Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [50]
One day they came to my office with their producer and told me that they had found a director.
“Great.”
“He’s from South Africa.”
I’d worked with lots of directors from South Africa. “Okay.”
“And he wants to shoot in Johannesburg.”
“Why? We could shoot that spot on a lot in Queens, at Silvercup [Studios].”
The producer spoke up. “If we shoot over there, they’ll save more than two hundred thousand dollars in talent. There’s no on-camera speaking parts, and if it pisses off the unions, they can’t do anything, because technically it’s a global spot.”
The three of them were single, and friends. If they wanted to get a trip out of this, and save money, who was I to stop them? I watched the director’s reel. It was decent. A little artsy for a packaged-goods spot, but if he wanted to shoot it, good for us. The producer told me that the agency had recently used the production company for a shoot for another client and everyone was happy.
“Fine. Only thing is I’m not gonna fly seventeen hours to Johannesburg just to go to a pre-pro meeting, so you’re on your own.” This news did not seem to bother them.
The next day the creative director of the agency, the man who had recently laid off my boss, knocked on my door. “So how’s the construction-worker shoot going?”
I gave him an update and offered to show him the director’s reel, but he waved it off. He said he totally trusted me. Which meant he’d already had the producer run it by him without telling me. “So when are you going to Johannesburg?”
“Actually, the client will only pay for two creatives, and I thought it was only fair that the team that did the work should make the trip.”
He stood up and looked out my window. Obviously he knew all of this and had discussed it with the head of the account, who, because of my newly acquired obsessive desire to attend client meetings, was still under the impression that I was a responsible adult and therefore my presence was essential to the success of the shoot. Under normal circumstances I would have jumped at a trip like this and would have tried to bring my family with me. But not this time. My wife was in the middle of a major work project. Plus, we weren’t thrilled about the prospect of having to get shots for our two-year-old, or that we’d be going to Johannesburg and not the safer, more tourist-friendly coastal city of Cape Town. Also, it meant I’d be gone for Mother’s Day, and in my wife’s family every holiday—Christmas, Easter, Groundhog Day, and especially Mother’s Day—was sacred. So for all these reasons, I did not want to go.
“Do you want me to go?”
“That’s your decision,” he said. He walked back into the hall and turned. “But if it fucks up in any way, it’s your sorry ass.”
A week later me and my sorry ass were on a jet headed to Cape Verde and then on to Johannesburg while one very pissed-off copywriter and my slightly less angry family (“On Mother’s Day—and you said you could shoot it in Queens!”) were back in New York.
There wasn’t a lot for me to do once I got to Johannesburg. A few hours a day for the first two days I hung out with the agency producer, the agency art director, and an account guy, watching casting sessions, picking through wardrobe possibilities, and checking out the location, which in our case was the roof of an abandoned parking lot in the burned-out center of downtown Johannesburg. On the second prep day the director shared his shooting board with us. The rest of the day was all ours.
The production company had assigned us a young chaperone named David who drove us throughout Greater Johannesburg, taking us to quirky restaurants, out-of-the-way art galleries, sporting events, and markets that we would not have dared to visit on our own. As he answered my questions about politics, music, writing,