shove and being designed to carry maybe 200 lbs and not 2000 lbs. the wheels of course collapsed immediately. So that was it for deep background action as well as Walt's dolly.

To see how the shot would all work art director Ray DiCarlo and I had previously set up the shot at Laurelhurst park which is where as a young child I remember once getting beat up in the wading pool... no not by an African American midget but by a girl. See there is a reason for everything.

Laurelhurst Park was OK but there were too many trees that would compete with the big leafy one that would be scooting across the frame so I then had another idea which was that we should shoot this in the world's biggest open backyard. So we shot out at Willamette Turf Farm which is where they grow hundreds and hundreds of acres of grass. Clean green as far as the eye could see.

In retrospect I wonder how everybody put up these crazy ideas. I never heard Ray ever say, "Come on... you want a giant maple tree to saunter across the frame like it's out for a Sunday walk? Are you nuts?" Well the correct answer would have been, "Well yes, actually I am."

And finally because of YOUTUBE the beginning pan over is a little hunky. My move was much smoother. And after 30 takes I would hope it would be!

Revisiting the Velvet Bowels of Advertising Part 2: "Cel One Transportation"

So Bud's Dance got quite a bit of attention. 1. I was really happy that this happened and 2. that my first official ( i.e. paid for) spots were for this great agency Rob Rosenthal and Al Moffat had started not long before we shot. No creative slouch himself Rob hired terrific writers and creatives like Carl Loeb from whose brain these amazing ideas sprung.

The campaign featured Moultrie Patton. Moutrie was the sweetest guy in the world and his history as a retired saloon singer, raconteur and World War 2 Tank commander only added to his mystique. After these spots he went on to become Walt the Trapper on that trendsetting series "Northern Exposure".

At the time we shot these I was fixated on physicist Richard Feynman... well I guess I still am. In my mind this campaign was sort of a tribute to guys like him. Crazy, brilliant, funny and rebellious in a positive way. Carl and I must have of been on the same wave length or at least reading the same books.

My old friend Art Director Ray DiCarlo and his wife Jean came up with this wonderful and strange world of an older genius obsessed with chihuahaus, edible plankton and croquet. Ray went on to shoot a feature and then start up Bent Image Lab along with two of the world's best animators; Chel White and David Daniels.

Lance Limbocker, "the best sound designer in the known universe" worked his audio magic. It's worth listening to this with headphones to pick up all of his aural nuances. And Greg Ives did this super stripped down music track that pretty much consisted of a stand up bass and a set of bongos. How hip was that?! This must of been some sort of a golden age. All of these talented people doing astounding work in a wet, then pretty ungroovey, medium sized city in where? Oregun? What were we smoking?

Also that's "Tiny" the chihuahua in the back of the Isetta. Small enough to fit in a coffee cup he was owned by a lady who was large enough that she could barely fit through the door of the production Winnebago. Ah the stories I could tell...

Revisiting the Velvet Bowels of Advertising Part 1: "Bud´s Dance"

Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends and Neighbors, Boys and Girls...

I have been going though the vast vaults of the Robin Willis Memorial Commercial archives located in Crawford, Texas just down the road from Jorge´s rancho, right next to an abandoned "Hot and Now" drive thru.

So let us begin at the beginning. Well at least the part where there is some hope of upward movement... before that it was just too sad as I desperately tried to convince the world to love me.

Speaking of desperation I had pretty much given up hope of the above happening and had gone back to school to finish my degree. 10 years or so previously I had majored in "Incomplete" at the hallowed halls of Portland State University. I was digging my new life as an older student at Marylhurst College, dominating discussions in class, calling up the professors to have my grades changed to A´s. Burning though 120 credit hours in 3 semesters though a cunning combination of professorial brow beating, testing and writing. Call me Robin College, I got a 4 point!

Anyway my friend and fellow director Todd Korgan called me up and asked if I wanted to direct a couple spots for the Portland Creative Conference. They had... wait for it, 500 bucks for both epics. Being nuts I said yes... under the conditions that I would write it, shoot it, cut it and would be left totally alone to twist slowly, slowly in the wind. Todd said he was hoping I would say that.

So I asked my next door neighbor, retired math teacher "Bud" Eugene Boughton if he would be so kind to star in these productions. He agreed and with the help of a water glass full of scotch delivered a stunning performance.

The spot was a big hit and went on to win many awards including "The Rosey"... which was and is Portland Advertising Federations big award. This might not sound like much but the fact is that Wieden and Kennedy, "the most groovy advertising agency in the world" also resided in my home town and had traditionally gobbled up everything. But this spot, which cost $250 dollars... that´s right 250 bucks, won one. Hurrah for the little man! Hurrah for being an ego maniac! Hurrah for moi!

Anyway things got strange after this. People from big, big agencies located in big, big cities would call ¨the office", my cubby hole over the bedroom looking for "Robin Willis´" reel. I would disguise voice to sound like a a high powered "executive producer" kind of guy and say off handedly that I´d see what we could do... And what we (me) could do was... panic.

In the future I shall be dusting off more of these icons of modern comedic advertising. Forgive me.