What one thing would you do to make the world a better place? It’s a question that’s become synonymous with beauty pageants. But the age-old query gets a different kind of reply in a new spot for Oxygen Media. Created by Mullen, Wenham, Mass., and directed by Bryan Buckley of bicoastal/international hungry man, "Pageant" is a :60 meant to look as if it had been spliced together from archival footage of beauty contests spanning the past 60 years. In it, 18 women successively tell the audience—a few words at a time—that they would improve the world by abolishing negative stereotypes of women in the media.
The spot opens as a fresh-faced and beaming Miss Georgia, circa the1950s, approaches the microphone. An emcee asks the proverbial question, "What one thing …" The smiling woman begins, "Well, Ted, I’d do my very best …" at which point the spot cuts to another woman, looking as if at a pageant held a few years later. She picks up where Miss Georgia left off: "to make sure …" Then the spot cuts to another contestant. And so on, and so on. In its entirety, the sentence the women string together reads, "Well, Ted, I’d do my very best to make sure that every time you ever witness a woman, from Illinois to Nevada, in the media, it would be sure to reveal her true complexities, and not just the same old stereotypes that everyone has become so accustomed to, and that I believe do an incredible disservice to all humanity." The tag: "Somebody had to say it."
Mullen creative director/ copywriter Tim Roper, art director Toygar Bazarkaya and producer Sarah Monaco said Oxygen’s goal was to differentiate itself from the landscape of women’s television that largely consists of so-called victim TV or overly sentimental movie-of-the-week fare. "Oxygen wanted to communicate what they stand for by contrast," noted Roper. "We played around with a lot of ideas, but this one seemed the most endemic. It showed what they are and what they aren’t, in an interesting and fun way."
When it came to selecting a director, Buckley and the team at hungry man immediately came to mind. Monaco had worked with the director and production house on "When I Grow Up" for Monster.com, and noted that "Pageant" not only had a tone and irony comparable to that well-known dot-com ad, but had similar "production hang-ups" related to the budget. "We needed three days, but we only had two," she said. In other words, the "Pageant" shoot had to run smoothly.
"The ad is supposed to look like found footage," added Bazarkaya. "Bryan was the one director to see that. He was the one not trying to put his handprint on it."
The assignment appealed to Buckley because it "presented a challenge on every level." He also loved the concept. "I remember reading the script and thinking it was just a great idea, stringing a sentence together like that, and one that was filled with irony," he said.
And then the work began. The agency and production teams pored over hour upon hour of real archival footage from pageants dating back to ’49, as well as books and photographs. New York-based casting director Stacy Osnow gathered some 500 wo-men for the original casting call, from which the 18 "contestants" were eventually chosen. Production designer Ginger Tougas set about creating the 18 different sets. Cinematographer Russell Carpenter researched film stocks and lighting techniques to figure out how best to capture the look of each era. In the end, Buckley said, they started with black-and-white, then went to reversal film, followed by straight 35mm, then video for the setups meant to capture the ’70s, and finally ended with 24p high-definition (HD) video. As a backup, a second 35mm camera was used when they filmed the HD sequences. Not having worked in HD before, Buckley said he was initially concerned it would look too sharp. Ultimately, the HD portion was used in the final spot.
Multiple Tony Award-winning costume designer William Ivey Long (e.g., The Producers) was brought in to pick out the ladies’ gowns. "William collects dresses, so he had a lot of stuff," Buckley said. "But sometimes we asked for a train wreck. You know, the ‘what was she thinking wearing that?’ kind of dress. Because it wasn’t about the winners; it was about the hopefuls. We also had to make sure the color palette worked with that period’s film stock and the set. That’s what was amazing—pulling all that together."
"Pageant" was lensed at Silvercup Studios, Long Island City, N.Y. Time, or the lack of it, presented the greatest challenge on the set. The 18 different setups—everything down to the pageant’s logo and the age of the emcee changed—left Buckley with only 10 minutes for each woman’s performance.
"Once we’d start shooting, it was go, go, go," Buckley recalled. "It was a sprint, using different techniques to get an interesting palette of reads. I didn’t want them to line-read, so I gave them sentences to work with, and I had their résumés, so I’d ask them questions that would throw them off a little."
Nor, according to Roper, were the actresses given a big-picture view of the script, because, he said, "The more out of context a phrase sounded, the more fresh it seemed."
Editor Andre Betz of Bug Editorial, New York, cut "Pageant." (He also edited "When I Grow Up.") "Andre had it cut in a day and a half, because he’s that good," Buckley said. "It was pretty well mapped out, in terms of the reads, but I asked him to try to get a sing-song-y cadence to make it work visually. In a short time, he really had the body worked out."
One final decision to be made was picking an ending from the two alternate women who had been shot: an African-American, and a bubbly blonde. "We weren’t sure about going a more serious route, or if we should push the end a little," Buckley said. "But [during postproduction] it seemed that the more serious way [with the African-American woman] was better."
"It was a really fun project," Buckley reported. His only gripe? "I thought it was going to run in the Super Bowl. Especially because of Britney [Spears] and that Playboy Playmate [Fear Factor] thing they had [on another network], I thought that [contrast] would have been great."
