Since director Hank Perlman of bicoastal/international hungry man last graced the SHOOT Directors Issue, in the spring of 1998, a lot has happened. At the time, hungry man, the production company that Perlman had opened with partner/director Bryan Buckley and partner/executive producer Stephen Orent, was a mere five months old, and it was monocoastal (based only in New York, that is).
Prior to launching hungry man, Perlman was already established as an award-winning copywriter, having worked on ESPN’s "This Is SportsCenter" campaign, which he created while at Wieden+Kennedy (W+K), Portland, Ore., in the mid-’90s. He’d made his directing debut while pitching in as a copywriter for MTV’s on-air promos department in exchange for using MTV’s office space.
Hungry man is now a thriving global production company, and Perlman is thriving right along with it. In ’01 three Nike spots that he helmed—"WNFL," "WNHL" and "WMLB"—were honored in the Advertising Excellence category at the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP) Show. The ads predict the future of women’s sports, as depicted by a gaggle of precocious grade school girls. There’s nothing like watching a bunch of 10-year-olds huddle up between plays in "WNFL," and hearing one of them tell her friend to hit another girl in the mid-section because she had hot lunch.
More recently Perlman directed six spots for a Sears holiday campaign out of Young & Rubicam (Y&R), Chicago, comprising "Dancing," "Diamonds and Turtlenecks," "Farm Boys," "Tow Truck Guy," "Family Portrait" and "Getting Serious." People are talking about them—not only because the work represents a new creative direction for the venerable retailer, but because the spots are so meticulously cast that the actors take the creative to a higher level.
The campaign introduces different scenarios in which people find the perfect items at Sears to seemingly improve their lives. Each spot is interspersed with a supered checklist of the purchases featured in the commercial. Sounds straightforward enough, but in the hands of Perlman something special happens.
Take, for instance, "Farm Boys" ‘ redheaded triplets, whom the director found on a triplets Web site. The three hulking college guys sit side by side on the couch on Christmas morning. They simultaneously unwrap nearly identical flannel shirts. One by one they say, "Thanks Mom," and then eagerly hand over their gift to her: a George Foreman Lean Mean Grilling Machine. The look on her face is one of surprise, disappointment and confusion. But that’s not all! Her sons also give her a package of ground beef to go with her grill. "That’s ground chuck," one informs her as all three let out self-satisfied chuckles.
"Dancing," another spot in the campaign, is the story of a teenage boy and his parents. The teenager enters the living room, puts a CD on the stereo and cranks it up. The camera focuses mainly on the boy in the foreground, but in the background his parents start dancing to his music in the kitchen. However, this is not good dancing. It’s the kind of outdated boogying that parents only seem to do after their children become teenagers. The boy turns his head and there is a brief, almost uncomfortable pause before his eyes widen at his parents’ appalling behavior. You know he’s going to be horrified, but it takes a moment for him to get there.
Many of the ads on Perlman’s reel contain these subtle, comic moments. Often he casts real people for his spots because he sees something in them that he knows he can bring out. "Sometimes you see people and they may not be seasoned actors," he notes, "but you can see the potential in them. Their instincts are there."
One of the things that attracted Y&R to Perlman for the Sears work was a package of spots he directed for BBC Radio One in the UK last summer via Fallon London. To let people know that Radio One was airing a summer of live concerts, Perlman shot eight commercials, including "Split Up," "Bag," "Sit Down" and "Drink," featuring teenagers standing in living rooms while listening to Radio One, but acting the way kids do at a concert.
For instance, in "Shoulders," a girl sits on the shoulders of her friend to get a better look at the concert stage. Or, in this case, to get a better look at the radio—which is two feet in front of her in her friend’s kitchen.
Perlman says he receives a lot of scripts from agencies in London—something he finds funny, considering he’s an all-American boy from the Chicago suburbs. "I consider myself so American that the fact that the English think my reel is funny is so flattering," says Perlman, citing the differences between English and American humor. "The English have no problem showing someone’s butt on television, while we’ll have no problem blowing things up. But in general, we share so much pop culture that there’s a lot of crossover. They think American ads are hilarious and we think English ads are."
Perlman is noted for his comedy-based style, but he believes that when working in that area, you shouldn’t do comedy for comedy’s sake. "Even though Sears took an entirely different approach and the ads were funny and smart, they were different in a responsible way," he points out. "Not just different to be different."
In a recent series of ads that Perlman directed for VoiceStream Wireless—"Driver’s License," "DMV/License," "DMV/Arm" and "DMV/Alarm"—out of Publicis, Seattle, the scripts involved a chimp using the text-messaging feature of VoiceStream’s various products. What attracted Perlman to the job was the fact that the primate is put in all of these everyday, boring situations, rather than being asked to perform the usual hi jinks of monkeys in commercials. To Perlman, that’s comedy.
"It’s one of those universal things—chimps are funny, but Publicis came up with this idea to use chimps that were as mundane as possible," recalls Perlman. "It became the anti-monkey spot. Sometimes what makes something funny is how dramatic it is."
