Authors: Judith Krantz
“You’d better think of something to pull this one out, Bootsie,” North said angrily. “That’s your job, not mine.”
Frederick Gordon North was the best director of television commercials in the United States. He knew he was. Everyone in the business knew he was. What’s more, he charged a thousand dollars a day more than any of the other top directors in the business and got it, as many days a year as he wanted to work. While the likes of Avedon, Steve Horn and Bob Giraldi all charged four to five thousand dollars a day as their personal directorial fee, North got six thousand. Even Howard Zeiff had never charged as much in the days before he became a film director, during which he was the undisputed king of commercial directors.
Why were they willing to pay so much? Why would advertising-agency creative directors pay North a thousand dollars a day more than directors
almost
equally good? Everyone had a different answer. Some talked about his “eye”—the way he
saw
things as they would appear on film with just a little more originality, a little more visual interest than anyone else saw them. Others talked about the way he worked with actors, bringing out more than they knew they had to give. There were those who insisted it was his matchlessly innovative use of lighting, and still others spoke of the way he managed to telegraph more of a message in thirty seconds than other directors could in a full-length motion picture.
The truth lay in the blood he spilled. North would do anything to make a good commercial, and he put his blood and that of everyone else he worked with on the line. He didn’t secretly want to make “real” movies, like the majority of commercial directors, nor did he hanker to do the most marvelously artistic still photography. To Frederick Gordon North
THE perfect art form
was the television commercial, whether it was thirty seconds, sixty seconds, or even only ten seconds long, and that quality of utter commitment made clients slaver for him. Of course, it was
essential that his work was technically superior, but that wasn’t the real lure—the hook was, had always been, the smell and sight of blood.
Daisy turned away from her inspection of North and his producer to speak to Z
ip
Simon.
“Excuse me, but do you have other problems besides the set?”
“No, just that minor detail,” Simon said bitterly. “But we can’t get a set built by tomorrow, and the car leaves in the morning, even if we could work all night.”
“I can get it done,” Daisy said.
“Sure you could. Two minutes ago you didn’t even know what a story board was, Kiki’s friend.”
“My name’s Daisy Valensky and I’m the head of Scenic Design at the University of California at Santa Cruz,” Daisy said with dignity. “I have a crew of forty top workers who will be here in an hour if I make just one phone call. They’ll work all night.”
“Is she for real?” Simon asked Kiki.
“Of course! They’re professionals, for God’s sake, Zip,” Kiki said, quivering with the unmistakable imperiousness of her old dad’s daughter, an unfamiliar guise to Daisy, but one which Kiki knew precisely when and how to assume.
“So, what the hell, Daisy, let’s talk to North. It’s worth trying—at this point anything’s worth trying.” Zip Simon was so disgusted that he didn’t mind confronting even Frederick Gordon North with this absurd idea. The shoot couldn’t get more fucked up than it was.
North and Bootsie Jacobs watched them approach with lively suspicion.
Zip
Simon, Vice-President in Charge of Advertising at United Motors, did not communicate with the director of his commercials casually. And, at a moment like this, accompanied by two hippie girls, he was particularly unwelcome.
“North, this is Kiki Kavanaugh, daughter of my boss and your client, and her friend, Daisy—ah—Valensky.”
North frowned. If there was anything worse than having a client on the set it was having the client’s daughter, and after that came the client’s daughter’s friend.
“Hi. Sorry we don’t have time to chat today. Nice to see you.” He turned away, leaving them with the impression of supreme indifference and wrathful blue eyes.
Daisy tapped him on the arm. “Mr. North, I can have
this place looking any way you want it by tomorrow or sooner.”
He turned and gave her a look of freezing irony. “Who let you on the set?”
“Listen,” said Simon, “this kid’s head of stage sets or something at Kiki’s college. She’s got a thousand willing nuts who want to build you a set”
“Kids?” North asked Daisy.
“People. Good people. They like to work.”
“I don’t care who they are. Do you seriously believe that you can take this building and make it look exactly like the outside of Cannery Row fifty years ago, before eight tomorrow morning?” He gestured in disgust at the spanking-new brick, the gleaming paint, the huge, modern windows.
“We can certainly try,” Daisy said resolutely. She looked boldly at North as she spoke. He had shockingly red hair, a fox of a man with a long, pointed nose, lots of freckles and blue eyes which told her that no matter how bad this moment was, it could not possibly end in failure. He was a man of sharp, clear edges. There was nothing indistinct or rounded or even comfortable about his clever features. He turned to Bootsie Jacobs and asked calmly, “What do you think?”
“We’d be breaking about sixteen union rules I can think of and about sixteen I don’t know about yet. Using nonunion labor would be the least of it, and that’s big trouble. Anyway, how can it work? They’ve got to be strictly amateur time. I think I’ll kill myself,” Bootsie said grimly.
“Why not let us get to work?” Daisy said eagerly.
“North,” Zip Simon said angrily, “you’ve come up empty. Now here’s a chance to get something on film before I put the new Skyhawk on that plane tomorrow. I don’t care if you shoot the damn thing upside down, sideways or hanging from a tree—it’s up to you to
do it!
That’s why we hired you. I don’t plan to go back to Detroit and have to tell my boss that the location just ‘happened’ to be renovated and we couldn’t do a single thing about it. Miss Kavanaugh says that this young lady can help—so let her! Unless, of course, you have a better idea.” His bald head had gone almost purple with aggravation.
Bootsie glanced briefly at North. “Go call your crew,”
she said to Daisy. If Zip Simon thought he’d be in trouble if they didn’t get the film, what did he think would happen to
her
if she couldn’t make this shoot happen? She’d begged and begged the agency to let her build a Cannery Row set at the automobile plant just to avoid trouble, but no, they had to be authentic—fuck authentic—and fly the prototype all over the country for historic streets to shoot on. What an utterly corny idea—but how many clients did sixty-second spots these days? And now here was the client’s bossy daughter with her helpful suggestions—well, if this long shot didn’t work, wouldn’t it be partly the client’s daughter’s fault, instead of hers alone? And who knew, with the right lighting and the right filters and a stiff breeze … who knew?
Daisy was already headed toward the phone.
Santa Cruz didn’t have a football team, but it had one hell of a Theater Arts department. And, as Daisy knew well, they had stored backdrops and props and varied other bits and pieces from past performances of
Camino Real
and
Streetcar Named Desire
and
Petrified Forest
. She told her people to bring everything, whether they thought they’d need it or not, and bring it fast. She ordered them out in full strength, not just the scenery painters, carpenters and prop people, but the stage hands, the lighting crew and even the costume and make-up teams. They could all help, including Kiki.
They swarmed to the location loaded with all the stuff that had been stashed away in the storeroom, including paints and tools, as thrilled to get their hands on an honest-to-God, real live television commercial as if they’d never looked down their idealistic noses on the entire medium.
An hour and a half after Daisy’s phone call, they reported to their chief ready for a night of work. The art director from the advertising agency handed over the photos of the demolished location to Daisy who snapped her orders and deployed her forces throughout the long hours before dawn. Zip Simon, the art director and Bootsie stayed up all night watching, while the cast and crew drifted away to sleep. North coolly went to his hotel to have dinner and get a night’s rest The catering service was on duty all night long, and by sunrise the set was ready. A Monterey which had long vanished had reappeared, if not absolutely authentic in every detail, still echoing the period
and the mood of the old photos. It was jerry-built and a strong breeze might have destroyed it—but; somehow, it existed. It was usable.
Exhausted, but too delighted with her success, and, by now, too interested in what was going on to leave, Daisy stayed throughout the shoot, understanding very little of what was happening. It was as different from a stage production as a stage production is from a basketball game. She watched the coffee-drinking rabble of yesterday become a crew such as she had never seen before, intimately connected to one another as members of a primitive clan, working together with the precision only enormous discipline can bring, more quietly expert than she had ever imagined technicians could be. They were all
satellites
of North, who controlled the set by the force of a hypnotic power, pleasure and displeasure shooting out from him as he rehearsed the actors to the constant accompaniment of asides to a girl who sat on a box seemingly chained to an enormous stopwatch which she wore around her neck.
“We have four seconds here,” he said to her, “How many have I used?”
“Three and a half.”
“Yell when I’ve got four.”
As Daisy watched him, she realized that this man in his early thirties, tall, lean and tense, was a battered lion tamer of diehard toughness. He wouldn’t be daunted by a cage of mixed rattlesnakes, porcupines and polar bears, to say nothing of lions. No matter what problems circled, prowling and growling, around him, North never put down his whip and chair, invisible though they might be, and once he began directing, every person on the set was convinced that his eye was on them at all times, even when he was looking through the camera.
The client group and the agency group stood at a respectful distance, glancing constantly at their watches, but drinking in the electric tension of the curses, the frenzy, the lightning flashes of temperament, the freely opened veins. They were in show biz, they thought, not realizing that as far as North was concerned, this had nothing to do with show biz and everything to do with advertising.
The crew combined alertness and stillness in equal combinations, as people do who are sure of their skills and
aware of when they are needed and when not. The technical jargon Daisy heard was strange to her in spite of her knowledge of stagecraft, and many of North’s directions to the actors sounded odd.
“Four seconds,” Daisy muttered to Kiki, “what can you do in four seconds?”
“Sell cars,” said Kiki smugly.
Over and over and over she heard North say, “Stand by … and … action!” The word “and” was drawn out almost unbearably. Many times it seemed to her that everything had gone perfectly, but he never seemed satisfied until, abruptly, he was. He coaxed, he warned, he encouraged, he grew taller, he grew shorter, he got violently angry, he became suddenly gentle and calm, he screamed for quiet in a terrifying voice and, seconds later, looking through the lens and talking to his cameraman, he was as loose as if he had been alone on the street. Once he caught her eye with a raking glance, unexpected and startling.
Pointing to the couple in modern dress about to get into the new Skyhawk, he said to them, “Now the intention here is that you’re going to take her home and give her a zatch—I haven’t been out myself since 1965, but am I wrong about the intention here?” Odd direction or not, the actors immediately grew into a couple in love when before they had only been a couple.
Everyone worked without a break, not even for lunch, because of the pressure to send the new Skyhawk back to Detroit. The auto carrier that would take the car to the cargo plane was delayed until the last possible second before the automobile, again hidden in its canvas covering, was carried away. Only then did North call a break.
Daisy expected that after lunch the set would become more relaxed, since they had the use of the vintage Skyhawk for as long as they needed it, but the tense time pressure was as strict as before. Time, on a commercial shoot, is always the enemy—there is never enough of it, and both North and Bootsie had to be back in New York for a production meeting with another client on the following afternoon.
Finally North said quietly, “Right, it’s a wrap,” and the technicians began to dismantle their equipment, the models vanished into the Winnebago with their attendants, and the large lights, cameras, sound equipment and other tools of the trade were quickly stowed away in the Cinemobile.
It was like the dismantling of a circus and Daisy felt sad as time turned back into an everyday beat, time which had been counted in seconds and half-seconds, all day long.
“Hey, they’re leaving without saying goodbye,” Kiki said with astonishment
“No, they’re coming over here,” Daisy said. “How could they not say thank you?”
North and Bootsie, almost running, approached the two girls.
“Be sure to strike the set and make certain everything is back exactly as it was,” North ordered.
“Uh—sure,” said Daisy.
“Sorry, but we have a plane to catch,” Bootsie said rapidly. “You were really great—Daisy, you’d make a terrific production assistant if you ever want a job.”
“Thanks—but no thanks,” Daisy answered.
“Come on, Boot, we haven’t got time to talk,” North snapped impatiently. “So long, ladies.” He took Bootsie by the arm and turned her toward the waiting car. As they drove off Bootsie Jacobs said, “You could have been a little nicer to them—they really helped, for Christ’s sake!”
“They wouldn’t have been necessary if you’d done your job,” North answered absently.