Damian Stevens, a senior producer at Fallon’s Southern California office, is set to join bicoastal Moxie Pictures as an executive producer next week (3/19). During his nearly two years with Fallon—the Minneapolis-headquartered agency which is slated to move its West Coast shop to new Santa Monica digs—Stevens has worked on jobs for assorted advertisers, including Holiday Inn, EDS, Nuveen and PBS. At press time, he was in the process of wrapping his commitments at Fallon, including a Holiday Inn assignment, and a pro bono package of PSAs for an undisclosed client.
The move to Moxie will mark Stevens’ first career stop on the production house side of the business. He becomes the second executive producer at Moxie, joining company partner Gary Rose. Moxie founders Rose and director Dan Levinson had been looking for an executive producer over the past eight months. The company felt the need for another executive producer to accommodate its steady growth, and to help free Rose to spend more time on career development for directors, on finding new filmmaking talent, and on diversification into areas beyond traditional spot production. The latter includes features—for which Moxie maintains a separate division (SHOOT, 6/23/00, p. 1)—and new ad forms that emerge out of the eventual mesh between TV and broadband.
Rose credited Levinson with the idea of bringing an ad agency perspective into the Moxie fold. "It provides a different dimension and way of looking at things," related Rose, who noted that Stevens could, for example, help groom some of the feature directors at Moxie’s bicoastal sister shop, The Industry, for commercialmaking. Specializing in representing longform directors for spot assignments, The Industry continues to be headed by executive producer Lizzie Schwartz.
Stevens said he’d been contemplating a shift over to a production company for the past few years. "For me, the next logical career move if I stayed on the agency side would have been to head a production department," said Stevens. "But that didn’t interest me the way the filmmaking aspect of production does."
So Stevens started putting out feelers to the production community, met with several houses, but ultimately "felt right" about linking with Levinson and Rose. Plans call for Stevens and Rose to initially work together as a team on projects, getting the agency veteran familiar with the Moxie culture. Then the executive producers will eventually divvy up responsibilities between them.
Moxie’s directorial lineup consists of Levinson, Christopher Guest, Pam Thomas, Todd Phillips, Bob Purman, Yariv Gaber and Rohitash Rao. The Industry’s roster of helmers includes John Waters (Pink Flamingos, Hairspray, Cecil B. DeMented) and Joe Nussbaum (George Lucas in Love).
Prior to Fallon, Stevens freelanced as an agency producer for about a year. Earlier, he was producing on staff at Hal Riney & Partners (now Publicis & Hal Riney), San Francisco. Before Riney, he freelanced after wrapping a stint as a producer at Foote, Cone & Belding’s (now FCB) Orange County, Calif., office, where he worked on the Mazda account.
Moxie’s sales force consists of Steven Monkarsh and Elizabeth Newton on the West Coast, Renee Case in the Midwest and Sarah Holbrook on the East Coast.
