All You Need Is Love (Stateside)
By Robert Goldrich
Director Chris Palmer of Gorgeous Enterprises, London, has wondered off and on again why he doesn’t do more work stateside. Yet as of late one has to wonder what he’s wondering about.
Consider his directorial and conceptual involvement in Starbucks’ global sing-along of the legendary hit “All You Need Is Love” from BBDO New York. Performances of the song from 124 countries were simultaneously streamed online Dec. 7, 2009, at StarbucksLove Project.com, commemorating the company’s one-year anniversary in partnership with the (RED) initiative. After the performance, anyone could in turn add their own rendition of the song. For each rendition submitted (up to a million), Starbucks committed funds to the charitable (RED) drive. In year one, the Starbucks (RED) product generated funds equivalent to seven million days of medicine for the Global Fund to help fight AIDS in Africa.
Meanwhile Palmer also recently earned a coveted stateside honor. The Directors Guild of America recognized him in January with his first career DGA Award nomination as spot director of the year.
True, the entries were all for U.K. ad shops–Budweiser’s “Lyric” out of DDB London, and a pair of J20 fruit drink spots, “Riviera Truckstop” and “A Horse Named Cynthia” from BBH, London. But clearly this work resonated with DGA judges who are well ensconced in American filmmaking and advertising.
Currency Whether the DGA nomination translates into more American ad work for Palmer, who’s repped stateside by Anonymous Content, remains to be seen. (His past U.S. credits include Nike via Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, and Jack Daniels for Arnold, Boston.)
However the currency Palmer deals in carries weight on both side of the Atlantic, honed during his early days in the business as an agency creative in London, first at BBH, then Lowe, and a startup shop in which he was partnered, Simons Palmer.
“I suppose at the end of the day,” related Palmer, “the valuable currency in any platform is a really good idea–whether it’s for a commercial, a theatrical movie, a TV show, anything. What platform is involved is irrelevant. The idea is everything. And that’s what I’ve based my career on as a director. I respond to the material. If it stimulates me, I respond and I think others will respond.”
Perhaps it’s this approach that has kept him from being pigeonholed directorially. “Years ago I did an Orange script with miniature cars,” he recalled. “I hadn’t seen anything like it before. The spot was quite a success yet I never saw any more special effects scripts. I remember other people referencing the commercial as part of their vision for other effects spots. But those scripts never came my way. I never see any logical pattern. I never get two scripts that are the same. Maybe people just think of me for good ideas. Touch wood, I’m lucky.”
Attracting such ideas from creatives might also be a by-product of Palmer’s extensive agency experience. “Having been there [on the agency side], I understand the process–what it’s like handing over an idea to a director, what it took just to get to that point. For me it’s a reference point of what I should and shouldn’t be able to do to a concept as a director.”
The closest Palmer came to recently being pigeonholed in any sense could be reflected in his body of DGA Award-nominated work.
Technical challenges All three commercial entries were similar in the key respect that they were technically challenging and very much linked to coinciding properly with their respective soundtracks.
In “Lyric,” we hear a song that recites the alphabet and counting from one to 10 as we see corresponding visuals through the windows of a fairly fast moving train.
Palmer came up with the idea of a train passenger’s perspective in that there’s “something musical” about that POV, which worked with a slightly slower sing-songy pace.
Shot on a Chicago railway, the commercial came together, said Palmer, thanks in large part to the coordinating prowess of first assistant director Cliff Lanning.
“Cliff had to have balls of steel to take this on and pull it off,” quipped Palmer. “We only had so many takes. On cue we had to have forty people run into a scene as viewed through moving train windows.
“If you blow it, you don’t have too many opportunities to do it again,” noted Palmer. “Juggling these logistics and dealing on the fly with suddenly, for example, not having clearance to shoot a certain rooftop made this an extremely complex project. It was like trying to solve a constantly moving Rubik’s cube. Our goal, though, and I think we succeeded, was to make the commercial look as if it were something that was just thrown together for YouTube.”
Though distinctly different from “Lyric,” the J20 fruit drink spots carry parallels to the daunting logistics of that Budweiser commercial.
“I wanted to make the J20 commercials look like found pieces of footage, each with two scenes playing to the wrong track,” related Palmer. “We literally took the audio of one and put it on the other scene.”
But even with the incongruous placement, the pacing and timing of the incorrect track (e.g., banter by a couple at a prim and proper garden party in “Riviera Truckstop”) had to correspond with the accompanying visuals (a cowboy and his horse).
Palmer worked closely with editor Paul Watts of The Quarry, London, to painstakingly map this out, meaning there was little or no room for changes during the shoot.
“The words down to every syllable had to fit, which was nightmarishly complicated. Ultimately,” affirmed Palmer, “it was gratifying to tackle the challenge and see the end results.”
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