During his brief tenure as group creative director at FCB, San Francisco, Chuck McBride met with a young director who had flown up from Los Angeles to pitch his ideas for a Levi’s spot. "It was back when they were doing ‘501 Reasons,’ and they wanted to do a girls’ spot for that campaign," McBride recalls. "We’d come up with this ‘mistaken identity’ thing, where cops think a girl is a bank robber and chase her off a bridge into the water. At the end, the cops look over the edge and they think she’s a goner and walk away, but you realize that she’s hanging on to the bottom of the bridge. That was our basic idea." The director’s take on that idea was unusual, to say the least: "He came back with a treatment where all the cops had dogs’ heads."
While he understandably passed on the pitch, McBride clicked with the director, Spike Jonze, of bicoastal/international Satellite, and hired him for another FCB Levi’s spot called "Doctors." That ad went on to receive an Emmy nomination, and a longstanding, successful collaboration began.
Today, McBride is the executive creative director at TBWA/Chiat/ Day, San Francisco, where one of his primary accounts is Levi’s. Recently, McBride experienced a sense of dej vu when he once again collaborated on a spot for the jeans maker with Jonze. The ad, "Dres-sing Room," which carries the tagline "Make Them Your Own," features people trying on Levi’s in what appears to be a dressing room. The footage of the people trying on the jeans was captured on a security camera. (McBride also works on the Sony PlayStation account, for which he recently did two spots, "Fumble," directed by Kuntz & MaguireaTom and Mike, respectivelyaof bicoastal/international Propaganda Films, and "Targets," helmed by Brian Beletic of Satellite. McBride is currently at work on a new package of ads for PlayStation.)
