Will Speck and Josh Gordon—the directors who team up as Speck/Gordon—were considerably less than excited when they heard from their commercial roost, Omaha Pictures, Santa Monica, that a new set of boards had just come in. They couldn’t imagine that the campaign—their first to be produced out of Omaha—would become one of their favorite projects, and would contribute to the loud buzz surrounding the young duo.
"When we first got the call that Sears boards were in, we were a little depressed," Speck says, having assumed that the work would be standard retail fare. "But then we found out it was from Young & Rubicam, Chicago, which is a good shop. And when we read the creative and heard what these guys wanted to do, we were excited. [The project meant] taking performances that we could play around with, and taking the visual approach and being able to highlight the reality of situations."
One of the spots, "Rake," highlights fall bargains on various products available at Sears. The ad presents a little family vignette, with Mom chatting mindlessly on the AT&T cordless phone; Junior in a Crossroads brand sweater at the kitchen table, fiddling with the Henkel cutlery; and Dad wandering through the backyard until he stumbles upon the Craftsman rake and manages to pop himself in the head. That kind of physical humor is a big part of Speck/Gordon’s work. "The stuff we really like is visual comedy," notes Speck, "where it’s not so reliant on a punch line. The performance is really leading you, and the story can be told with images and not necessarily telegraphed through jokes. It’s what we tend to gravitate toward, but it’s not where we always want to be. I think we have a lot more to say that’s not necessarily funny."
Other recent spots the pair has done through Omaha that exhibit a light touch include "Conversation," "Low Rider," "Chick Magnet" and "Test Drive" for Budweiser’s "True" campaign, out of DDB Chicago. "Conversation" and "Low Rider" received heavy airplay during the NFL playoffs and coverage of the Winter Olympics. "Conversation" finds a couple of young guys, apparently at an art gallery opening, sipping Buds and talking basketball, until an attractive young woman comes into the picture, when they shift to an appreciation of sculpture. In "Low Rider," a young urbanite in a convertible is humiliated when a car full of his buddies pulls up alongside just as his girlfriend has jacked up the volume on a sappy love song.
Gordon recalls that the team was thrilled to be working on the "True" campaign. "We were so excited when they came to us and said they wanted to shoot them in anamorphic, and wanted them to be a little more cinematic," he says. "That’s the kind of stuff we jump all over."
Doing It All
In fact it was the cinema that first brought Speck and Gordon to Los Angeles. They had met during film school at New York University, and headed to Los Angeles in 1995 with dreams of feature films in their heads. "We directed our senior thesis film together, which was nominated for a student Academy Award," recalls Gordon. "We came out to L.A. and were going to work on a film. But we didn’t have a feature script set up, so we had to get day jobs in the beginning."
Gordon worked for the TV show Mad About You, and Speck worked for producer Laura Ziskin on the movie To Die For. "We worked on our script and shorts and stuff like that at night," Gordon continues. "We did that for a year or so and decided we couldn’t be away from directing. So we put all our money together and in ’97 made a short film called Culture, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best live-action short."
During that time period, people they worked with kept telling them that commercials would be a great way to break into directing and gain experience. With Culture and a spec spot they cut down from Angry Boy, another short film, they were signed by bicoastal/international @radical.media. Culture also got them an agent and a deal to write a script for Fox 2000, a unit of 20th Century Fox. Speck/Gordon joined Omaha in August ’01.
"Our fantasy is to make our lives like our college experience, where we got to do a bunch of different things," Speck says of the pair’s interest in doing both commercials and longform. "We want to continue to make commercials and experiment and expand within that medium, but also to be able to make films and continue to write scripts. We did a TV pilot for FOX a couple years ago, and it didn’t break the momentum in our commercial career. That’s our goal: to do everything."
Although their commercial work is heavy on comedy and dialogue, the men say they are most influenced by visuals they’ve experienced. As an example, Speck cites Budweiser’s "Chick Magnet," which was shot outdoors in a park. "We were trying to find something that would be visually interesting, but be outside in a way that looked real enough to be a park," explains Gordon. "Josh remembered this scene from The Parallax View, the old Alan Pakula movie. We loved the look of it and we loved Gordon Willis, one of our biggest heroes, who shot the movie. They have a scene in a park with an almost mosaic office building in the background that gave the park a sort of city feel but was really beautiful. Our location scout went out and found the park. We ended up shooting in that park and referencing Gordon Willis’ lighting schematic."
The team approach has occasionally given Speck and Gordon an edge on solo directors. "The Budweiser package was awarded right over a holiday, so it didn’t leave much time to prep," notes Gordon. "A single director would have had a harder time keeping it going. The great thing about two of us was that I was able to deal with one department while Will was able to deal with another, simultaneously. It allowed us to put all our focus into what we put up on the screen."
