Larry Kardish, senior curator of MoMA’s Department of Film and Video, is credited with bringing an extra dimension to the AICP Show while it was still in the conceptual stage. Besides agreeing that the honored commercials should become part of the department’s permanent collection, he noted that traditionally, as is the custom with the screening of anyone’s work at the museum, the author or artist would be on hand to give some lecture or presentation. This, recalls Jon Kamen, who was chairman of the AICP at that time, was "the catalyst for the Directors Lecture Series."
The speakers that inaugural year of 1992 were directors Steve Horn, Joe Pytka and Ridley Scott. (Excerpts from SHOOT’s original coverage of their talks are reprinted on pages 32, 33 and 34.)
In ’94, the Lecture Series was expanded beyond directors, with Jeff Goodby, founding partner/creative director in Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, speaking on various subjects including, ironically, his infrequent commercial directing endeavors.
Here are observations made by a cross-section of Lecture Series speakers over the years:
"What I tried to do was select work that contributes to each advertising piece, so someone can look back someday and see who we are. Through the early work, you can see how I used the camera to find the moments within the moment."
— Leslie Dektor, director, Dektor Film. 1993.
"A lot of people lose sight that we’re being paid by people who sell products. I feel very strongly that that should be the primary focus of everyone in this business."
— Henry Sandbank, director/partner, Sandbank, Kamen & Partners. 1993.
"I was shooting insane asylums, prostitutes, squatter camps and Zulu witch doctors. [For the race riots of the early 1970s], we tended to rush toward the nearest plume of smoke and shoot it. It seems my experience with apartheid led me to my work in advertising."
— Peter Smillie, director, Smillie Films, Venice, Calif. 1993.
"The filmmaker and the digital image creators must learn to understand each other and, more importantly, become each other. … When a director and producer feel empowered to come and play in the sandbox of digital effects as partner and participant, not client and adversary, then the revolution will expand … The empowered filmmaker will then have the will and the courage to attempt more daring and visionary projects."
— Director James Cameron, co-founder, Digital Domain, Venice, Calif. 1995.
"I was very broke, and advertising really saved me from bankruptcy."
— Director Jean-Paul Goude, PAC Films, Paris. 1995.
"Even if you could create a computer-generated model that looked like Humphrey Bogart or Marilyn Monroe, who’s going to make it act? What makes those actors legends was not the way they looked, but the way they acted– and that came from their own talent, their own creative thought processes."
— John Lasseter, director/VP, creative development, Pixar Animation Studios, Richmond, Calif. 1996.
"I’m one of the least-influenced directors by other people’s work. I don’t look. I don’t like to look– I just get jealous, because there are so many wonderful players. I am a habitual news and sports watcher. I channel surf, and in that I get to see the current crop of commercials."
— Bob Giraldi, director/partner, Giraldi Suarez Productions, bicoastal. 1996.
"The largest product an advertising agency makes is an advertising philosophy. [Usually the work emanates from that philosophy] … We just did a lot of the work and recently put some meaning behind it."
— Dan Wieden, president/creative director, Wieden & Kennedy. 1996.
"You don’t want comedians in a comedy [because] you [should] never acknowledge you’re making a comedy."
— Director Barry Sonnenfeld. 1997.
"In my view, the future of advertising is definitely in broadcast, and don’t let anyone tell you that it isn’t as long as broadcast generates one simple thing– as long as it generates fame."
— John Hegarty, chairman/creative director, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, London, New York and Singapore. 1999.
"The Avid is the worst thing to happen to editing … I don’t understand why we have to see 50 different variations of a scene. Why should a director look at 50 different cuts? … Why should a director be forced to shoot so much?"
— Spike Lee, director/principal, Forty Acres And A Mule Filmworks, Brooklyn, N.Y.; head of Spike/DDB, New York. 1999.
"There is a glut of capacity [in numbers of commercial production companies]. I think there will be consolidation just as there has been in the agency business. It may not promote creativity, but it may be more economically efficient."
— Jeff Berg, CEO of International Creative Management, Beverly Hills. 1999.
"Fundamentally, we [agencies] think of ourselves as being part of the ad industry, which is a really big mistake. We’ve attached ourselves to the conventions of advertising. Whenever we get a brief or an assignment from a client, we think :30 TV spots, eight-and-a-half-by-eleven print ads. [But] why do we limit ourselves to that?"
— Bob Jeffrey, president, J. Walter Thompson, New York. 2000.
"The future film will be two minutes long and 120 minutes wide [30 times more material needs to be created to make the interactive experience viable]."
— Robert Greenberg, chairman/ CEO R/GA Digital Studios, New York. 2000.
"If everything is so carefully planned and plotted out, then there’s no room for something amazing happening in the actual process of creating a commercial. Then the work is desiccated, embalmed, dead. Some of my very, very best work has actually been produced in a situation approximating chaos, and it does take a great agency, a great producer and a great company to pull it off."
— Errol Morris, director, bicoastal/ international @radical.media. 2000.
"In order to create the same video experience, for, say, a :30 piece in an interactive environment, you need eight to 32 times more material. You need to create more and more content, which is totally unique. We have not yet met the Joe Pytka or the Leo Burnett of the future."
— Mark Kvamme, partner in Sequoia Capital, Menlo Park, Calif., and chairman of the board of US Web/CKS, San Francisco. 2000.
