By ALISON SLOANE GAYLIN
Even a Directors Guild of America (DGA) nomination for best commercial director has a downside, as director Bryan Buckley is quick to point out. "There’s always the inevitable backlash-the people who are going to say, ‘What’s the big deal about this guy? He sucks! I can do better than that.’ "
There probably won’t be a backlash against Buckley anytime soon: On March 11, he picked up the DGA Award. Buckley won on the basis of four spots, all for dot-com companies: Monster.com’s "When I Grow Up" via Mullen, Wenham, Mass; "TriMount Studios" and "Broker" for E*trade out of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (GS&P), San Francisco; and OnHealth.com’s "Friends" via TBWA/Chiat/Day, San Francisco. He says the main reason he submitted those four ads is "the way they all evolved from the boards."
In the 10-plus years he’s been directing, Buckley has developed a reputation as a director who specializes in edgy, comic spots. During his former partnership with director Frank Todaro (of bicoastal/international @radical.media), Buckley helped introduce viewers to Budweiser’s famed lizards and to several acclaimed ESPN commercials. More recently, he’s carved a niche for himself in the increasingly crowded dot-com field.
Buckley-who now directs via a production company he co-founded, bicoastal/international hungry man-says he was "definitely happy" to have been nominated, but didn’t necessarily expect it. "When Frank and I did the [ESPN] SportsCenter stuff a couple of years ago, we thought for sure we’d get nominated, but we weren’t," he recalls. "You don’t know what the criteria are-you just have to hope it happens."
"TriMount Studios" was a very different animal before Buckley came on board. The basic concept was the same: After seeing a trailer for a surefire box-office bomb called Blow’d Up, a man visits E*trade and sells all his stock in the studio that produced the film. But in the original treatment, the fictional film didn’t have much of a plot. "Blow’d Up was just about blowing things up all over the place," he recalls. "Then we talked about developing an actual trailer with a storyline and attaching a star to it."
Casting About
For Buckley-who frequently reworks ads based on his casting decisions-Anna Nicole Smith was the obvious choice to play the heroine of the "TriMount" clunker. "I think she’s a really interesting character in the world of Hollywood. She married rich. She isn’t a hundred-pound waif and she has been scorned for it."
Smith was willing to take the opportunity and run with it-in black lipstick, high heels and a skin-tight catsuit. "She was a total gamer," says Buckley. "She was confident enough in herself to have fun with this thing, and it was fantastic."
After much consideration as to who should play the bomb-planting villain (David Lee Roth was front-runner at one point), Buckley and the creatives settled on Star Trek veteran George Takei. They shot most of the spot in one day at an abandoned military facility in Southern California. "We ran around blowing things up, and essentially writing the script to the film as we went," Buckley recalls. "Because we only had Anna for a day, we’d shoot her on a set, and while we were setting lights for her, over on the other side [of the facility], there’d be something ready to blow up. I’d run over to the monitors, look in there and say, ‘Okay. Blow that up.’ Then I’d run back and shoot the scene."
Nothing is blown up in Monster.com’s "When I Grow Up." The spot features children saying lines such as "When I grow up, I want to be forced into early retirement" and "I want a brown nose." Casting was equally important to Buckley, especially since it had to be done in a hurry. "The client had given me a board which I had signed off on. It was three spots for the Super Bowl. And the day before we were supposed to start [pre-production], they killed it," he remembers. "The [agency creatives] said, ‘The client freaked out at the last minute because they thought it was too negative, but we have this other thing.’ And they faxed us a page with a bunch of those lines from the kids. So that was the spot. We had no idea what the feel was supposed to be. … But from that one page, we began to build the spot."
The building process was fast. "We had to shoot it in two weeks," explains Buckley, "and it was around Christmastime. I started thinking, ‘Okay. How am I going to make this a Super Bowl spot?’" In order to set the commercial apart from "the million other talking-head" ads, Buckley chose to film it in black and white. "We stayed on the same lenses; I wouldn’t go wider," he adds. "If I went wide, I wouldn’t allow the subject to get close to the lens, so it wouldn’t get goofy. No extras, either. I always work with extras, but I wiped that out [this time]. I wanted all the scenes to be like postcards."
He opted to shoot and cast the spot in New Orleans, Minnesota and New York. "We shot twenty-seven kids in total, and I think eight made the cut," he says. As is the case with many of his projects, none of the children were professional actors. "To me, one of the great things about this business is giving people a chance, be it Anna Nicole Smith or the kid down in Louisiana who, when I asked him what he wanted for Christmas, said, ‘a bed.’ You can find interesting people who aren’t necessarily spoiled or obnoxious. They can give to you, and hopefully you can help their lives change a bit."
Both "Friends" and "Broker" featured lead actors who are not professionals. The old man shown egging a car in "Friends" was "homeless a few months before" the shoot, Buckley says. And the sad-eyed, ’70s throwback who plods through a miserable day in "Broker" "really is that character [physically]." (The "Broker" star’s non-actor father, who accompanied him to the shoot, was tapped by Buckley to play the older man in E*trade’s Super Bowl ad, "Monkey," also for GS&P.)
Buckley recently completed work on a series of Miller Lite commercials via Ogilvy & Mather, New York. Still, he appreciates the creative freedom that the dot-com category can provide. "They don’t have to worry about what the interior of their place looks like-it doesn’t matter," he explains. "The entire perception of them is in their site and in their advertising. It makes them more willing to take chances."c
Judge Upholds Dismissal Of Involuntary Manslaughter Charge Against Alec Baldwin In “Rust” Shooting
A New Mexico judge has upheld her decision to dismiss an involuntary manslaughter charge against Alec Baldwin in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of a Western movie.
In a ruling Thursday, state District Court Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer stood by her July decision to dismiss an involuntary manslaughter charge against Baldwin. She said prosecutors did not raise any factual or legal arguments that would justify reversing her decision.
"Because the state's amended motion raises arguments previously made, and arguments that the state elected not to raise earlier, the court does not find the amended motion well taken," the judge wrote, adding that the request was also untimely.
A spokesperson for Baldwin's lawyers said Friday that they had no immediate reaction to teh decision.
The case was thrown out halfway through trial on allegations that police and prosecutors withheld evidence from the defense in the 2021 death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the film "Rust."
Baldwin's trial was upended by revelations that ammunition was brought into the Santa Fe County sheriff's office in March by a man who said it could be related to Hutchins' killing. Prosecutors said they deemed the ammo unrelated and unimportant, while Baldwin's lawyers say investigators "buried" the evidence in a separate case file and filed a successful motion to dismiss.
Special prosecutor Kari Morrissey can now decide whether to appeal to a higher court.
Baldwin, the lead actor and co-producer for "Rust," was pointing a gun at Hutchins during a rehearsal on a movie set outside Santa Fe in October 2021 when the revolver went off, killing Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza. Baldwin has said he pulled back the hammer —... Read More