What’s the difference between a good bad performance and a bad bad performance? The people behind two recent campaigns recently pondered that very question. Sean Mullens, of bicoastal Brand, directed a package of ESPN.com spots, via Ground Zero, Marina del Rey, Calif., that features a troupe of hilariously bad actors; and Tom Schiller, of bicoastal Coppos Films, helmed four ads for the limited edition Platinum Gameboy Advance from Nintendo, through Leo Burnett USA, Chicago, which also treasure the atrocious.
Speaking with the directors, casting directors, and agency creatives who created the spots, it’s clear that there’s an art to capturing badness on film.
When asked if casting the Gameboy spots differed from other jobs, Schiller wittily responds, "It was only different in that I was able to do what I love—find bad actors." The director says that during auditions, "half of [the actors] were bad but didn’t know they were bad, and half of them were bad because they were acting bad."
Schiller’s love affair with bad acting goes back to the mid-’70s, when he wrote material for Saturday Night Live. "I invented ‘Bad Playhouse’ for Saturday Night Live, so I love bad," says Schiller, referring to a regular SNL feature that showcased Dan Aykroyd as "Bad Playhouse" host Leonard Pinth-Garnell.
Schiller was able to revisit his love when he helmed the Gameboy’s "Boy Band," "Rock Star," "Mr. Jimmy," and "Chelsea," four ads that show aspiring pop stars who both charm and appall.
The five-guy outfit (Steven Goldsmith, Kelly Burnett, Matthew Stadelman, John Hill and Ciaran Tyrpell) in "Boy Band," decked out as though they were about to appear on MTV’s Total Request Live, hilariously flails through a song and dance routine. "Rock Star" features a grunge rocker (Nathan Baesel) playing a gloomy tune that climaxes in an indignant, and humorous outburst. In "Chelsea," a Britney Spears wannabe (Chelsea Lagos) sleazily—and incompetently—struts her stuff in a record exec’s office. "Mr. Jimmy" (Rick Shapiro) features a Ricky Martin-style singer crooning a pop tune. Supers reading "They dream of going platinum. Now they can," appear in each spot. The commercials close with a product shot and a voiceover, "New limited edition Platinum Gameboy Advance."
According to Matt Horton, VP/ creative director at Leo Burnett—who teamed on the spots with, among others, Dustin Smith, VP/associate creative director—the agency had an extraordinary amount of freedom working on the campaign, noting that Nintendo’s directive "was the simplest brief we’ve ever seen—just communicate platinum."
Executive VP/executive creative director Jonathan Hoffman says that commercials usually need to convey a load of information, but that wasn’t the case with this round of ads. "In this case, it’s a different color of plastic," relates Hoffman, referring to the casing on the Gameboy system. "Any time we get something like that, we’re quietly excited."
Horton points out that he and his team got involved in casting early on. "Usually, they’ll send us tapes that we’ll go through, but we decided to get in right away and see casting up front and close," he explains. "We had both conventional casting calls and we went out to nightclubs, karaoke clubs and places where bands were auditioning."
Jodi Collins, independent casting director at Jodi Collins Casting, New York, who has worked with Schiller on spots for clients such as McDonald’s and Comedy Central, looked for three types of performers. She checked out "folks who could really sing well, because to sing badly involves being able to sing well first; people who were really strong actors; and funny people who couldn’t sing at all."
Chelsea Lagos, who wound up playing the sexy, clumsy performer in "Chelsea," has appeared in numerous films, including Reality Bites and White Man’s Burden. "She’s more of a serious actress," notes Collins. "She’s beautiful and funny and smart, and it just so happens she also used to sing in a band, so she could really feed into the character she was playing."
Finding Rick Shapiro was a different story. Schiller and his producer, Barbara Gold, took the agency creatives to a nightspot in New York’s East Village, where the "Mr. Jimmy" lead performer was doing a show. "He’s done open mike nights for years at clubs where there’s alternative comedy. As a performer, he has so many insane moments that flicker through his head that he articulates in the moment—it was just hysterical," laughs Collins.
"He was almost too good," says Schiller. "He was very convincing, but his anger was funny."
For "Boy Band," various performers were mixed and matched in order to achieve the right chemistry. "These guys were really good because three of them were kind of in sync, one was way off, and the singer was terrible, so it was a perfect combination," says Schiller.
How does Schiller get good bad performances out of his actors? "The level of bad that’s still entertaining is the one we’re looking for," he explains. "The level of bad where you feel sorry for the person, that’s just a train wreck—you don’t want to use that to sell a product.
"You still have to wonder at the beginning of each spot, ‘Wait a minute, have I seen these people before?,’ " he continues. "The more you watch, the more you realize that they’re just [bad]. That’s the secret: They have to look real in the beginning."
ESPN.com
Court Crandall, creative director at Ground Zero, talks about why his agency decided to put together an incompetent acting troupe to promote ESPN.com in a new seven-spot package directed by Mullens of Brand. "Most ESPN commercials are branding commercials, but with ESPN.com, there were a lot of particulars," he explains. "You can’t just say, ‘Go to ESPN.com.’ You’ve got to sell the individual properties, whether it’s Fantasy Football or the Live Draft.
"We needed a campaign device that allowed us to convey a lot of information in an interesting way," continues Crandall. "This idea of a community theater, and presenting the information in kind of an awkward way seemed more appealing than trying to create another character to do it."
The ESPN.com spots—"Fantasy Football/Johnny’s Sad Day," "Page Two/Ol’ Fishing Hole," "Six Pack/ State Fair," "Insider/A Hike In The Alps," "3 Play/Sunday Stroll," "Bingo/The Big Decision," and "MSN/The Players"—feature the ESPN.com Players, a hapless ensemble that performs skits that promote the sports Web site. (The acting troupe comprises Daniel Lee, Clive Kennedy, John Cervenka, Wendy Molyneux, Carrie Aizley, Gary Kraus, Philip Parks, and Caprice Crawford.) The seven ads are rife with awful performances, bad puns, and dismal stage sets. For instance, in "Insider/A Hike in the Alps," two mountaineers ludicrously discuss ESPN.com’s "Insider" feature, a paid service that provides even more sports information than the general site, as they plod in place. At ad’s end, one performer surmises, "I guess ‘Insider’ is a mountain of information," and a banner unfurls that reads, "ESPN.com. Still Undefeated."
Mark Randall, casting director at Mark Randall Casting, Los Angeles, relates how he, the agency and Mullens went about finding actors for the ads, which were inspired by Christopher Guest’s feature, Waiting for Guffman, a comedy about an amateur theater group. (Randall and Mullens are no strangers to irregular casting: the pair had previously cast a Budget spot, "Roller Skates," out of Cliff Freeman and Partners, New York, with real people that they found on the Venice, Calif., boardwalk and at a gay roller disco night in Glendale, Calif.)
"What Chris Guest did in Guffman was choose amazing actors to portray people who couldn’t act," relates Mullens. "I felt it would bring something different to [the campaign] if we picked actors who were really bad, but thought they could act. So it was almost the exact opposite [of Guffman]."
"While the agency wanted to cast comedians to play bad actors, Sean wanted to cast community theater types from small towns who would naturally be kind of clumsy and awkward on the stage," adds Randall. "In the end, we wound up with a nice fifty-fifty mixture that worked out pretty well."
Randall says the campaign’s casting session was quite a scene. "I think the big risky thing that I did was put an ad in Dramalogue magazine for open call for union and non-union talent, which basically meant that anyone in Los Angeles who saw the ad could show up and audition," he relates. "And they pretty much did. We were expecting it to be really crowded but it was out of control. We had to contain these masses of people in lines that went all the way around the block.
"Everyone was limited to a sixty-second audition," he continues. "They could do anything they wanted: a monologue, a song, whatever they wanted. It was like that movie from the ’70s, Fame. We had to move like lightning all day long. We wound up getting some great stuff."
During production Mullens didn’t meddle much with the actors’ performances. "I did very little direction inside the spots when we shot them," he says. "It was letting them drive the car and then me just barely touching the steering wheel here and there."
What set the actors he chose for the campaign apart from the others? "You start looking for people who are trying to act and think they are acting well, but they aren’t," explains Mullens. "That got me down to about a hundred people. From that point on there were certain people who had physical characteristics in their body language that others didn’t. Some felt a bit uncomfortable in their own skin, some felt a bit overconfident."
But Mullens points out that incompetence alone didn’t guarantee winning a part. "For [the actors] to be bad wasn’t enough," he stresses. "I wanted people to look at [the performers] and still feel some connection with them," he says.
Did any of the trained actors that were included in the audition make the cut? Mullens answers, "They did. They fooled me."
