Baker Smith is difficult to define as a director. Tag him a comedy helmer, and the striking visual sense displayed in his work gets in the way. Call him a visual stylist and the dead-on, offbeat dialogue and hilarious sight gags in the spots he directs out of Tate & Partners, Santa Monica, make that label appear woefully inadequate.
Take his Sprite spot "Movie Makers" for Lowe & Partners/SMS (now Lowe Lintas & Partners), New York. The setting is a sterile executive conference room at a Hollywood studio. The attention to detail in using the set to reflect the tone of the spot is perfect: lots of metal and glass in cold colors, with studio execs clad in designer suits and sitting around a table. Then the characters start pitching a concept for a new blockbuster to the studio chief. "Okay, people, what have you got?" the boss says, sliding into a chair. "Death Slug," says the guy from marketing. In quick succession, they pitch the tie-ins: a rubber slug action figure that leaves a slime trail, a Death Slug taco that shrinks when salt is added, a Slug Slime music video, slug slippers and slug on a stick. "What about the script?" asks the boss. "We can have one by Friday," replies an exec.
"I try to approach everything from a conceptual point of view as far as the look," says Smith. "I tend to think that the concept should dictate what the film looks like. In this case, the story was about cold-hearted bastards who care about nothing other than themselves and marketing points."
Now contrast the sterility of "Movie Makers" with Heineken’s "The Premature Pour," also for Lowe Lintas & Partners, where pouring a beer serves as a metaphor for a botched sexual encounter. In the elegant surroundings of a chic bar, a young woman pours the sexiest beer ever filmed, as Al Green’s "Let’s Stay Together" is heard, making her intentions crystal clear. A man is captivated by her, but blows his chance by dumping his Heineken in a glass, sending foam flying.
A conscious effort to sell beer, using premature ejaculation as a metaphor? "Absolutely! We embraced it wholeheartedly," Smith relates. "Obviously it was the agency’s idea, and one, certainly, any guy can associate with."
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Hitting home runs with his work is routine for Smith. Work he directed for Nike picked up several Clios and the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1998. And his ’97 effort for Volkswagen, "Sunday Afternoon," via Arnold Communications, Boston, is widely considered a classic. This year, he also had a spot showcased on the Super Bowl—Oxygen’s "I Am Woman" via Mullen, Wenham, Mass.
Smith recently finished work on three ads for Motorola—"Rock Paper Scissors," "Golf" and "Party Plans"—out of McCann-Erickson, New York. (The account has since shifted to Ogilvy & Mather, New York.) He also completed a campaign for Hollywood Video, out of Cliff Freeman and Partners, New York, which consists of the spots "Boxer," "Chase," "Interrogation," Shakespeare" and "Documentary." The ads for the video rental chain feature people contemplating what to rent, with scenes from a particular genre coinciding with each thought. For example, in "Interrogation," a customer’s voiceover muses about whether to rent a Mafia film, a war movie or a romance. While seated in an interrogation room, he is slapped by a soldier when he thinks of a war movie, and kissed by woman when thinking about romance.
"I love those spots dearly," Smith states. "The agency and I worked really, really hard and spent a lot of hours together on them, and it paid off for us. They were fun in different ways for us to shoot."
Fun for Smith and the agency creatives, perhaps, but the actor in "Interrogation" may have looked at it differently. "That poor guy," says Smith. "We designed it so that we would shoot over his shoulder so that we could do a ‘movie punch.’ But you do eight takes a day, he’s going to get accidentally tagged two or three times. By the end of the second day he was starting to get welts on the side of his face, but he was a trooper."
After graduating from college in ’87, Smith packed up his car and headed to California with the vague idea of gaining a picture deal. "I was very naïve," he recalls. "I thought when you crossed the state line that someone would hand you a three-picture deal. I was too green, stupid and young to realize how the process worked."
The crisis in Smith’s career path came when he had to choose between an offer to become a tour guide at Universal Studios or a glorified gofer on The Discovery Program. "I remember sitting down with my girlfriend at the time, who has since become my wife, to discuss it," says Smith. "I told her, ‘I’m 22 and at the crossroads of my life. Do I go for the money at $175 a week at Universal, or do I go for what I want to do, but you’re going to have to support me?’ "
The girlfriend agreed to support Smith, and he used the opportunity to learn filmmaking, eventually creating a spec reel, which landed him at now defunct Harmony Pictures in ’89 as part of a directing trio called Bliss. (The other members were Charles Wittenmeier, now with bicoastal/international Propaganda Films, and Scott Bibo, who now directs out of Villains, bicoastal and Chicago.) The team separated in ’91, and Smith signed with Tate & Partners in ’92.
Smith, who is working on spots for Heineken, as well as on some new Porsche fare out of Carmichael Lynch, Minneapolis, still has ambitions to direct features, but finds spots more than satisfying. "I just love what I do. I love my job. I got really fucking lucky," he declares. "Ten years ago, I was doing this for free and having just as much fun. Now people are paying me. It’s almost like icing on the cake."µ
