It’s the classic set-up for a porn film: Women break things in their apartments so that the sexy superintendent will come to fix them. Then bau-ch-ch-bau-bau … let the games begin. But it’s not a skin flick we’re talking about here; it’s a commercial for Levi’s 569 Loose Straight Jeans, out of TBWA/Chiat/Day, San Francisco.
The :60 "Fix It" begins when a door swings open and the young man standing there wearing baggy jeans and a T-shirt simply states, "I got your page." A Mrs. Robinson-like character looks him over seductively as she silently lets him into her apartment to fix a leak under the kitchen sink. As the young man struggles with the piping, his beeper sounds and he’s off to another apartment to fix a chandelier that has fallen from the ceiling. Cut to a medley of wo-men trashing their apartments like rock stars—a sledgehammer to a sink, a chair thrown through a window, an ax to the wall, and the climax: a bomb tossed in the toilet. Our young super dutifully answers each page, at last arriving home to his own dilapidated apartment in the same building, where his girlfriend nonchalantly asks, "¿Que pasa?" Covered in dirt and sweat, he replies: "Man, this place is falling apart." On cue, the bomb finally detonates elsewhere in the building, his pager beckons, and he wearily heads out again to survey the wreckage. The supered message: "Levi’s 569 Loose Straight Jeans. Make Them Your Own."
"Fix It" is part of Levi’s overall "Make Them Your Own" campaign. The concept was first introduced with a Spike Jonze-directed spot called "Dressing Room," produced through bicoastal Satellite, featuring hidden-camera footage of people trying on jeans. "Fix It" represents a branching out into single story lines that focus on individual Levi’s products. In the case of 569 Loose Straight Jeans, the agency wanted to present the consumer with a different kind of jean—one that wasn’t the tight-fitting, Marlboro Man-wear often associated with the brand, but was, rather, a loose-fitting alternative. They did this by creating a not-so-typical character.
While the script for "Fix It" contained a scenario we’ve seen before, nothing came off as the way it was executed was cliché. For instance, instead of casting a hunky repairman wearing tight jeans and a tool belt, we have this boyish-looking fellow sporting baggy pants and carrying a duffel bag. The women aren’t bodacious babes of the beer commercial ilk, but are instead an interesting cross-section of femininity and chutzpah. In addition, the apartments are sparsely decorated with a hint of 1970s décor, and each scene is shot as if being viewed by a silent voyeur. The camera never moves and the result is an interesting-looking commercial that resembles the pared-down feeling of a European play.
"When we were going to do this we thought, ‘We’ve got all these women. Let’s not go in and shoot cleavage; let’s back up and treat everything with a bit more respect,’ " said TBWA/ Chiat/Day, San Francisco, creative director/copywriter Chuck McBride. "This way it has far more ironic tension."
McBride’s thoughts were echoed by director Michael Haussman of Serious Pictures, London. "Instead of asking what’s dynamic, we said, ‘Let’s make it un-dynamic and give it a humbler point of view.’ So we framed everything slightly above eye level and stripped away most of the props to have the characters straight up front," Haussman related.
The apartment sets were built at Black Island Studios, London. Whether intentional or not, each room conveyed a European sensibility. "I don’t think we’d ever get colors like this in America," commented McBride, speaking of the saturated orange and green palettes.
For Haussman, the most fun aspect of shooting "Fix It" was not breaking things, but setting up the aftermath—"making everything look like a crime scene," as he put it. "A chandelier on the floor with part of the ceiling hanging, and he’s looking up at it and she’s looking at him. Those are the really fun things, the more provocative things," noted Haussman.
Casting for the spot was done in New York, Paris, London, Barcelona and Madrid, but, according to Haussman, most of the women were drawn from Barcelona. "When you cast in places like London and Paris, you start to get three types of girls in the same mold, but in Barcelona, everyone is totally different," Haussman observed. Indeed, the women in the commercial were young, old, black, white and totally unique, which added to the spot’s intrigue.
Because the camera never moves, the pacing of the commercial was meticulously established by editor Angus Wall of Rock Paper Scissors, Los Angeles, and composer Larry Schwartz of bicoastal Elias Associates. From the get-go, McBride knew the music should be a waltz, and he commissioned Schwartz and Elias Associates creative director Jonathan Elias to come up with some demos that Wall could cut to.
The music had an extremely episodic feel, lending itself to the visual telling of the story. In the end, the music crescendos, then levels off, leading into the moment when the man’s girlfriend asks, "¿Que pasa?" then resumes as he heads back out to fix the next disaster. "This is the first time in my career I’ve [gone to the music house so early], and I think it’s a really progressive way to work," said McBride, pleased with the results.
While a lot was left to chance—building sparse sets that still looked real, relying on ironic tension to create humor, casting atypical characters—McBride always kept one thing in mind: "If there was ever any doubt, we thought, ‘Hey, we’ve got a bunch of good-looking chicks wrecking stuff, so how can we go wrong with that?’ "
