There aren’t many commercial directors who can say they started a dance craze. But this year, the directing team Joe Public—a.k.a. Adam Cameron and Simon Cole—introduced millions of New York Yankees fans to the "El Duque." The dance, which was named for high-kicking pitcher Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez, debuted on an ad the British duo directed for adidas, and it wasn’t long before it became hotter than the Macarena with the stadium crowd. "El Duque Dance" was one of six spots that earned Joe Public its first Directors Guild of America (DGA) nomination for best commercial director of ’99. As pleased as they are with the DGA nod, Cameron and Cole would rather talk about their contribution to pop culture. "We went to Yankee Stadium, and in the bleachers, they were all doing the dance and quoting lines from the commercial," says Cole.
The spot, out of Leagas Delaney, San Francisco, depicts a crowd of hip New York clubgoers mimicking Hernandez’s trademark pitching technique on the dance floor, as giant video screens show the real El Duque in action. When fellow Yankee pitcher David Cone asks a woman in the club what the dance is called, she rolls her eyes at his ignorance before responding, "It’s the El Duque." At the end of the spot, Cone is shown in the men’s room, practicing some goofy moves as he attempts to invent his own dance.
"That shoot was particularly difficult," says Cole. "We were working with Dave Cone, who is an inexperienced actor—a sports star."
"There were a lot of pressures on the schedule," Cameron adds. "When you shoot with celebrities, you don’t tend to get too long with them, so you don’t get too many chances of getting the right take."
Joe Public, which is represented by bicoastal Headquarters, had only one day to shoot "El Duque Dance." Fortunately, they’d worked with Cone on adidas’ "Rest That Arm," also for Leagas Delaney. "What you’ve got to do with these celebrities is find out what it is they are confident in, what they do well, and use that to the best advantage," explains Cole. "There’s something about that slightly startled, deer-in-the-headlights look that Dave Cone has that we’d recognized from shooting the previous spot, and we worked with that. If we were trying to get Dave Cone to behave like Robin Williams, then we’d have been in trouble."
Potpourri
Shot in black and white, the straightforward "El Duque Dance" looks very different from Joe Public’s five other DGA entries. "Sponsor," for Snapple via Deutsch, New York, is a parody of public service ads, in which a sincere host outlines Snapple’s efforts to "keep young fruit from going bad," as child-sized raspberries, strawberries and peaches are shown cavorting at a Snapple-sponsored fruit camp. As opposed to "El Duque Dance," Cameron says "Sponsor" required "weeks of preparation and exhaustive research into making the little fruits just right. And we used all the conventions of ‘beautifying commercials’—the swing and tilt lenses, and the beautification of a place and people."
Amazon.com’s "Two Minutes," which Joe Public directed for FCB,
