you’re thinking about that, have a Coke and a smile.
• • •
Day one goes off without a hitch. Okay, perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration. There were problems from well before the opening shot. In the pre-pro meeting, for example, Flonz had said, “We’re going to do this old school. Film, none of this digital rubbish. We’re filmmakers, not digital makers. Digital is something a proctologist does to an old man. We’ll shoot thirty-five millimeter. We’ll cut it by hand on a Movieola. Who needs a computer to edit?”
Super. Why not just have the Amish do a flip-book?
Shoots are highly organized events. Every detail has been thought out and planned ahead of time by the hierarchy: director, first assistant director, line producer, agency producer. Every hour of the twelve-hour shoot day is accounted for. When you have a film camera and fifty union crew members working, you are spending large sums of money, so structure is crucial. There are only four things that can endanger that structure: solipsistic stars, insecure directors, animals, and, the most dangerous of all, babies.
Ours is a three-day shoot. And during almost every minute of those three days, we are shooting babies. To recap, the spot opens with our drone-babies walking through a hallway in a futuristic setting. We then see an auditorium where babies sit and watch a screen. Then our hero-mom comes running into the hall and throws a doodie diaper at the screen. Very simple.
At the moment we are trying to shoot the mothers sitting with their babies, all of whom are supposed to be mesmerized by the Big Brother–like character on the screen, who’s talking about the welfare of the planet and who—per the client’s in-house legal department—will not be Big Brother–like at all, as that’s A) legally far too close to the original Apple spot, and B) too scary for the babies. So Big Brother instead will be a she and she will be a bunny. Flonz felt strongly that we needed to shoot with as many babies as possible. “I want real. I want a thousand babies and their mothers. I want to feel it, smell it, and taste it on the film.”
Pam, on the other hand, did not want to feel it or smell it and especially did not want to taste it. She said we were asking for trouble, that surely we could shoot ten, maybe twenty babies tops and replicate them in post-production, much the same way crowd scenes are shot now, where you simply cut and paste a small crowd to fill a stadium. Pam had raised this concern again to Flonz’s producer as the pre-pro meeting was breaking up and all of us were headed to dinner. Flonz had made the terrible mistake of being both condescending and sexist to Pam in the same sentence.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he began, retying his kaffiyeh around his neck. “I’ve been doing this awhile, okay?” He chuckled but there was a hint of nastiness to his comment.
Pam had paused and then nodded a lot. Never a good sign with Pam.
“Grampa. You haven’t made a commercial since the Internet was dial-up, but if this is how you want to play it, be my guest. Also, call me sweetheart again and I’ll pull the hair off your balls.” (They were seated at opposite ends of the long table at dinner.)
But Flonz got his babies.
We arrive at a soundstage at Universal at 7:00 A.M., Pam, Ian, Keita, myself. A wide-eyed production assistant greets us, smiling.
“Lot of babies,” he says.
“Excuse me?” I say.
“Lot of babies. Never seen so many babies in my life. You’ll see.”
He asks if we want to get breakfast first or go to the set. We opt for the set. We have an hour before Jan and her team arrive and want to make sure everything is ready for the first shot. The plan is for Alan and Jill to escort them here from the hotel.
Keita says to me, “This is very exciting. I love Hollywood.”
The PA brings us to the set, a replication of the set from the 1984 commercial—auditorium-like, chairs facing a large movie screen. And it is there that my good energy begins leaking like a baby’s wee from a Snugglie. It’s not the set itself. It’s the sound, and, to a great extent, the smell. Babies. Everywhere. Smiling, happy, screaming, crying, wailing, teething, crawling, toddling, running, falling. Who’s to say how many. A million, perhaps? A huge section away from the set in the cavernous soundstage is