Who can turn Wall Street into a raging river and Brooklyn into a desert? If you answered "God," you just might be onto something. But, apparently, mere mortals possess this strange power—namely New York-based Christopher Film’s owner/producer Jimmy Parker and his crew.
This past June, ad agency D’adda, Lorenzini, Vigorelli/BBDO, Milan, on behalf of BMW Italia, approached production service company Christopher Films with a big request: They wanted raw nature to invade the urban New York landscape. And over Labor Day weekend, crews worked round the clock to pull off the Herculean task of turning Hanover Street in Downtown Manhattan and Water Street in Brooklyn, N.Y., into, respectively, a river and a desert. The effort was made for a BMW X5 spot called "Citta Allagata," directed by Frederico Brugia, who is represented in Italy by BRW & Partners, Milan. (Citta Allagata means "flooded city" in Italian.)
The idea was to show that the BMW could go over all sorts of terrain—with a city view thrown in. "Looking south from Water Street in Brooklyn, you can see a bit of the Brooklyn Bridge, and you can see the high-rises of Wall Street across the water," he explains. "And, of course, Wall Street is Wall Street."
Parker, who founded Christopher Films in 1992 after a career as a freelance producer, recalls that an "original question was, ‘Couldn’t this be done in the computer?’ And, yes, it could have been, but you never would have had the realism. You get a bit extra when you do it [in-camera]. That was the director’s feeling."
The demands of pulling off such a task were, admittedly, enormous. "You can’t close New York down, yet we wanted to bring in many tons of material," notes Parker. "One reason we chose to do it over Labor Day weekend was the benefit of one extra day. … We started working Thursday night, bringing sand into Water Street to make the desert, and Friday night in Wall Street bringing in all the stones, soil, trees. The idea was that we would shoot the desert on Saturday and Wall Street on Sunday, and use Monday as clean-up. … We’d have a crew of twelve start, work ten hours and go home. Then another crew would come in. It just went on and on."
Planning
One of the reasons everything went so smoothly is because the locations were right. For the river, Parker says that Wall Street was an easy choice. "We were limited to Wall Street because we had to close down everything around us. It wasn’t just having a standing body of water surrounded by trees and soil and whatnot," he explains. "Once the action of the car started, the water itself had to be moving at quite a rapid speed. So there had to be an incline. … and New York is such a grid, when we found a street with a bit of a curve, that lent some architectural interest to the frame."
Freelance production designer Jim Mazzola says that when he was first approached with the job, he didn’t know if it would work. "I thought about it for three or four days, wandered around in my car," he remembers. "That’s where I get my best ideas, as I’m driving in traffic. And it just went through different stages. ‘Gonna build forms for the dunes, have a special crew construct that … then the trucks, effects crew.’ Everything just worked like clockwork."
Even though Mazzola is a 25-year veteran of the business, with 73 feature film credits under his belt, including being property master on The Age of Innocence, he admits that for a commercial, this was "a big deal. Because on movies you have the time, the money and a lot more people."
Naturally, a shoot of this magnitude required meticulous coordination. "I have to say I have very good location managers," reports Parker, "and a very good relationship with the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. They should really get a lot of the credit for organizing this and helping it come off and keeping the homeowners and store owners happy. Because we really did stop life in these areas."
For her part, Julianne Cho, director of publicity at the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting, says, "It was simple because they had some of the best location managers in the city." The location managers on the shoot were Laurie Pitkus and Tom Betterton, with Carla Raij acting as assistant location manager.
Raij herself admits that the shoot was one of the biggest requests she’s dealt with as far as commercials are concerned. "If you begin to think about things far enough in advance, anything is possible," she believes.
And, yes, confirms Raij, permission had to be granted from myriad agencies—in Wall Street, for example, diplomatic parking had to be relocated, and in Brooklyn, a city bus was re-routed for three days. But Raij says that the beauty of the process in New York is that "it all goes under one permit … you file one formal permit under which everything must be covered, so by the time you type up the permit, you have permission from each person."
Although the permitting process went smoothly, they had to get a last-minute approval from the Fire Department—a process which had amusing results. At least, notes Raij, she can laugh now. "I’ll never forget: Jimmy was smoothing out sand dunes with a shovel," she recalls. "Someone in the neighborhood called the Fire Department. I had to wake up the battalion chief at midnight to get one more approval."
All parties involved maintain that New York is one of the most film friendly places in the world. "I’m from New York, I grew up in the business in New York," states Parker. "There’s a lot of loyalty with the crews and the vendors, so I definitely love it here. People who have never been here before with big productions from overseas, they’ll call me up and say, ‘Listen, we have this job and we need a city that looks like New York. But, of course, we can’t do this in New York. So is Kansas City or Chicago appropriate?’ And I say, ‘Wait a minute; we can do this in New York.’ At the end of the day, New York is so film friendly that my clients are always amazed. I have to say, probably one of the reasons people come to America to shoot is to see New York as a backdrop for their ideas."r
