Sometimes it really is better to do things the old-fashioned way. Take director David Frankham, for instance. Represented by bicoastal The A+R Group, he adheres to a simple, character-driven approach in his work. It’s this traditional—yet stand-out—style which helped a campaign for the Los Angeles Dodgers that he directed out of the Los Angeles office WongDoody, garner a Gold Lion at the 2001 Cannes International Advertising Festival.
The spots—"Giant Loser," "Uniwave," and "Hey Batta"—are direct and to the point. Shot in a documentary style, they depict a single super-fan of the baseball team interacting with various unsuspecting members of the public. In "Uniwave," said Dodgers’ fan sits at a bus stop bench, performing the wave solo and yelling. A bemused woman asks him, "What does that do?" He replies, "Gets people pumped up." In "Hey Batta," the same fan sits at a lunch counter, endlessly repeating, "Hey batta hey batta hey batta," to a woman who’s trying to enjoy her soup. And in "Giant Loser," the fan boards a bus and convinces a reluctant rider to don a rival team’s ball cap so that the Dodger fanatic may extensively deride him for being a fan of the opposition team.
The Gold Lion isn’t the first award to honor Frankham’s work, but it’s certainly his biggest. He won a Seattle Art Directors Club award for his first-ever spot, Citgo’s "Nature," out of now defunct Wells Rich Greene BDDP. (At the time, Frankham did not have formal representation.) And the Dodgers work also picked up a silver Clio.
But the down-to-earth director has to admit that the Lion is special. "You all of a sudden see your work on a different scale," relates Frankham. "We heard the day before that we won, so we all flew out [to France]. The whole agency gang went. And it was amazing—there were people from Brazil, from all over Europe there. … We were a small local campaign compared to everything else. I definitely think it’s expanded the scope and the way people look at you."
Narrative Process
Frankham has remained committed to his own vision. "I’ve always been character driven, story driven," he explains. "When I was first coming in [to commercialmaking] a lot of my peers were directing music videos and stuff, which I just really didn’t relate to. And the commercials at that time I felt were just a lot of image flashing—sixty beautiful postcards in thirty seconds. I was coming from somewhere else."
Even Frankham’s training was what might be considered old school. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he did a great deal of production work as a teenager. Although he spent 1988 and ’89 studying mathematics at the University of Arizona, a career in math just didn’t speak to him, and he realized how much he missed production work. "I kind of had to go away to realize, ‘Hey, that was actually really great!’ " he remembers.
Then Frankham had the opportunity to apprentice under director Martin Donovan, whose work includes the feature films Apartment Zero and Somebody Is Waiting, which Frankham worked on. "[Donovan] apprenticed under Visconti, so there was this Italian idea of true apprenticeship," Frankham explains. "It was kind of like you didn’t have any job other than to figure out your own ideas on how you were going to shoot things, how you were going to tell the story, etcetera. … It was being able to break down and actually be able to shoot a film without taking that leap."
It might seem logical that Frankham, given his love for traditional narrative and character, would have been exclusively drawn towards long-form filmmaking, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. So he discovered after doing his first commercial—for Wells Rich Greene BDDP, with Rob Moss, who was then a creative director at the agency. Frankham wanted to shoot some storyboards that Moss had done for Citgo. The boards had been killed, but Moss suggested that Frankham just go ahead and do them as a spot. "So I took that on as a practice, and I just loved it," recalls Frankham. "I had to tell the story in nine-hundred frames—it was tricky. You had to think out things a lot more and define the important things. … I really enjoyed it."
Then, in ’97, Frankham signed with his first production company—Valiant Pictures—where he got to direct more character-driven spots. Among these was a package for the Seattle Reign, a woman’s basketball team in the now defunct American Basketball League, out of Hammerquist & Halverson, Seattle, in which the antics of pitifully bad male cheerleaders are shown to great comic effect. It was at Valiant that Frankham says he developed a great relationship with a group of creatives, all then at Hammerquist: copywriters Matt McCain and Ian Cohen and art directors Matt Peterson and Mike Proctor. "In the beginning it felt like we were the kids, and the adults were on vacation," Frankham remembers fondly. "We built off each other, coming back to that trust. … The only important thing was that it was the best or the funniest it could be. So that group will always be a touchstone for me."
Not surprisingly for a guy with his sensibilities, Frankham counts greats such as documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, who also directs spots out of bicoastal/international @radical.media, and the late feature director John Cassavetes, among his influences. In fact, Frankham recently completed work on a documentary, ISO Someone Like Me, about a childlike 48-year-old man who thinks he is Peter Pan and is searching for Tinkerbell. A less thoughtful director might have been tempted to make fun of such a subject, but not Frankham. "The guy has a lot of levels going on. … I’ve become a fan," Frankham says. Besides, he points out, "If I wanted to make fun of someone like that, I wouldn’t have to leave Los Angeles."
Next up for Frankham are a campaign for AvMed with Crispin Porter+Bogusky, Miami, and another documentary. He hopes that someday he’ll get to shoot a spot in New York, something he’s never done. But mostly, Frankham says, he just wants to keep doing what he’s doing. "I’m just loving doing the commercials," he enthuses. "And I’m enjoying the documentaries to balance it out."
