A creative collaboration between one production company and one advertising agency may end up in court. A basketball court, that is.
Bicoastal/international @radical.media and Wieden + Kennedy (W + K), Portland, Ore., which have teamed to produce award-winning spots for ESPN, Nike and Miller, are engaged in an unusual partnership. Together, the production company and advertising agency are producing Hurricane Season, a two-hour movie for ABC. The telefilm, which is likely to begin shooting this summer for the 2000-’01 broadcast season, is based on the book In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle by Madeleine Blais. The story of an Amherst, Mass., high school basketball team’s championship season, it originally appeared as a New York Times Magazine cover story, which the author later turned into a ’95 non-fiction bestseller.
Both Bill Davenport, managing director of W + K’s Portland headquarters, and Jon Kamen, @radical.media’s co-proprietor, say the joint venture will offer new creative opportunities for company employees. Both shops have been branching out lately: @radical. media hired Jane Long, a former executive at the independent film company The Shooting Gallery, New York, to oversee film development, while W + K brought in Badonna Smith to work on development projects there.
Game Time
ABC has not announced who will direct Hurricane Season, but numerous directors from @radical have relevant experience directing sports-themed spots for W + K clients. Rick LeMoine and Steve Miller—a.k.a. the directing team of LeMoine/ Miller—helmed ESPN’s "Broadcast News," a comic spot that featured sports stars such as Yankees pitcher Roger Clemens and track star Jackie Joyner Kersee. ESPN’s SportsCenter campaign also included "The Kid," "Kerri Strug" and "Self-Defense," all co-directed by Bryan Buckley and Frank Todaro, who at the time comprised the @radical. media directing team of Buckley.Todaro. (Todaro remains with the shop, while Buckley is now a partner/director at bicoastal/international hungry man.) Ralf Schmerberg, who also works through @radical.media has directed several Nike spots out of W + K, including "Body," "Los Toros" and "Psalm 23." In addition, @radical. media director Robert Leacock helmed Hoop Hop, a documentary produced by W + K, for Japanese television.
"This is an extension of our already great relationship with Wieden," says Kamen, who like Davenport and @radical.media co-proprietor Frank Scherma, will serve as an executive producer on Hurricane Season. "The idea started at Wieden, and we joined forces and optioned the book together. We’ve been working together to get the project going."
Davenport says the project has been in the works since ’97, when he and other W + K executives read Blais’ book and article, and felt it could make an inspiring film that would appeal to sports fans. "We’ve been inspired by the female athletes we’ve encountered in our collaborations for Nike and ESPN," Davenport says. "When we read the book, we knew it would make a good story for us to tell."
Susan Lyne, ABC’s executive VP of movies and miniseries, and Quinn Taylor, VP of movies for TV, will oversee Hurricane Season on the network side. "This is actually a bit of a reunion for us, working with Susan," says Kamen. "We originally met her when @radical was producing the Web site for Premiere magazine, where she was the top editor. If it weren’t for Susan, this wouldn’t be happening."
Kamen points out that several of the executives, including Lyne, have school-age daughters involved in team sports, and Hurricane Season is a way of showing their support for their daughters’ endeavors. If the television movie is well received, the producers hope to parlay it into a weekly series. "We plan on doing a really great job with this two-hour movie, and make something that people would like to see more of," says Kamen.
The adjustment from Madison Avenue to Hollywood isn’t easy. "The movie and TV business is certainly different from advertising," says Davenport. "It takes a while to work your way through it. The distributors are different, the buyers are different—everything’s a little different."
Though Hurricane Season, now being scripted by Dawson’s Creek producer Chuck Rosin, is likely to be the first finished product from the agency-production company collaboration, Kamen says more projects will soon be announced.
diversity
Meanwhile, @radical.media is about to seal a second joint venture with an agency, this time with Carlton Communications, New York. "This one is more of a convergent media project," says Kamen, who expects to make a formal announcement shortly. "We are also in the middle of a deal with The New York Times, and there are many TV and emerging media projects that we aren’t ready to announce yet."
W + K has been encouraging its employees to pitch ideas and seek production assistance on their creative work outside of advertising. "Anybody can come in and pitch," says Davenport. "It’s a pretty loose thing. It’s an opportunity, too, for our creative people to do something besides advertising, and see if they can tell stories in a longer format."
Davenport and Smith served as producers for a documentary called Bloodlines, directed by Rebecca Guberman and Jennifer Jako, which was later shown on MTV. "We came in during postproduction and helped them finish it and get it distributed for part of their World AIDS Day coverage," says Davenport. The agency also helped one of its longtime producers, Jeff Selis, self-publish a book of dog photographs, Cat Spelled Backwards Doesn’t Spell God, which was later republished by Chronicle Books. Selis’ second photo book, Dog Bless America, is in the works, and Wieden is co-producing a tie-in documentary. Davenport adds that a former agency freelancer was coming to the offices to give a reading from her first novel.
Though agency-production company alliances are unusual, both Davenport and Kamen think they are the wave of the future. "I don’t see any conflict whatsoever," says Davenport. "It seems to me that we are all trying to tell a story. Whether we make the movie or someone else does, [the network is] still going to put ads in."
Kamen concurs. "We see it as crossover, not conflict," he says. "The world is changing, and everybody has to wake up to that change. Ads aren’t going to be what we now know them to be. [Spot] directors are doing things other than commercials, so it’s only logical that producers and agencies are doing the same—especially the people we are dealing with at Wieden and from @radical."
