HOW TO MAKE A SCREAMING CAR COMMERCIAL....NOT KIDDING.

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Mea Culpa
Writing and producing car commercials.
It was a job, a decently paying job, a full-time job with benefits and I got it on the week my unemployment ran out, knowing that advertising was a low profession and thinking that making car commercials was the lowest of the low.
But I took it. There was some sort of recession around 1989 or so and they let a lot of us go. By that time, I spent most of my time at work doing other things, since doing this didn't take much effort.
Later on, I wrote this, parts of which I sold to Adbusters Magazine. It has never been published in it's entirety...until now.

By Tom D’Antoni

            FIRST: /sit down in a quiet place and empty your mind of these things. Honesty, kindness, taste, and love for your fellow human beings.

            I was out of work.  TV jobs had dried up, so had radio jobs.  I was knocking out a few pieces for “Sports History Magazine”, which folded while I was working on assignment.

            Worse than that, the unemployment was about to run out.  Two weeks left,  Jesus.

            In front of me, was an ad in the Sunday paper for a TV/radio producer/writer at an ad agency.  Said I must be comfortable in editing situations.  Hell, tape editors were the people I got along with best.  And anyway since the unemployment was running out I was prepared to appear comfortable in any situation.

            The agency specialized in car commercials for local dealerships all over the country.  Same kinds of commercials.  Different dealers.

            I got an interview, dressed for success, and walked into hell.

SECOND:  Learn how to keep a straight face in the presence of bad work produced by your superior.  This will serve you well when dealing with clients for whom you must produce similarly bad work.

            At my first interview the “Creative Director” showed me some of the agency spots.  I had already noted the irony of his title.

            I exercised great self control.

            I didn’t laugh.

            I didn’t ask him if he thought they were funny.

            He didn’t think they were funny.  They were his best work.

            Keeping in mind my last unemployment check was in my breast pocket, I unclenched my jaw and told him he probably sold a lot of cars with those spots.  The problem was, I was right.

            And it was then I had the Devil’s enlightenment.  Screaming men and loud music DO sell cars.  At age forty, I as finally approaching a level of cynicism I had only dreamed of.

            He was impressed with my TV experience and was unable to read my mind, so he hired me.

            Another reason I got the job was because after my interview, I sent a telegram (yes a telegram) to the boss touting myself in shamelessly offensive car commercial language.

            He liked it.

            I was quickly learning the art of self-mortification in the line of duty.           I wasn’t going to approach it quite like I did when I wrote for that supermarket tabloid, I thought.  I           WANTED to do that.  I NEEDED to do this, but it was kinda the same thing.  The sleaze level, the lack of taste, and the deception involved.

            It was attractive to me in the same way.

            My career had gone from idealism to survival.

            Making car commercials.

            Oy.

           

            THIRD: Demonstrate to the boss how eager you are to learn how to lie, cheat, and steal in order to sell cars.

            The first day on the job, the boss called me into his office, gave me a cup of coffee, and sat me down.

            I knew I was about to be let in on the secrets.  I felt like it was about to be initiated into a cabal from which, once I learned its rituals, I could never escape.

            I made a lot of eye contact as he bared his dark little soul about the real secrets of selling cars to you and me.

            He explained that there are three kinds of car commercials: product, positioning, and retail.

            Product:

                        We don’t do those, he said.  Those are done by the manufacturers’ agency.  All it does is introduce you to the car itself.  We’d like to do those,  but that’s not our thing.  What we like to do is give the dealer the lowest priced spot.  We don’t go out of our way to spend a lot of his money.

            I was incredulous.

            Not spend money?  Somebody else’s money?  And keep a lot of it for yourself?

            But I just nodded.

            A thought crept into my brain.

            I don’t believe him.  And why should I?  This guy makes goddamned car commercials!

            I found, to my surprise, that at least in this regard, he was telling the truth.  This agency was successful, in part, because it made commercials real cheap, and still sold cars.  Dealers liked that.  After all, they had cokehead sons to support.

            Positioning:

                        We do some of those, he said.  Positioning is like this:  Where does this model fit the buyer?  The difference between an Isuzu Trooper and a Rodeo.  Same make…different price range…different feeling about the car.  It doesn’t really sell the car itself…it tells the buyer if the car fits him or not. 

            Sounded nebulous to me.

            It’s like a retail spot more than a product spot, he said.

            Just not the hard sell?  I thought.  No prices and terms.

            We just don’t go in for the kill on it, he said.

            I thought so.

            “Go in for the kill,”  I repeated in my head.  The kill.

            The language at the agency was loaded with football jock talk.  Anything for a win.  Anything.

            Sometimes I’m ashamed to be a man.

            Retail:

                        This is what we do 90% of the time, he said.  There’s a ten day window got for us to convince a buyer to put up his money.  And we tell the dealers to make their sales correspond to the second and last weekends of the month.  That’s when the paydays occur.

            The most important thing is the price and payments.  Price and payments.  Price and payments.

            I got the picture.  It was price and payments.  And he was selling me like he would anybody else.

            And location.  If you can put the buyers town, or suburb, or neighborhood or street or goddamned house number in the spot, then do it.

            Hence spots that begin:

            <VERY LOUD MUSIC>

            FIRST SCREAMING MAN:  They’re coming from (your town)!!!!!

            SECOND SCREAMING MAN:  They’re coming from (another town nearby)!!!!!

            FSM:  They’re coming from (still another neighboring area)!!!!!

            SSM:  Why?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?

            FSM:  PRICE!!!!!

            SSM:  YOU HEARD US…..PRICE!!!!!

            Something like that.

            I wanted to run, screaming, not persuasively, but in agony at what I knew I had to do in order to keep this job. Still, in the back of my mind was the feeling of deep irony.  Now I was going to make pure schlock.  Me.  Unadulterated evil crap.  Not a parody, not an imitation, but the real thing.

            God help me.

            Fourth:  At all time, try your level best to avoid meeting with the client or his representatives as this activity may lead to the furious consumption of alcohol and strong drugs on your part.

            Lucky for me I had to endure a few such meetings.  It is one thing to go about the task of producing bullshit commercials.  It is another to actually face the bull itself.

            One such bull was a beefy Italian man who owned a lot of car stores ina major American city.  He spoke in the manner Lenny Bruce once described when he was talking about goodfellas sitting in the front row of a nightclub as “tape running slowly backwards”  Lenny also said he never told them to be quiet during his routine either.  “Go ahead, throw up on my pants if you like,” was his way of saying, “I’ll make any kind of car commercial you like, sir.  Just don’t kill me.”

            I did have to meet with the slick sleazebag Ford dealer who got himself in so deep with the government and his coke habit that he blew his brains out.

            I had to talk to these people.  And they had not a speck of irony about them.  They were predators who would do anything or say anything you wanted to hear as long as you bought a car from them.

            QUOTING FROM A SPOT:

            “Bad credit?

            No problem!!”

            Why?  Because they are nice guys trying to help you out?  Well, no.  Because they could sell the same car over and over again.  They liked bad credit because they knew they could repo that sonuvabitch man times.

            If I could convince them I was on their team, that I was part of the conspiracy…well, then I was ok.  But they were smart, and they didn’t really trust anybody.  I guess they figured everybody else was as crooked as they were.

            And they sized me up right away.  That’s why, I think, the agency head and the “creative” director kept me away from them. 

            I didn’t mind.

            FIFTH:  Understand that the process of creating such a monstrous work in NOT like opening the Seventh Seal of the Apocalypse.

            As a matter of fact a car commercial, even a TV spot can take under three hours make, from the time the account exec gets off the phone with the client till the label goes on the tape box.

            This is, after all, retail.

            Here’s how it can go:

            The account exec gets a call from the dealer.  The dealer has just had too much to drink at lunch and has come up with a sale idea.  Something original like….oh….a tent sale.

            He really wants to be on the air with it.  He can’t have it today?  Ok, how about tomorrow.

            The account exec, counting his commission as he speaks, says sure, no problem.  We’ll fax “the creative” (meaning, a script and a storyboard) in about a half an hour.  He finds out how much the guy wants to spend and the particulars of the sale, including the disclaimers.

            FIFTH AND A HALF:  Accept the fact that the disclaimers are your quickest route to damnation.

            You know, the little lines of copy that you can’t read at the bottom of  the screen?  Even if you tape it and pause the tape you still can’t read them.

            They are not meant to be read.  They are there because one government body or another said they must be.

            What they do is contradict almost everything else that is said in the commercial.  That’s the trick. 

Say something that sounds like it’s a bargain you just can’t pass up, and then deny everything in the disclaimer.

            Oh, that low price isn’t a buy?  Nope.  The small print tells you it’s a lease.

            What?  I have to pay all that money down?  Well, sure.   Didn’t you read the disclaimer?

            There are legal limits to size and time on the screen in some states.  Even the best of them, it is too small, too fast, and too unintelligible to understand.  But that’s alright.  Understanding is not what is offered to you.

            My personal favorite was Missouri.  At the time, all bests were off, and all you had to say at the bottom of the screen was, “See salesman for details.”  The details were that, well, we didn’t really mean all that stuff in the commercial, here’s the real deal.

            FIFTH (cont.)

            After the account exec gets the details of the deception, and assures the client the agency can deliver (whether he knows it for a fact or not), he runs down the hall to the office of the Creative Director and throws it all on his desk.

            The Creative Director bitches and says the account exec owes him one, but turning around a spot so fast is normal for him.

            So he gets on the phone with the client to iron out all the gory stuff again and then sits down and writes a script.

            This takes, oh, fifteen minutes tops, because the Creative Director has written this spot 45 different ways already.  This month.  Its always the same because it always works.  Why change it?

           

            Then comes the storyboard.  Another fifteen minutes and its all faxed.  At the point, I have been alerted and am scurrying to find the voiceover guys, a place to record them, and an editing suite to make the spot.  All concerned are aware that a call could come anytime day or night, so rounding up all the required components is easy.  And if one of the components isn’t available, there is always another that can be plugged in.

            And finally the Creative Director calls me into his office to explain the spot.  Like he needed to.

            I had to endure listening to him read…no SHOUT it to me.  Or at me.  I never told him that his reading had no relationship to how it really sounded.  I knew what he wanted.  The screamers knew what he wanted.

            Who didn’t know?

            I sat there and listened to him and I knew that at a crucial point in the reading of the script he would start spitting.  And that the glob of spit would stay suspended on his lips, sometimes passing from his upper lip to his lower lip in a thin strand.

            What was I supposed to do except listen to him SHOUT his script to me?  The same script he had SHOUTED out to me a hundred times before?  Was I supposed to tell him the truth?

            I nodded at the appropriate times and got it up enough to tell him “Sounds great!  That should move ‘em this weekend!!!!”

            SIXTH:  Close your eyes and reconfirm that the process of making a car commercial is based on manipulation and deception.  And that it is best if all concerned are in on the joke.

            My first recording session was a gimmie.  I was just along for the ride.  It wasn’t that I had never been in on one.  I had 10 years in the business.  But this one was special.  It was my first session in hell.

            It took place in a slightly more than amateur studio we used because all the other studios were booked.  It was nestled in the basement of an aging voiceover talent’s home.  We met with the talent, another aging but still active disc jockey/sports reporter, play-by-play/ voiceover talent/and dinner theater actor with a lot of national radio credentials, who was more interested in showing us the badly shot home videotape of his latest performance in (I don’t know…Carousel, or something like it) than in doing the spot.

            The other people in the room, the engineer and his father (who owned the place) had to pretend they liked it even though it was laughable (to me).  I couldn’t really tell if it was laughable to them.  I hoped so, but I think they really liked it.

            I fell right into line and mumbled something about “being really good, Johnny!”  Keeping the talent happy was something I had learned a long time ago in TV, even when he (or she) was a no-talent, an egotistic bastard who tried to stab you in the back at every opportunity.

            But, there was a moment when everyone was in on the joke.  Time to record.  And this guy was a pro’s pro.

            The “Creative Director’s” passion was writing too many words to really fit into a 60 second spot, and then getting the talent to yell real fast, then faster and faster until he got it all in.  

            I learned later that this guy had worked with the “Creative Director” for many years and knew what to expect.  He looked at the script (for the first time), did a quick read through and nailed it on the second try.

            And then he pulled out the dinner theater video tape.

            It might have been “Brigadoon.”

            SEVENTH: When actually making the car commercial, try to arrange the session so that the session so that the “Creative Director” and the client are not present.

            Otherwise you have to hold it all in.  If the client or the Creative Director is present, one cannot say, in a clear, loud voice, the following about another man’s spot, or about a spot the client is paying thousands of dollars to make: “Jesus, this really sucks!!!”

            As I have done.

            If neither is present one can enter the edit room hung-over, throw the storyboards and the audio tape on the desk in front of the videotape editor and say, “Just fucking do this, will you?  I need some sleep.”  And know that he has done enough of these things to do it right.

            As I have done.

            EIGHTH:  Do not allow the frantic nature of the business to interfere with your own neuroses.

            When there are too many words to fit in the time allowed and you must call the Creative Director to cut some.

            When the client has sobered up from lunch and has called back the Creative Director to change everything.

            When the client and Creative Director are both present in the edit room and you must appear to give a shit.

            When you’ve used the same piece of music behind the last fifty spots and know you will continue to use it as long as it sells cars.

            When the piece of spit on the Creative Director’s lip is about to make you slap him. Or throw up.

            When you think you have finally purged yourself of the guilt of your actions.

            When you have discovered you have an addiction to sleaze.

            When God tells you its time to quit by willing the bottom to dropout of automotive market and the agency lays everyone off.

            Then?

            NINTH:  Purge this experience by writing the vilest, most aggressive, most shocking car commercial the world has ever heard.

            That’s what I did.  Here it is.

            I suggest you get a friend and read it aloud, pretending to be screaming car commercial guys.   And as fast as you can.

            FIRST GUY:  FUCK YOU (YOUR TOWN)!!!!

            SECOND GUY:  IF YOU WANT TO BUY A NEW CAR THIS WEEKEND

            FG:  YOU’RE A BIG ENOUGH SCHMUCK TO COME TO (YOUR FAVORITE DEALER)

            SG:  BAD DEALS!!

            FG:  CARS THAT BREAK DOWN!!

            SG:  THIEVES!!!

            FG: N IF YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING TO FIND A BARGAIN AT (THE DEALER) ….

            SG: YOU CAN KISS MY ASS!!!!

            FG: IT IS OUR BELIEF THAT YOU’RE SUCH A STUPID MOTHERFUCKER…

            SG: YOU’LL FALL FOR THIS BULLSHIT….

            FG:  GUARANTEED!!!!!

            SG:  IF YOU FIND A BETTER DEAL…

            FG:  SHOVE IT UP YOUR UGLY ASS!!!

            SG:  YOU HEARD RIGHT!!

            FG:  SHOVE ITUP YOUR UGLY ASS!!!!

            SG:  BRING YOUR TRADE…

            FG:  BRING YOUR TITLE…

            SG:  BRING YOUR WIFE…

            FG:  WE’LL FUCK HER!!!!

            SG:  THAT’S RIGHT, WE’LL FUCK YOUR WIFE!!!

            FG:  BECAUSE AT (YOUR DEALER)….

            SG:  YOU’RE FUCKED SIX WAYS FROM SUNDAY!!!

            FG:  TAKE A HIKE…

            SG:  TO (THE DEALER)

            FG:  HOME OF CHALLENGE PISSING!!

            SG:  THAT’S RIGHT……

            FG:  CHALLENGE PISSING!!!!

            SG:  HOW DOES IT WORK?

            FG:  IF YOU CAN PISS SIX FEET IN THE AIR STRAIGHT UP AND NOT GET WET…

            SG:  YOU GET NO DOWN PAYMENT!!!!

            FG:  DON’T WAIT!!

            SG:  DON’T DELAY!!

            FG:  DON’T FUCK WITH US OR WE’LL RIP YOUR NUTS OFF!!!

            SG:  ONLY AT (YOUR DEALER)!!!

            FG:  THE ONLY DELAER THAT TELLS YOU TO FUCK OFF!!!

            SG:  HURRY UP ASSHOLE

            FG:  THIS EVENT ENDS THE SECOND AFTER YOU WRITE US A CHECK.

            SG:  AND IT BETTER NOT BOUCE OR YOU’RE A DEAD MOTHERFUCKER!!!

            FG:  (YOUR DEALER)!!!

            SG:  (YOUR TOWN’S) FILTHIEST!!!

            FG: AND EXCLUSIVE HOME OF THE MEANEST SONS OF BITCHES IN THE STATE OF (YOUR STATE)!!!

            SG:  GUARANTEED!!!!!!!!

            This commercial actually exists.  I cut it one afternoon after we had done all the other spots.

            It helped.

           

            TENTH:  Live with your guilt.  Do good works to try to allay it.  Drink if you have to.

            After the agency laid us all off, I lost my other two jobs.  My girlfriend left me.  And I ended up driving a cab for awhile.

            One day the owner bought some new cabs.  I looked at the dealership logo on the trunk.

            I had done their spots.

            I deserved it.

           

My Interview with Will Vinton from c.1998

Will Vinton died today. His claymation animation was beloved world-wide.  

I did this piece for a web magazine in either 1998 or 1999. That magazine has since bid the internet farewell and I can't remember the name of it. I also wrote stories on John Waters and Hardy Fox of the Residents for them.

Thought it might be nice to see this again.

--- Tom D'Antoni

 By Tom D'Antoni

            Will Vinton isn’t merely the world’s best known clay animation artist; he invented and copyrighted the term "Claymation." They were his California Raisins, it was his Noid, his M&M’s, his Ozzie the Elf,  his action figure driving the red Nissan in the "coolest spot of the year" in 1996, according to Rolling Stone. He directed the first full length Claymation feature film, "The Adventures of Mark Twain."

             And they’re his "Foamation" characters in Eddie Murphy’s Fox series, "PJ’s" (Monday nights). Foamation, also trademarked, is the same as Claymation, just in a slightly different medium. Vinton likes to call them "dimensional animation."

            The use of stop-motion filmmaking; the one-frame-at-a-time, move-the-little-figure-a-quarter-inch-and-raise-its-left-eyebrow-slightly technique, although perfected by Vinton, was not invented by him.

            We can go back to 1933, and the original King Kong for the first breakthrough for that. Or maybe we can go all the way back to Edward Muybridge’s horses- in-the-air, frame-by-frame studies of animals and people in motion.

            Vinton does not claim Gumby and Pokey, early clay stop-motion stars, as an influence, although he must have seen them as a kid, growing up in the 1950’s, a little south of Portland, Oregon.

            Plenty of others have been influenced by Vinton, however, including Henry Selik’s work in "The Nightmare Before Christmas," and music videos like Peter Gabriel’s "Sledgehammer." Many others influenced by Vinton have ended up working for him as part of the 250 people living out their fantasies at Will Vinton Studios, which occupies nearly a square block in Portland.

            Portland is also the birthplace of Simpson’s creator, Matt Groening.

As a Portland resident, I can tell you it isn’t the legendary rain that is the coincidental inspiration for having America’s top two animators being born there.

            Computer generated imagery (CGI) is a huge part of the studio’s output these days, something Vinton likes to blend with dimensional animation and live action.

            He is an Academy Award winner, and a laid-back, Northwest, jeans and sweater kinda guy. Last week, he refilled his coffee cup, twirled his blonde handlebar mustache and answered questions.

.

Q:        How did you get involved with “PJ’s”

A:        I got a phone call from Ron Howard he said he and Eddie Murphy had pitched an idea to Peter Roth the head of Fox Broadcasting. He said they wanted to do it in dimensional animation.

            It sounded great..

            We went down and spent some time with Eddie and Ron. Eddie had 15 or 20 great characters which came right out of his own personal life experiences. Funny stuff. He would free-associate with them. It clearly looked like a great project from the beginning.

            It was on the basis of those characters that we started to hone it down to a smaller group. Eddie wanted to be the lead character, he didn’t want to do all the voices, because he had already done that on other shows.

            I went down to Miami to record Eddie for a demo script. I’ve worked with a lot of people, directing, but Eddie is a superstar. There were a couple of times when he really burned me well, really appropriately. I’m trying to direct him to do certain kinds of black characters. Here’s this guy from Portland, Oregon suggesting things like that. Eddie does such great imitations of white doing imitations of black guy. Like myself. (He laughs.) He’s wild.

Q:        Did he improvise?

A:        A lot. And the improvisation mixed with the script resulted in a demo which ultimately sold the series.

            We went through an incredible process of character design. We did screen tests of different characters with Eddie’s voice, different styles of animation, and played them against each other, literally like a screen test. It was a wonderful process. We took the time to make sure that we weren’t going with a first knee-jerk reaction to things. It has paid off with something really unique.

Q:        Given that it took you three and a half years to make “The Adventures of Mark Twain,” it must have been quite a process to gear up for a weekly series.

A:        It’s an absolutely amazing process. It’s a feat of production management that’s unprecedented, at least in the U.S. It’s the first series done in dimensional animation, but it’s the first show of any kind, cell animation or otherwise that’s produced wholly in the United States as opposed to farming it out to Korea or Taiwan.

            One of the things we wanted to do right from the beginning was to bring feature film quality animation, art direction, lighting to television. What’s made it possible has been some really innovative production management processes that have allowed for everybody to work as such a great team and keeping the directors and the animators completely busy and focused on their task which is to bring those characters to life one at a time.

Q:        Was that your job?

A:        No, I’m the opposite of that. I’m much more of a director and I had my doubts originally that  it could stay a creative process and be a big systematized thing, but I’ve been turned into a believer by the people who have done that. I can brag about it cause it has nothing to do with me.

Q:        What DO you do?

A:        My involvement in the show is strictly creative upfront, creating characters, getting the demo launched.

Q:        But you’re not divorced from the production.

A:        Oh, no, no no. I’m working more as an executive overseeing, more as a producer, my creative role was getting it rolling, getting the characters styled, the animation established.

Q:        The character style says something to me about race relations. About the use of caricatures of black folks.

A:        Comics have been doing it for a long time. Eddie Murphy is one of those. Things like “In Living Color” have done it, but not in animation. The 90’s have been breaking out of the 80’s which were so politically correct. Especially in the Fox lineup, you see a lot of Homer Simpsons and Al Bundys, those kinds of characters who are white men, in their “natural” state, being completely oblivious to what’s politically correct. To that extent this is  following that tradition with black characters and a black creator, Eddie Murphy. I think it’s part of the natural evolution of things.

            It is interesting to see, when you look back over decades of time, how things that people were too afraid to talk about, open up. It’s natural that humor leads the way in those kinds of things. The taboo issues are the best material for comedy.

Q:        Do you watch it when it airs?

A:        Yeah, I find seeing it there in the context gives me much more feedback. I like to see the commercials, I like to see how the show and the story bumps up against the breaks. I like to see the nature of the advertisers. I feel like I’m still a student of television, trying to understand what it’s going to be.

Q:        What other projects are you involved in now, that you can talk about?

A:        I’m currently developing a couple of projects. I can’t talk TOO much about them because of the nature of the beast. We have a pilot we’re working on called “Klay’s TV” that’s a prime-time sketch show. Pretty interesting cause it has a lot of different styles of animation all within one show. That’s also for Fox.

            We also just sold a pilot called “Animals Anonymous”, “AA” for NBC, also a prime-time show.

Q:        “Hello, my name is John, I’m a giraffe?”

A:        Yeah, you’ve got the idea. It’s a pretty fun thing. It’s about a time in our history where animals have evolved to the place where they’re getting jobs, living alongside humans in the great melting pot of New York City. They are coping with civilized life in the big city, which is at poles with their animal instincts. Very much an analogy of our human state, but told through animals.

Q:        What is it with you and anthropomorphics? I remember you made Siskel and Ebert animals in one of your films.

A:        Dinosaurs. It’s pretty much a staple of animation,  after all. They weren’t actually Siskel and Ebert first, they were dinosaurs first. And then you go, “What are you gonna do with dinosaurs?” Two critics who fight with each other all the time, it’s such a natural.

            Characters are funny, they have a life of their own. They’re like actors. We had a character years ago called Wilshire Pig that existed in little  productions here and there. He hung around the studio in sculpted form at various times. It’s kind of like they’re begging for a new role. In his case we did a couple of prime-time specials for CBS starring him. It was his shot at the big time. They evolve as time goes on, as “PJ’s” characters will.

            Even in the first thirteen episodes, the characters are becoming much sharper as we get to the end of the thirteen. They’re getting much better.

Q:        Why did you decide to make the tops of the “PJ’s” characters so big?

A:        Playing with the designs. So much of a character’s attitude, expression comes out of it’s face. So much of that is in the eyes, it’s kind of natural to let those features be larger than life in order to let them be more expressive than life.

            Thurgood (the Eddie Murphy character), in our screen tests, had several different designs, some of them were quite realistic. And then others were quite abstracted. I think we ended up with a character that was in between. But if we hadn’t done that screen test, everybody but everybody would have picked that realistic character right off the top. Realism is the common denominator for everybody. It’s the denominator for all ideas, the place where we all can agree in a hurry. Abstraction is always a much more difficult thing to agree on, to get consensus on.

            A character really isn’t about his physical design as it is about his animation design, his performance. So, by taking these rather different designs and then building a style of animation around that look, it really allowed us to explore what the show was going to feel like more than what the characters simply looked like. It’s a process I like to go through with everything we design. Sometimes you end up having to go with a little bit more the common denominator approach when you have clients and people have strong opinions about it. It’s definitely not the best way to go.

Q:        Do you remember the first clay thing you made?

A:        As a kid, the first clay things I did were army men that I put on boats and ran down this little creek that ran through a park next to my house and basically bomb them. It was a boy thing to do. There was a neighbor kid who had fireworks, we would make things and blow them up. Clay was great for that because the heads would blow off, arms and so on, it was pretty cool.

Q:        When did you begin capturing these things on film?

A:        In college I started messing with stop-motion animation. You can just experiment over beers and pizza and a table-top setup with clay, a single-frame camera and some buddies, and sort of see what you can do to make this clay dance and come to life. And to see if you can outdo the other person.

Q:        What was it that made you become an animator?

A:        There wasn’t one thing. It was a product of many many different kinds of  interests and disciplines. I studied architecture in school. Before that, physics. But I was also very interested in music and theater. In terms of film, I respected the classic works that Walt Disney did and Chuck Jones, and people like that that I paid attention to.

            In terms of clay, I was inspired by a little known work by Ellie Noyes called, “Clay Origin of the Species.” It was a rather simple, crude clay animation of dinosaurs. It was the evolution of the species where all these lumps of clay and dinosaur-like things are eating each other up, evolving, all done to jazz music. It was a pretty simple film but amazingly effective. There was a reality to it that was striking.

            Working with architectural models got me into experimenting. I did things like reconstructions of buildings as models with friends in architecture and we’d animate people going through them to try to bring them to life. I found early on the power of filming when my professors were so dazzled by doing a presentation on film as opposed to on paper. That got me excited about exploring.

            I  guess my influences in film have been more in live action, special effects movies as anything that’s been in animation.

Q:        Although everybody knows you for the California raisins, there is a wide variety of styles in your work. Some of it very painterly.

A:        We’ve been a “studio” for a long time. I started it out as my own thing, doing short films, but for a long time now, I’ve always had the desire to nurture directors with different points of view and styles. We have a dozen or so, really solid directors, each one of whom has their own style. That’s been an important thing for us.

We got pigeon-holed a little bit with Claymation,  after the California Raisins. People began to think that’s what Claymation was, or that was the company was. It’s funny how the success of something like that can sometimes work against you if what you’re trying to do is a variety of styles. That got us into exploring computer animation, and now that’s half of our business.

Q:        Is there anything that delights you that you really really want to do right now?

A:        I’ve always felt that what we do and what animators tend to be really good at is short comedy gags and shorts, as opposed to long-form narratives. Long-form narrative is quite alive and well in animation today, but I think the real superstrength is short concepts. That’s where the “Klay’s TV” project comes in. I’ve been nurturing that concept for many years, trying to create a program that utilizes animation directors’ best skills in a format that’s viable for television.

            Short films have died in this country, and that’s too bad, because they’ve been a great proving ground, experimental ground for animators in the past. It still exists in other countries as a great place for innovation. In this country because there’s no outlet for short films, the commercial has become the replacement for that. Innovative stuff happens in commercials, and that’s one of the great things about being a commercial company. It gives us a chance to try different techniques. It’s the most important thing, almost, in advertising, is finding fresh approaches, things that pop out.

            The problem in commercials is that you don’t get to tell your own story, your gag. So the idea of making short films is something that is very exciting to me and I hope we’ll be doing more of that.

HOW I PRODUCED A PSYCHIC INFOMERCIAL AND ANGERED GOD

by Tom D’Antoni
Written c.1996
I found this on a portable hard drive. I had forgotten I had written it, although not the experience. I may have sold this to the Chicago Reader. Or I may have never sold it.
Shrug.

            When I was in my twenties, selling out was a hot topic of conversation among us young writers, journalists, film makers, musicians and such. The talk was usually about how were never ever selling out, never giving in and never prostituting our talent for something as evil as cash.

            Twenty years later I was making car commercials. You’da thought I couldn’t sink any lower.

            I could.

            Three years after car commercials, I was writing and producing a 900 number psychic infomercial.

            I tried to remain faithful to ethics and principle and truth, but the kind of piety needed to remain faithful and also make money escaped me.

            So now here I was in charge of a big-budget, multi-camera, destined to run at 3 a.m. on every television station in the country, totally bullshit television product designed to get morons to spend money they don’t have to hear bogus advice from telephone “psychics” whose job it is to keep them on the phone as along as possible.

            Telling you this is like a pro wrestler telling you his sport is fixed. You already figured that out. Sorta like a supermarket tabloid writer telling you he made up all the stories.

            I did that too.

            So maybe you are not that stupid and had figured out already that these psychic infomercials are a crock of shit. Here I am to confirm that fact for you.

            The show contained a half-hour of “psychic readings,” true life incidents (like the one where dead people were contacted by a “ghost psychologist), testimonials, interviews and a 900 number which ran at the bottom of the screen at all times. And in little print beneath it, “For Entertainment Purposes Only.”

            We know, we know.

            It all started when a poet friend of mine and I decided we wanted to go into the 900 number psychic business. He had worked as one just prior to his detox. We were both broke and, I mean, how hard could it be to fool people who believe in this stuff?

            There was a lot of money to be made. A lot. A whole lot. More than either one of us had ever seen, according to our projections.

            We had endless conversations with a sleazeball 900 number company which also wanted to get into the fortune telling biz. We had gotten close enough to get lawyers to draw up a contract and were ready to sign when a woman named Gail Summer showed up.

            In her late thirties/early forties, tall with frosted blonde hair, cut short, glamorous from across the room (though not nearly so up close), she was severe but ingratiating, full of treacly new age insincerity. She was also classically passive aggressive. If she got mad, she got her boyfriend to be threatening while she watched.

            Like she did after she watched the raw footage of her performance after the taping. I stood up to him. I think she liked that.

            She had done car commercials and pitched other, similarly high class businesses on TV. She had a short acting career which flopped. Small parts in a couple of TV movies. All along she had been an astrologer, doing charts for money. She thought she had hit it big when she did a 900 number infomercial for Mike Lasky a.k.a. Mike Warren, a hustler who had made a lot of money as a gambling tout.

            Her infomercial was a big hit. Suckers were calling by the thousands but she felt she wasn’t slurping enough from the trough, so she quit Lasky who went on to make those hilarious “Psychic Friends Network” shows with Dionne Warwicke and Rip Taylor. Shows that are direct descendants of Gail’s.

            Gail put together her own bunch of fortune tellers and called her group “The International Foundation of Professional Psychic Counselors.” She wanted it to sound like they were therapists.

            Don’t laugh.

            Ok, laugh.

            I laughed. Not in front of Gail, however.

            So before you could say, “Get lost, boys!” the poet and I were out and she was in with the 900 number company. And the 900 company had the bucks. Or so we thought.

            The poet got tossed over the side and I fought hard enough to get to write and produce her infomercial. I promised not to sue them.

            Gail showed me her previous show and its script. Said she wanted a more dignified type of show, in keeping with her (snicker) Psychic As Therapist concept.

            I can really keep a straight face.

            I asked: We want “live” readings like you had in the first show, don’t we? Yes.

            Are you going to provide the psychics? Yes.

            And you’re providing the people getting the readings? Natch.

            And they’ll already know the psychics? Yeah.

            And they’ll have interesting stuff in their “readings?” Of course, she said.

            And you can provide the studio audience? Oh yes.

            Sid did provide most of the audience. I provided some, my girlfriend and her son, a junk shop owner and her girlfriend, and the poet who got dumped.

            And for those segments, she did, in fact, provide the psychics and the people who were getting the readings. And they came in for the dress rehearsal the afternoon of the shoot so that their “live” readings could be rehearsed.

            On the roster of “Client Testimonials” Gail sent me were descriptions like, “Is willing to say anything we want.” And “Will say whatever we need.”

            I wrote most of the script, Gail wrote some of it and approved the rest. Here’s how one of the spontaneous, hand picked audience member “live” readings opened. Gail just happened to be in the right row to choose “Jackie.”

            Quoting directly from the shooting script:

            GAIL: Who’s ready for a reading?

            audience applauds/hands shoot up/Gail picks Jackie

            GAIL: What is your name?

            JACKIE: Jackie Brown

            GAIL: Have you ever had a reading before?

            JACKIE: Yes I have.

            GAIL: Do you have a specific area of your life you want to find out about?

            JACKIE: Yes I do.

            GAIL: Well, go right on into the counseling center and meet Grace Grella!!!

            jackie  walks to cc/audience applause/music

            Oh my, was that dishonest? Oh my, was that triple suplex part of the script Mr. Hogan?

            By the way, the show opened with two disclaimers at the bottom of the screen, in very small print upon a field of video blue.

            ONE: “The people you will see are not actors.”

            And TWO: “The psychic demonstrations are real.”

            Ok, number two is not a lie, it’s just misleading. It doesn’t say that the psychic “readings” are real. It says that what you think are psychic readings, what we’re telling you are psychic readings are only “demonstrations,” and that these are real. Real demonstrations.

            Kinda like a disclaimer under a car commercial. Exactly like a disclaimer under a car commercial.

            Since we were trying to make the suckers call from home, we had to have a “live” reading from someone calling from home. We did.

            Well, not exactly.

            The “caller” worked for the 900 number company and although she was actually speaking on the phone to Raj, the psychic on the set, she was also actually in a room on the second floor of the production house. We had cleverly disguised one of their video editing rooms to look like hers or almost anyone’s home.

            She also was rehearsed, although not as well as I would have liked. But she was in sales and therefore experienced in pretending.

            There were money problems from the start. The 900 number company said they had a lot of money, but they didn’t. they tried to bring in an Iranian who owned a lot of those pay phones that never work, but he wanted to own everything and never put up a dime.

            When the set was delivered, and the builders wanted their $10,000 or they would take the set back where it came from, the 900 number company bailed and Gail put up the money herself.

            Cash problems continued. So much so that one of the people getting a “live” reading was a potential investor. Gail figured it would be to our advantage to put him in the show. He was given a reading by “Dr.” Olga Chorna who claimed she had been a “psychic for the KGB.” She looked like Kruschev in a print mumu with nice skin and those upside down glasses heavy older women favor.

            Sorry, folks, I did not check with Moscow to confirm, but she claimed to have used her psychic abilities in their space program. The potential investor also posted for the rehearsal. After all, he had to protect his potential investment.

            Jolly Dr. Olga told him he possessed great physical and emotional strength and that if he took home the extra-special Russian psychic scarf on the table before them, he would become a multi-millionaire.

            He kept the scarf and his money.

            Early in the process I wanted a celeb. Got to have a celeb, right?

            We did not get Dionne Warwicke. Or Rip Taylor, or Jimmy “J.J.” Walker, or any former junkie from the Brady Bunch. Gail told me that an old friend of hers—matter of fact someone whose chart she had done—was available. Jeff Byron.

            “Who the fuck is Jeff Byron?” I thought.

            “Oh, he’s…….?” I said.

            “He played Dr. Martin on “All My Children!!” Gail said.

            “Great, Gail, right up our demographic!”

            Funny, he acted just as surprised in rehearsal when he saw his chart, as he did when he saw the same chart during the taping. He was, after all, an actor, wasn’t he?

            We set up his intro by having an audience member ask Gail how she got into the biz. She suddenly remembered during her answer that, “One of my clients just happened to be in town,” and why doesn’t he come out from behind the set and say hi?

            We had flown him in for the rehearsal the previous day, and there had been a stink because he wanted first-class travel and we wanted to pay coach.

            I love spontenaity.

            The script was full of hilarious misdirections:

            GAIL: We have a group of professional psychics who have been certified by the International Foundation of Professional Psychic Counselors.

            Well, she started the IFPPC.

            I wrote most of the audience questions. And the answers. Gail wrote the rest of them.

            GAIL: Before we do a reading, do we have any questions on the psychic experience?

            medium wide shot audience/hands shoot up all over

            AUDIENCE MEMBER 2A: Gail, how do I know I can trust the psychic to be qualified?

            GAIL: Each of our psychics have to be fully accredited before we allow them to be with us. (etc.)

            AUDIENCE MEMBER 2A: That puts my mind at ease.

            Of course they were accredited. Her own organization was doing the accrediting.

            The final segment was designed to make the suckers weep. Some poor old man’s daughter had been murdered. Years later he was visited, he claimed, by a ghost. He called somebody connected with Gail, and she sent Dr. Roger Pile, a (ready?) “Ghost Psychologist,” who claimed that he could not only contact dead people, but that “disfunctions survive death.”

            That’s something to look forward to.

            On the set Dr. Pile crossed his plaid pantlegs and told us that he had contacted the poor man’s visitor and—guess what?—it was not his daughter, but his daughter’s murderer seeking forgiveness.

            The ghost got it and everybody lived happily ever after.

            What a great way to end the show!!! Makes you want to call a psychic this minute doesn’t it?

            And what was I doing during the taping? Oh, complicity! I was standing at the monitor, jumping up and down, waving my arms, and leading the audience in wild cheering. And trying to keep them from leaving before it was over.

            And babysitting Gail who had performed much better in rehearsal. So much so that we used the ghost segment from rehearsal instead of the main taping.

            I was Gail’s Rip Torn.

            I’m a sleazeball, too. A bigger sleazeball, because once I had ethics and knew better.

            On the other hand, I was merely making TV. That’s how TV people justify working on dishonest crap…or just plain crap. I could have been driving a cab. I wasn’t, I was making TV with  a decent sized budget and a five camera shoot.

            Call it media denial.

            But look when I was writing for the supermarket tabloid “The Sun,” I told America that a tribe of South American Indians who had never seen the outside world had been found dancing around a naked statue of Elvis and chanting something that sounded like “Viva Las Vegas.” Was I responsible for retards who believed it? Not any more than I’m responsible for retards who believe that somebody else can tell you what your future holds over the phone.

            I got my punishment. It was a $100,000 production and in the end Gail paid off everybody but me. I think that call that Karma.

            Meanwhile she’s got psychic lines running all over the country, and the money’s rolling in.

            This piece is Gail’s karma.

            I wrote it for the money.

thank you to the muse who inspired it.