Sean Mullens is not interested in doing what has been done before. As a professional credo, this seems to have served him well: Mullens, who directs through Brand, a satellite of bicoastal Headquarters, has begun to garner industry notice and accolades. He was included in the 2001 Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors Showcase at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, where a spot he helmed for ESPN picked up a Bronze Lion.
The Bronze Lion went to "Swimming Pool," one of the ads he directed for an ESPN campaign, out of Ground Zero, Marina del Rey, Calif. He was included in the New Directors Showcase on the strength of that spot and "Art Class," another ESPN ad in the same package. The campaign promoted baseball playoff season with the idea that October is different from the other months in the season.
For the campaign, the months of the baseball season were turned into people: Those representing April to September wear pastel T-shirts; those months are happy and encouraging. In contrast, October, clad in a black T-shirt, screams abusive tirades. In "Art Class," the man and woman representing the earlier months of the season offer words of encouragement to people attending an art class. October reacts to the amateurish art projects by screaming, "People, we’re at the end of the line here and this is what you’re giving me?!" He then grabs a Styrofoam container decorated as a puppet and supplies it with a falsetto voice: "You guys are really bad at this. There are five really bad artists at this table. Five people who’re going to go home with nothing. Nothing!" In "Swimming Pool," a bunch of old ladies are playing water volleyball when, suddenly, the October character jumps into the water to give them the same sort of screaming pep talk.
"We’d tried to get Jack Black to play October," relates Mullens. "He wasn’t available, but we did get this great improv guy [Dan Weiss] to play him. There weren’t any written scripts for him. I just let him develop and explore the character and prodded him to keep going, and then he hit a certain direction I liked."
Asked about the awards the ESPN spots won, Mullens replies, "I’m not up on award shows. Bryan could definitely tell you what the spots won." That would be Bryan Farhy, partner/executive producer at Brand, which was launched last September as a satellite of Headquarters—Mullens’ previous roost since ’99.
"I think [Farhy] wanted to create a company that was interested in making smart, edgy work and in doing work that hadn’t been done before," says Mullens of Brand. It’s a strategy perfectly aligned with Mullens’ goals. "I was happy with Headquarters, but they recognized that Brand would be a better fit for me: I get the one-on-one attention from Bryan, but we still have the security provided by a larger company."
Other notable work that Mullens has directed through Brand includes "Roller Skates" for Budget, out of Cliff Freeman and Partners, New York, which addresses Budget’s merger with Ryder Trucks. The spot has a similar set-up to previous ads in the campaign, in which Budget employees are first shown brainstorming about how to make their company’s services better. When someone suggests roller skates, the spot cuts to a sequence showing pot-bellied movers wearing skates and very tight short-shorts. "It’s like a wrong version of the Village People," notes Mullens.
Creative Direction
Mullens started as an agency creative in the San Francisco market, working most notably as an creative director/art director at FCB San Francisco, before transitioning into the director’s chair. He signed with his first production house roost, San Francisco-based Commotion Pictures, in August ’97, while still at FCB. Mullens became a full-time director when he joined Headquarters.
During his first couple of years directing, Mullens recalls, he turned down a lot of boards, rather than build his reel with what he considered sub-par creative. "It was about being disciplined," he says. "I was turning jobs away so that I’d work once every two to three months."
This selectivity allowed him to build his reel on his own terms, and to pursue his interest in documentary filmmaking. For the past year and a half, he has been shooting a feature-length documentary, The Cushman, which looks at meter maids in San Francisco. "It started with a hatred for them [meter maids]. I wanted to expose them as dirty rat bastards," deadpans Mullens. "The film was meant to answer one question: What makes them want to be the most hated people in the city? But as time has gone on, the characters have evolved and it has became more dimensional."
Another of Mullens’ recent highlights is an anti-litter PSA campaign for the state of Texas, which he concepted and directed for Tuerff-Davis EnviroMedia, Austin, Texas. He presented the agency with three pieces of creative, from which the shop selected one that posed the question, "If someone you love or respect were Texas, would you still litter?" The resulting spots—"Mother," "Grandfather" and "Daughter"—feature different central characters. In each scenario the person is shown standing silent and unmoving, in the Texas prairie, as someone unceremoniously dumps garbage or litter on them. The ads are scored to "Deep in the Heart of Texas," and the tag line: "If your grandfather [daughter, mother, girlfriend] were Texas, would you still litter?"
Perhaps the most striking of these is "Daughter," in which the camera pans across the prairie, revealing a three-man bluegrass band far in the background. The camera continues panning until, in the foreground, a young girl appears, garbed in a pink dress. A burly, bald guy eating a sandwich walks into frame; as he nears the girl, he tosses his wrapper with a half-eaten burger at her dress, staining it. The camera then focuses on the girl’s impassive face for a sustained sequence, until cutting to a shot of an old Victrola playing a record labeled "Don’t Mess With Texas."
Mullens reveals that he was initially inclined to pass on the project, but he ultimately warmed to the challenge and found it to be good fun. "I always get to direct other people’s creative," he remarks. "This was cathartic for me to do." The anti-litter effort has attracted a good deal of media attention in Texas, even including, according to Mullens, an inquiring phone call from Texas’ most famous native son, President George W. Bush.
"I took the long road," says Mullens of his career path. "In the beginning, my work was much more visual and aesthetically pleasing. Then Headquarters wanted me to do dialogue work, so I got into that. I’d love to be more visual again, but I want my work to grow and I want do a wider range of projects."
In terms of future career goals, Mullens observes, he’d like to break into feature directing within the next three years. He speculates that his first feature will likely be a dramatic piece, from a script he has written. But he has no plans to phase out spots. "I never really planned on being in advertising," Mullens notes, "as I never planned on being a commercial or a feature director. … I’m simply not interested in doing what’s conventional. I feel I’ll do lots of different things in my life, and they’ll all be creative."
