A couple of times, I’ve tried to do serious [commercials]," says Rob Pritts, who directs commercials out of Backyard Productions, Venice, Calif. "They usually wind up being funny when they’re not supposed to be."
Pritts needn’t worry about having to be serious. His flair for comedy has garnered the spot maker numerous awards, a feature film credit and most recently, high-profile projects for M&Ms and Altoids. The Altoids campaign, which Pritts directed via Leo Burnett USA, Chicago, spoofs educational filmstrips of the 1970s to hilarious effect. In "Making Friends With Fruit," teenagers are shown how to get in with the in-crowd (offer them Altoids Sours, not grapefruit), while in "Healthy Curiosity" a young, would-be scientist feeds one of the candies to a guinea pig, who promptly explodes. And in "Curious Objects," a boy finds some questionable items in his father’s garage. As the voiceover encourages children to ask Dad about these items, the father shows his son their innocent uses. (Handcuffs, for instance, make a nifty bike-lock.) Finally, the boy finds a tin of the sours. The voice over advises Junior to place the tin on the floor and slowly back away.
Pritts, who has satirized a variety of film and commercial genres in his spots, was drawn to the Altoids project from the start. "I’ve always had an odd fascination for those filmstrips," he relates. "The thing about them was, they were campy and really cheesy when we originally saw them, and they seemed dated, even for the time. I went to high school in the seventies, and those films seemed like they were ten years old then."
Pritts worked hard to replicate that cheesy look, and it shows. With their purposefully shoddy production values and stiff performances, the ads appear to have been pulled straight out of a school projector, circa ’76. As with all of his projects, Pritts did a lot of pre-production research. "We actually found a guy in the Valley who made these movies," he recalls. "He showed up at our door with a big, old box full of films. We watched a bunch of them on tape. It was kind of like an archeological dig.
"Back then, things were shot on reversal," he continues. "They were usually shot on 16mm, off of sticks. The cameraman was probably the brother of the guy who owned the company, and he wasn’t that concerned about making sure the film was exposed right."
Initially, Pritts wanted to use the same shooting techniques (or lack thereof) for the Altoids spots. "We talked about shooting on 16 reversal, because you still can get that stock," he notes. "But the problem is, it’s new. We did a test, and it looked too good. When we tried to effect the film in post, we couldn’t get the same results as we’d get if we used full-on 35mm negative."
In other areas, however, he remained faithful. "We used really flat lighting and big shiny [bounce] boards when we were out in the sun," he says. "Inside, we’d just use the bare amount of lights and light it all with a key light. We also tried to keep the crew really small to replicate what they did back then."
"Curious Objects" was even written like a filmstrip, "on set, by myself and the [creatives]," Pritts reports. "We had just shot [one ad], and we knew that we were going to do something in the garage, but we weren’t sure what. It gelled at lunch that day. I storyboarded it, and then we shot it right afterward."
In post, Pritts made sure editor Bob Mori, then of Superior Assembly Editing Company, Santa Monica—he’s now with CO-OP, Santa Monica—added, "little affectations like the film cut where you’d see the splice. He was also able to filter the track and make it seem like it was an optical track, because that’s what those [’70s filmstrip] tracks were."
That attention to detail has been key to Pritts’ success. "If you’re going to do it, go all out," says the director, who had his actors speak Japanese and later dubbed in the English for the M&M’s Japanese monster movie parody, "Pituitary," via BBDO New York.
Though not all of his spots are spoofs, Pritts clearly enjoys making them. M&M’s "PSA," also out of BBDO, is styled after a politically correct public service announcement Pritts utilized "flash-frames and swing-and-tilt lenses" to make it as "self-conscious and pretentious" as possible. "There’s something intriguing about turning the medium in on itself," Pritts observes. "Particularly now. The viewer has become so sophisticated, and we’ve started to mock ourselves in so many ways."
A graduate of Southern Illinois University film school, Carbondale, Ill., Pritts directed industrial films for eight years before he hooked up with his old friends, Backyard founding partners Blair Stribley and Roy Skillicorn, in ’91. "Blair and I had gone to high school together and Roy was our art teacher," Pritts relates. "He was a young teacher; the age difference was close enough that he was nearly a peer.
"They’d started a production company in Chicago in ’85," continues Pritts, "but then the director moved to Los Angeles. In ’89, Blair started talking to Roy about starting [Backyard] in Chicago and then I came on board."
Pritts’ spec spot, "Bob in a Box" for WLUP Radio/Chicago was picked up by the station, and went on to win a Gold Clio—as well as lots of attention for the fledgling production company. Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, called on Pritts to shoot a Sega campaign, and his career took off.
Last year, Pritts directed his first feature film, Corky Romano, starring Chris Kattan from Saturday Night Live. Though he enjoyed working with the comedian ("I love hanging out with actors"), the experience was tougher than he’d anticipated. "A commercial director brings certain expectations into a movie," he explains. "You think, ‘I’m breaking out of the thirty-second or sixty-second format. I get a chance to develop a character.’ Well, in this case at least, you do get to do that, but you have no time. It was the equivalent of shooting four or five decent sized spots in a day. It took me a week to go, ‘Oh my God. We’re moving faster than I ever have in my life.’ But after a while, I got into the rhythm."
Much as he enjoyed his film experience, Pritts has no plans to make more features. "I think, after doing that, I kind of got it out of my system," he says. "I’m happy shooting spots."n
