Baker Smith was shooting a Mini Cooper car spot when a call came in from his business partner/executive producer, Bonnie Goldfarb. "She was screaming into the phone," recounts Smith, partner/ director at Harvest, Santa Monica, which he founded with Goldfarb in March 2001. "I had no idea what she was saying, and I thought, ‘My God, she’s gone mad.’ "
Smith, who says Goldfarb has always been "the emotional one," listened to the producer for a few moments. "I sort of just sat there quietly and let her work it out," he recalls. "Then she said, ‘You got the nomination.’ I’m thinking, ‘I got the nomination for what?’ "
After more than a decade of helming ads, Smith had received his first Directors Guild of America (DGA) nod for best commercial director of ’01. To say he was surprised would be an understatement: "You know, when you’re walking down the street, and all of a sudden you see somebody you haven’t seen for fifteen years? How it takes you a second to recalibrate the brain? That’s how I felt," he explains. (The DGA award went to Bob Kerstetter, co-founder/creative director at Black Rocket Euro RSCG, San Francisco, whose spot helming endeavors have been through bicoastal Tool of North America.)
Smith was nominated on the basis of four spots: FOX Sports’ "Nail Gun," for TBWA/Chiat/Day, San Francisco; Toshiba’s "Asylum," out of DGWB Advertising, Irvine, Calif; Heineken’s "Birth of Scratching," through Lowe, Lintas & Partners, New York (now Lowe, New York); and "Cheryl ‘n Me," a spot for Lucky Magazine via Black Rocket Euro RSCG, San Francisco. (The latter two were produced through Tate & Partners, Santa Monica, Smith’s roost prior to Harvest.)
The Work
Like most of Smith’s spots, "Cheryl ‘n Me" makes a lasting comic impression. In it, a young woman is shown gallivanting around with her best friend, Cheryl, who happens to be a mannequin. But when she catches her husband and Cheryl in the midst of an affair, the woman realizes it’s time for a new best buddy: Lucky magazine.
Smith says he "had a blast" shooting the spot. "It was so much fun just to watch people on the street," he recalls. "They’d see a camera, and they’d see this actress hugging a mannequin and they’d think, ‘What the hell is going on?’ "
The director made good use of those onlookers. "All the people in the background are real," reports Smith, who also cast a real perfume tester at Macy’s to spray a scent on Cheryl’s plaster wrist. "The idea was to make the whole thing look as real as possible. Cheryl is real to the girl, so we had to treat it that way and film it that way. We actually spent a lot of time talking about Cheryl, discussing what she would and wouldn’t do."
No matter how outlandish the idea, Smith manages to make it credible. A highly collaborative director with a keen eye for detail, he works hard to make each spot’s scenario as realistic as possible. It’s the source of much of his humor. "Birth of Scratching," for instance, depicts a DJ, circa 1982, who discovers the hip-hop record spinning technique while trying to clean a spilled Heineken off an LP.
"Asylum," which features an inmate imitating a copying machine in various bizarre ways, was shot in an actual, abandoned insane asylum, in Camarillo, Calif. "You’d walk in there, and you could feel the ghosts," relates Smith. "It was pretty creepy."
The shoot was a highlight, he adds, because of the degree of creative freedom he was given. "We had two days, and the agency said, ‘Do whatever you want.’ So we ended up cutting five different spots, some of them completely independent of the [final] thirties. We’d just sort of go into a room and say, ‘OK, this is a great room.’ We’d get the grips and lighting department in there, and we’d improv." The actor who played the copier fanatic, says Smith, "had so much fun with it. I would just make a few suggestions and we’d burn two minutes of film."
In "Nail Gun," a man’s nail gun goes haywire, peppering his neighborhood with exploding nails. At the end of the spot, it’s revealed that the tool was made in October, when assembly-line workers were too mesmerized by FOX’s coverage of the Major League Baseball playoffs to pay attention to their jobs.
Two of the tool’s "victims," are a man and his dog. Smith reports that the dog’s performance was particularly truthful. "We had planted some squibs in the driveway, so we could get the sparks," he explains. "As soon as those squibs hit, that dog jumped five feet in the air and hauled ass. What you don’t see in the spot, because we cut it out, is, he runs away and then a beat later you see this trainer running after the dog. Two minutes later, you hear a PA who is several blocks away say, ‘The dog has just passed me. He doesn’t look like he’s going to slow down.’ "
When Smith began his career, in ’89, he directed out of the now defunct Harmony Pictures as part of the directing trio Bliss. (The other members were Scott Bibo, currently at Play, Venice, Calif., and Charles Wittenmeier, who is now with Form, Los Angeles.) In ’91 Smith went solo, and signed with Tate & Partners the following year.
Smith formed Harvest with his longtime producer Goldfarb, he explains, "because I guess I needed a bit of a challenge. It felt like the next step for me."
It’s been a positive step. "I didn’t realize how much fun it was going to be," he reports. "There’s an enormous amount of freedom associated with it, which I did not expect. You feel you can call your own shots."
Smith is busy enough directing spots. He recently completed work on the aforementioned Mini Cooper campaign—four spots out of Crispin Porter+Bogusky, Miami. (The Mini Cooper is produced by the BMW Group.) "They definitely have a humorous twist to them," he hints. "Some of them more of a smile than a chuckle, though."
