Former Agency Creative Gains First Spot Production House Roost.
By KATHY DeSALVO
Director Deb Hagan has joined Straw Dogs, a bicoastal production house, which New York-headquartered Paradise Music & Entertainment (NASDAQ: PDSE) agreed to acquire this spring. The Paradise deal is expected to be finalized later this month.
Straw Dogs provides Hagan with her first commercial representation; she was an agency creative for the past nine years. Most recently, Hagan spent a year and a half as an associate creative director at Los Angeles-based BBDO/West, where she worked on such accounts as Best Western and Earthlink before resigning in July to pursue directing full-time. Her background also includes prior agency art director stints at L.A.-based TBWA/Chiat/Day, Minneapolis-based Fallon McElligott and New York-based Ammirati Puris Lintas (now Lowe Lintas & Partners).
Straw Dogs signed Hagan based largely on the strength of her self-financed spec reel. It consists of the darkly comedic spots "Cruel World" for Unocal 76, "Monster Burger" for Hardee’s, "Fly" for L.A. Cellular, and "Worst Job in the World" for Pizza Hut. Also to her credit is an unaired spot she directed on spec for Holiday Inn Express, "Clandestine Meeting," created by Fallon McElligott, and "Waiting Room," a spot for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, via Gabriel Diericks Razidlo, Minneapolis.
Straw Dogs president/CEO Craig Rodgers said he considered Hagan to be among the next wave of top directors to enter the industry. "She is a talented, multifaceted, creative person," said Rodgers. "It’s definitely that kind of person who I think will be the prototype of what the new directors are all about."
Acknowledging that he and the company are inundated by reels from new directors—particularly comedy reels—Rodgers said that he was struck by Hagan’s intriguing brand of humor. "You see choices that she’s made that are left-of-center but that move the story forward," said Rodgers. "One of the things I judge a great spot on is if you find yourself chuckling about it long after it’s left the screen. Hers are spots that you think about later and laugh to yourself, over and over."
For instance, consider the Hardee’s spot "Monster Burger," in which two suited men, each holding a gigantic hamburger bun, walk purposefully up a hill. The tension builds as both men, approaching each other from opposite directions, continue on their journey. They stop when they reach their destination: a cow, which is then sandwiched between the buns. Said Rodgers: "The whole idea of a giant burger is high-concept, but Deb made these subtle choices [with regard to] the reactions she captured from the talent and the animal. Her direction is simple, but it works on many levels."
"One of the things we also consider is quick intuition and quick decision-making abilities, which are incredibly important," added Rodgers. "So often you see people that can’t commit to their ideas. Deb is extremely self-confident in her choices, and that impressed me tremendously. I think there’s a couple of directors to have come along who have had a strong perspective; she’s certainly that type of talent. She’s got a very unique perspective."
Hagan said that she’d met with a number of production companies and was hooked up with Straw Dogs by L.A.-based sales rep Steven Monkarsh. She began talking with Rodgers and director Jesse Dylan (also the CEO of Paradise), and said she thought they were "energetic guys who had a good vision for their company, and for what they wanted to do with me. The whole place has a good vibe about it, so I thought it was a good place to land."
Hagan began her shift into directing around a year and a half ago, at the suggestion of agency colleagues. "I kept saying no. I loved being an art director, and I hated to leave behind the coming-up-with-ideas side of it," said Hagan. "Then one day I thought, ‘I’m just going to try it.’ So I scooped up some money and did the spec reel."
After shopping the reel around to different houses, Hagan decided to add to it and began talking to former agency colleagues. That approach yielded several assignments, one of which was the aforementioned Holiday Inn Express spot, which came to Hagan this spring through her contact with Fallon president/creative director David Lubars, who had hired her back at BBDO/West. The spot, which tied into the campaign’s theme that staying at the hotel makes you feel smart, featured a man seeking information from an informant at a secret location at night.
"Basically, we had some ideas," said Lubars, "and we had a very inexpensive one [with ‘Clandestine Meeting’] that cost nothing. [Hagan] said, ‘Let me shoot it and then you’ll see if it’s any good, and if you can use it.’ The client liked it and everybody liked it, but it just didn’t fit into our rotation. But she did a really nice job on it, and I would work with her again."
Soon thereafter, Hagan was awarded the Star Tribune spot from a former Fallon colleague. It depicts a doctor’s waiting room in which the only reading material immediately available are issues of the children’s magazine Highlights. In that setting, a patient is seen reading the sports section of the Star Tribune. When it’s her turn to see the doctor, she gets up and tosses the paper on a table, prompting a scuffle among the other patients.
"My interest is in doing [spots with] dialogue and doing comedy in a realistic way, with nice-looking film and acting that doesn’t feel like acting," said Hagan. "It’s not knee-slapping, over-the-top [humor]. It’s little stories where you watch and think, ‘That was a little off.’"
Rodgers said the company has already bid Hagan on an undisclosed project, which he expected to be awarded shortly.
Hagan joins a Straw Dogs directorial roster also comprised of Dylan, Jason Farrand, Mike Rowles, Neil Burger, Charlie Cole, and Rob Lieberman, who works through The Lieberman Company in association with Straw Dogs. The company is repped by Chicago-based Tracy Bernard in the Midwest; L.A.-based Paula Arnett on the West Coast and by New York-based Chris Messiter on the East Coast.
Tim Burton Discusses His Dread Of AI As An Exhibition of His Work Opens In London
The imagination of Tim Burton has produced ghosts and ghouls, Martians, monsters and misfits โ all on display at an exhibition that is opening in London just in time for Halloween.
But you know what really scares him? Artificial intelligence.
Burton said Wednesday that seeing a website that had used AI to blend his drawings with Disney characters "really disturbed me."
"It wasn't an intellectual thought โ it was just an internal, visceral feeling," Burton told reporters during a preview of "The World of Tim Burton" exhibition at London's Design Museum. "I looked at those things and I thought, 'Some of these are pretty good.' โฆ (But) it gave me a weird sort of scary feeling inside."
Burton said he thinks AI is unstoppable, because "once you can do it, people will do it." But he scoffed when asked if he'd use the technology in this work.
"To take over the world?" he laughed.
The exhibition reveals Burton to be an analogue artist, who started off as a child in the 1960s experimenting with paints and colored pencils in his suburban Californian home.
"I wasn't, early on, a very verbal person," Burton said. "Drawing was a way of expressing myself."
Decades later, after films including "Edward Scissorhands," "Batman," "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "Beetlejuice," his ideas still begin with drawing. The exhibition includes 600 items from movie studio collections and Burton's personal archive, and traces those ideas as they advance from sketches through collaboration with set, production and costume designers on the way to the big screen.
London is the exhibition's final stop on a decade-long tour of 14 cities in 11 countries. It has been reconfigured and expanded with 90 new objects for its run in... Read More