Is It the Reel Thing? : Big-Name Directors Try to Bring Film Magic to Coke Ads

Shooting TV commercials again after 20 years in feature films “was like getting back on a bicycle. It came back to me in no time,” said Richard Donner, the director of the three “Lethal Weapon” movies, among others.

Donner is one of several Hollywood veterans whose work for the Coca-Cola campaign coordinated by the Creative Artists Agency was unveiled last week. Of the 26 new commercials for Coke Classic, at least 10 were shot by directors such as Donner, Rob Reiner (“A Few Good Men”), Phil Joanou (“State of Grace”) and Marek Kanievska (“Less Than Zero”). Some of the spots were shown Sunday night on CBS during the miniseries “Queen” and Monday night during the CBS series “Love & War.”

The Coke campaign, the first foray into advertising by the powerful talent agency headed by Michael Ovitz, is notable for its Hollywood ties. Some advertising industry professionals feel that Coke officials were persuaded to put aside their longstanding relationship with the McCann-Erickson agency by Ovitz’s position in the Hollywood creative community and the possibility of using that creativity in Coke commercials.

But the campaign also raises questions about whether a film director is necessarily a good commercial director. Are commercials a distinct medium that movie directors can be uniquely unsuited to handle?

Not surprisingly, opinions vary depending on where they’re coming from.

The consensus among advertising people is that recently, only a few feature directors have directed high-quality spots. Spike Lee won high marks for his Nike commercials, and Terry Gilliam scored last year with his ads for Orangina, a British soft drink.

But, says Donner, “There are very few film directors--the good ones--that I wouldn’t trust to shoot excellent commercials. Shooting spots, with the economy of words and visuals, is a wonderful discipline that’s within the reach of any strong director.”

Donner directed dozens of commercials in the mid-’60s as well as a couple of spots last year for the Universal Pictures theme park in Orlando, Fla. He made two 60-second and two 30-second Coke Classic spots, of which the most admired is “Spaceship,” which deals with the search for an alien.

Joanou’s four spots--which deal with men looking at women and suppressing their longings by drinking Coke--run only 15 seconds each. He had directed a couple of Sans Souci beer commercials in Europe last year.

He says that it’s “extremely difficult to create a story and characters and deliver a payoff in 15 seconds. At the same time, it can be equally difficult to sustain tension and drama over a period of two hours with a movie. Neither is a walk in the park.”

Several sources in the advertising community say most movie directors aren’t all that good at it. And that includes great auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard and Woody Allen.

CAA’s interest in Francis Ford Coppola directing a series of Coke Classic ads reportedly faded after McCann-Erickson executives passed along to CAA and Coke officials a spot that Coppola had filmed for General Motors and was never aired, allegedly due to GM’s dissatisfaction.

CAA spokespersons declined to comment officially for this story, as did Coppola and Reiner.

A review of the commercials shot by big-name feature film directors suggests that the ad community’s criticisms are not solely defensive:

* Coppola’s General Motors spot, in which a middle-aged couple on vacation stops at a gas station in the desert. The key moment happens when the husband graciously buys a tank of gasoline for some young female travelers who are broke.

* A Woody Allen-directed commercial for Coop, a chain of Italian supermarkets, which was one of a series that cost a total of $7 million. The father of a large family leaves the dinner table, apparently in lewd pursuit of a maid. His real object of desire, however, is a bowl of red apples, one of which he kisses and fondles sensuously.

* An avant-garde-styled spot by Godard for Nike running shoes, in which a father and his young son encounter the Grim Reaper on a country road. Because they are wearing Nike footwear, they are able to outrun the scythe-wielding phantom and escape death.

* A curious, off-kilter spot by Antonioni for Renault automobiles that uses miniatures and computer animation. It’s a dream-like, quasi-psychedelic vision of a Renault coupe driving through a city full of contorted cube-like skyscrapers.

Several other directors have directed TV spots to marginal effect. David Lynch’s recent efforts for Obsession perfume have been derided for being arch and pretentious. Martin Scorsese directed at least one stylish-looking, $750,000 TV ad for Giorgio Armani cologne that has not been widely shown.

Roman Polanski recently directed a spot for European Vanity Fair that was slickly filmed but not all that persuasive. Joel Schumacher directed a vampire-themed Coca-Cola commercial that received only a couple of plays last year. Even Fellini has taken a shot at it, filming a spot in Italy for Compari aperitif that, while certainly Fellini-esque, reportedly did not stand the Roman advertising community on its ear.

The Britons who came to Hollywood from TV commercials in the ‘70s are still regarded as masters of the form. Directors Hugh Hudson (“Greystoke”) and Ridley and Tony Scott (“Thelma & Louise” and “Top Gun,” respectively), occasionally still shoot spots. Alan Parker (“Mississippi Burning”), a British ad maestro from way back, recently directed a well-received spot for Sprite featuring Macaulay Culkin. Adrian Lyne (“Fatal Attraction,” the upcoming “Indecent Proposal”), another graduate of British commercials, directed a spot for Jovan cosmetics about six years ago.

The Scotts continue to occasionally shoot commercials between films on a low-profile basis. A production company that represents their TV commercial interests would only confirm that Ridley’s son, Jake, has directed one of the CAA-Coke Classic spots.

Early reaction to the CAA-Coke Classic spots among advertising professionals has been mixed. This is perhaps explainable by the fact that TV commercial directors and others in the ad community have always resented the idea of movie directors invading their turf, and also because of widespread concern that CAA looked as though it was interested in becoming an ad-hoc West Coast ad agency. “A lot of agency people are very unsettled about this,” says a public relations veteran close to the advertising community, “and they’re making their feelings known.”

Sources contend that CAA had limited success in lining up a slew of prestige-level Hollywood directors, and that convinced Ovitz and his CAA coordinators, Shelley Hochron and Len Fink, to turn to established TV commercial directors and state-of-the-art computer graphics companies to produce the bulk of the spots. A CAA spokesperson insisted there was never any intention to emphasize Hollywood directing talent as part of the new campaign.

“Directing commercials is a whole different world than directing movies,” says a TV advertising veteran. “You have to think a lot faster on your feet and improvise a lot more than what feature filmmaking allows. The only reason that agencies hire movie directors for TV commercials is to impress the client.”

Directors are generally interested in plugging into TV directing jobs, too. The daily pay for big-time directors runs anywhere from $17,000 to $25,000 per day, with most shoots taking four to six days prep time at half-pay. Donner earned $500,000 for his series of Coke ads, according to a feature producer.

Award-winning commercial director Joe Pytka, whose work includes the Pepsi spots that ran during the Super Bowl, says that the vocabulary of movies and commercials “is very different. One is not better than the other--they just require different disciplines. Most of what we see is hack work but at their highest level, movies are like great novels and commercials are like poems. You can riff your way through a novel and add some padding here and there, but a poem has to be perfect.”

The other side of the coin is that commercial directors who move into feature films (like Pytka, who directed the unsuccessful Richard Dreyfuss comedy “Let It Ride”) have been accused of concentrating on captivating visuals instead of good storytelling.

Pytka says his biggest criticism of movie directors who shoot TV spots is “they don’t sweat commercials like they do movies. The energy that you put into a commercial can be more intense and draining than what it takes to shoot a movie. Ask any writer--it’s always harder to write short than write long.”