Third time's the charm
By Robert Goldrich
For director Tom Kuntz of MJZ, the third time proved to be the charm as he recently won the DGA Award as best commercial director of 2009. This was Kuntz’s third career DGA nomination, having previously been nominated for the honor based on his spot work in ’06 and ’08.
This time around, a diverse mix of comedy commercials earned Kuntz his first DGA Award: Cadbury’s viral sensation “Eyebrows” out of Fallon, London; Skittles’ “Tailor” for TBWAChiatDay, New York; and CareerBuilder.com’s “Tips,” a 2009 Super Bowl spot, as well as Old Spice’s “Scents For Gents,” both from Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, Ore.
“Tips” also earned a primetime commercial Emmy nomination last year. But in the big picture, “Tips” was just the very tip of a prodigious award show circuit performance for Kuntz in ’09, as perhaps best underscored by last year’s AICP Show. at MoMA.
MJZ led the production house derby with 10 AICP Show honors in ’09–seven of which were for projects directed by Kuntz.
The Kuntz-directed “Pinata” for Skittles out of TBWAChiatDay, New York, figured prominently in the mix, earning honors in the AICP Show’s Advertising Excellence/Single Commercial (Best of Show spot), Humor, and Performance/Dialogue categories. Another Kuntz-helmed Skittles spot, “Tailor,” also gained Performance/Dialogue recognition.
The balance of Kuntz-directed honorees were: Cadbury’s “Eyebrows” in the Advertising Excellence/International category; CareerBuilder’s “Tips” in the Visual Style category; and Altoids’ “Promotion” from Energy BBDO, Chicago, for Production Design (production designer Roger Swanborough).
And the high-profile comedy beat just goes on for Kuntz. On the heels of the DGA Awards, spots he helmed made their debut during last month’s Super Bowl telecast, including Monster.com’s “Fiddling Beaver” and “Boogeyman” out of BBDO New York.
Creative roots In his brief acceptance remarks at the DGA Awards ceremony, Kuntz thanked the DGA, his crew, MJZ principal David Zander and executive producer Jeff Scruton, and first assistant director Thomas P. Smith.
A couple of days earlier, during the DGA’s Meet The Nominees: Commercials session at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles, Kuntz reflected on his early days in the business as an agency creative for several years, and how that experience gave birth to his directorial aspirations.
“I was an art director and not a very good one,” quipped Kuntz, noting that he became a bit frustrated working all year on the agency side with maybe one commercial to show for it.
Kuntz very much wanted to be more prolific and saw that there were directors who were getting that opportunity. Among the directors he recalled admiring back then from his agency vantage point were Spike Jonze, Mark Romanek, Phil Morrison and the Traktor collective.
Kuntz’s agency pedigree includes serving as an art director at JWT New York, then moving onto Kirshenbaum Bond+Partners, N.Y., and MTV’s on-air promotion department where he and creative colleague Mike Maguire stumbled onto directing, first establishing themselves as a helming team.
Kuntz and Maguire then joined their first production house roost, the venerable Propaganda Films. After Propaganda closed, the duo wound up at MJZ. In ’05, they split to become individual directors, with each firmly establishing his solo career. (Maguire is at The Directors Bureau.)
Kuntz’s solo success was punctuated by an earlier referenced DGA Award nomination, his first, as best spot director of ’06. That nom was earned on the strength of such quirky humorous fare as Altoids’ “Fruit Pants” from Leo Burnett, Chicago, and Skittles’ “Trade,” “Beard” and “Leaks” for TBWAChiatDay, New York.
Kuntz’s creative chops on the agency side continue to serve him well. At the recent DGA Meet The Nominees event, he related, “I like doing treatments. Sometimes it’s the only way I force myself to think deeply about a project at the outset when competing for a job. I don’t like the dog-and-pony-show treatments. I like writing, thinking it through. I find that the treatment often represents a huge chunk of the work I need to do for a job.”
At the same time, Kuntz said he’s learned the delicate art of not giving away the store.
“You learn how to suggest ideas but to not be so specific that others can take advantage and deliver them.”
Certainly underscoring Kuntz’s delivery prowess is the recent DGA Award win and a continually evolving body of work as well as ongoing repeat business.
On the latter score, consider that at least one Skittles spot has been part of the entry mix for each of Kuntz’s three DGA Award nominations.
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More