By Robert Goldrich

On Feb. 12, production designer Lauryn LeClere won an Art Directors Guild Award for her work on FEMA’s “Ignoring The Storm.” The honor is meaningful not only for LeClere individually but also production designers collectively–particularly for those artisans active in commercials. This marked the first time in the nine-year-history of the competition that the guild saw fit to recognize production design in spots. The Art Directors Guild, IATSE Local 800, decided to launch a category encompassing commercials, PSAs and promotional spots. To be eligible, a commercial had to be 30 to 120 seconds in length and be designed and supervised by a production designer or art director.

The new category is called Excellence in Production Design for Commercials. The recognition of spots now goes rightfully alongside categories for feature films, TV series, TV movies or miniseries, awards shows and music specials or documentaries. Commercial nominees and the winner are also honored at the same gala ceremony at which special awards of recognition are bestowed.  For example, William J. Creber, who production designed the Oscar-nominated Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, received the Art Director Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He has worked with such noted directors as Stanley Kramer, George Stevens and Robert Towne.

When announcing the formation of a spot category, awards committee co-chairs Dina Lipton and Robert A. Strohmaier Jr., related in a joint statement, “It is most fitting for the Art Directors Guild to include the artistry of production design of commercials into its existing awards structure. The efforts of production designers and art directors working in this have been too long overlooked and will now be recognized and acknowledged properly.”

Though not as high profile as when the Directors Guild of America (DGA) Awards finally included recognition for commercial helmers in ’79, the establishment of a spot category in the Art Directors Guild Awards carries a positive parallel to that historic DGA step. The DGA Award for best commercial director of the year is arguably the most coveted honor among spotmakers.

Similarly, IATSE’s Art Directors Guild, Local 800, hopes that its Art Directors Guild Awards will attain the same elite status for spot production designers. Like the DGA Awards, the Art Directors Guild Awards competition is judged by entrants’ peers. Guild members serve as judges for both the nominations and the final winners across all categories.

Indeed the inclusion of commercials in the Art Directors Guild Awards represents welcome news to the ad community. And thankfully, there’s a mini-trend of spots gaining acceptance from artisan organizations. In ’03, this column reported on the Costume Designers Guild, IATSE Local 892, starting a commercial category in its annual awards show. That marked the first time in its then five-year history that the Costume Designers Guild Awards formally acknowledged the artistry of commercials.

    Another first for this year’s Art Directors Guild Awards was the formation and formal introduction of its Hall of Fame. Seven late legendary production designers were inducted: Wilfred Buckland, Richard Day, John DeCuir, Sr., Anton Grot, Boris Levin, William Cameron Menzies and Van Nest Polglase.

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