Even a Directors Guild of America (DGA) nomination for best commercial director has a downside, as director Bryan Buckley is quick to point out. "There’s always the inevitable backlash—the people who are going to say, ‘What’s the big deal about this guy? He sucks! I can do better than that.’ "
There probably won’t be a backlash against Buckley anytime soon: On March 11, he picked up the DGA Award. Buckley won on the basis of four spots, all for dot-com companies: Monster.com’s "When I Grow Up" via Mullen, Wenham, Mass; "TriMount Studios" and "Broker" for E*trade out of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (GS&P), San Francisco; and OnHealth.com’s "Friends" via TBWA/Chiat/Day, San Francisco. He says the main reason he submitted those four ads is "the way they all evolved from the boards."
In the 10-plus years he’s been directing, Buckley has developed a reputation as a director who specializes in edgy, comic spots. During his former partnership with director Frank Todaro (of bicoastal/international @radical.media), Buckley helped introduce viewers to Budweiser’s famed lizards and to several acclaimed ESPN commercials. More recently, he’s carved a niche for himself in the increasingly crowded dot-com field.
Buckley—who now directs via a production company he co-founded, bicoastal/international hungry man—says he was "definitely happy" to have been nominated, but didn’t necessarily expect it. "When Frank and I did the [ESPN] SportsCenter stuff a couple of years ago, we thought for sure we’d get nominated, but we weren’t," he recalls. "You don’t know what the criteria are—you just have to hope it happens."
"TriMount Studios" was a very different animal before Buckley came on board. The basic concept was the same: After seeing a trailer for a surefire box-office bomb called Blow’d Up, a man visits E*trade and sells all his stock in the studio that produced the film. But in the original treatment, the fictional film didn’t have much of a plot. "Blow’d Up was just about blowing things up all over the place," he recalls. "Then we talked about developing an actual trailer with a storyline and attaching a star to it."
Casting About
For Buckley—who frequently reworks ads based on his casting decisions—Anna Nicole Smith was the obvious choice to play the heroine of the "TriMount" clunker. "I think she’s a really interesting character in the world of Hollywood. She married rich. She isn’t a hundred-pound waif and she has been scorned for it."
Smith was willing to take the opportunity and run with it—in black lipstick, high heels and a skin-tight catsuit. "She was a total gamer," says Buckley. "She was confident enough in herself to have fun with this thing, and it was fantastic."
After much consideration as to who should play the bomb-planting villain (David Lee Roth was front-runner at one point), Buckley and the creatives settled on Star Trek veteran George Takei. They shot most of the spot in one day at an abandoned military facility in Southern California. "We ran around blowing things up, and essentially writing the script to the film as we went," Buckley recalls. "Because we only had Anna for a day, we’d shoot her on a set, and while we were setting lights for her, over on the other side [of the facility], there’d be something ready to blow up. I’d run over to the monitors, look in there and say, ‘Okay. Blow that up.’ Then I’d run back and shoot the scene."
Nothing is blown up in Monster.com’s "When I Grow Up." The spot features children saying lines such as "When I grow up, I want to be forced into early retirement" and "I want a brown nose." Casting was equally important to Buckley, especially since it had to be done in a hurry. "The client had given me a board which I had signed off on. It
