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Although the TV commercials will try and have you believe otherwise, there is nothing good about breakfast cereal. No matter how 'low fat' or 'high in fibre' the box tells you it is, ditching the high sugar cereals is the first step you need to take towards a better breakfast.
I was working in Chicago, in theater and in commercials and anything that anybody would let me do. When I moved to L.A., I had made a choice to be a character actor, meaning that I wanted to become somebody else. That's what attracted me to becoming an actor in the first place.
In my experience, not just in shooting films but in the commercials I've done, initially, it's very exciting for the community, and its a real novelty. Very quickly, though, they realize there's a buck to be had, and it becomes annoying, and they lose their patience pretty quick.
Remember that the NFL was cultivated into prominence by Pete Rozelle, a pro-war conservative. In the 1960s, Rozelle hired a World War II veteran-turned-filmmaker, Ed Sabol, to produce highlights, commercials and documentaries that marketed the sport as patriotic and militaristic.
When you're auditioning for commercials, they're looking for a Latin guy in his 20s, and you'll show up, and it's a bunch of people who look just like you, and it's a little weird. More often than not, they're way better-looking. They're taller. They have way more abs than you do.
I started home school around sixth grade, but I'd only done a couple of national commercials. I remember I had this Spalding commercial with Paul Pierce from the Celtics, and I used to go to school, and people made fun of it. It wasn't even cool to be an actor; you got made fun of.
Since becoming an alleged adult, I've always felt like I should exercise - or should at least want to exercise - and make a feeble attempt at health, thus staving off terrible things like the coronary heart disease and high cholesterol described to me in 1980s margarine commercials.
Realness is something in such short supply; you can't believe anything anyone is saying when you turn on the television, and then during the commercials, they are lying to you there also. You can't believe anything, but when you go see a drag show, something real is happening on stage.
Even when I do commercials, I try to tell a story about the product. With music, I try to tell the story of the person's struggle for success. And I believe every word I say. I never read anything on the air I don't believe in. I think people sense that about me, and they respond to it.
If you don't like an ad, why should anybody else?... We're all consumers... That's why I always create commercials for myself first of all. I am the consumer I know best. If I think it's a great commercial, I figure the rest of the people might think so, too. I haven't been wrong so far.
In the off season, you work out for two hours a day, and then you got all this other time off. I like doing other stuff. Football obviously isn't going to last a lifetime either, so it's always cool to get in front of a camera, do commercials, and do endorsements for products that you love.
It used to just be a SAG card, and then you got an AFTRA card. I got my AFTRA card doing a commercial in Atlanta. I got my SAG card doing a beer commercial from 100 years ago; it was one of the first national commercials with a family in it that was black and normal, and I played the daughter.
Warner Bros. got into television very early, so I did a lot of television there. In the beginning, it was sort of okay to do television. But then it became this thing where movie actors didn't do television - they certainly didn't do commercials, because that just meant the end of your career.
We've been trained to spend money since we were born with all these commercials with toys and G.I. Joes and Transformers. But there's so many things in the supermarket, there's so many things on television that automatically, when you turn it on, are saying, 'Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy!'
My favorite commercial I did was my Verizon campaign, which I filmed a series of three commercials. My favorite movie I have done was 'House Under Siege' because it was my very first movie at 5 years old. My favorite TV show I have filmed was 'The Night Shift,' which is one of my favorite shows.
You have to prove that the Freberg way will sell their product better than if they just did straight advertising. Whenever I give a lecture or seminar, that's what I try to get across to people. I hear very few radio commercials that sound like I could have written them or that they got the idea.
Commercials certainly pay more than films. I was pleasantly surprised at the profitability of commercials when I did my first ad for a popular soap brand years ago. I was paid a huge amount of money for a mere 30 seconds of screen presence. After that, ads have been a regular feature in my career.
Watching soccer is my main hobby, really. I'm no tactician or coach, but I enjoy watching the free flow of it, the different styles, and the histories behind clubs. Like Barcelona vs. Madrid - it's not just a soccer game; it's a geopolitical struggle. There are great storylines and no commercials.
The beauty of my job is I do all different kinds of film directing, not just surf films anymore. And I do stuff from commercials to short films to working on feature films, and none of it is based from where I live. It's all based elsewhere, so I can live anywhere and commute to where I need to go.
I'd say, specifically after 'Get Smart,' people now know me either as The Guy from 'Get Smart' or 'She's Out of My League'; when that came out on DVD, everyone was recognizing me from that. But as far as the amount of people in a time, nothing touches when those Capital One commercials were playing.
My own personal aesthetic is all to do with real actors and real locations and a kind of almost hyper reality and actuality to things. But the digital world, I explore that through other mediums, with music videos and commercials. Even 'The Road' was a real learning curve for me with digital effects.
The way it works in commercials is they come to you with the script, and then you do the visual, you do the storyboards, and you give your vision of it, but it's very much their baby. You just kind of put your polish and sheen on it and your interpretation of it, but it's very much the agency's idea.
Even one's own home is a kind of anthology of advertisers, manufacturers, motifs and presentation techniques. There's nothing 'natural' about one's home these days. The furnishings, the fabrics, the furniture, the appliances, the TV, and all the electronic equipment - we're living inside commercials.
I was addicted to 'The Monkees' TV programme - not so much because of the music but because of the commercials in between. The programme was sponsored by Yardley, and in the commercial breaks, there would be these English girls on roller skates, wearing hot pants, and I just thought, 'God! How neat!'
I did a lot of commercials starting in about '75, yeah. Well, not 'a lot'; I never was a big old commercial gal, but I made a good living. I didn't immediately make 'a living' at commercials; the first year I made maybe a living was about '80. I had a great year in '85. I had a nice little supplement.
When I ask people what they think of when they hear the term 'cerebral palsy,' I usually get one of two responses. They either think of a smiling, crumpled child in a wheelchair on a poster or commercials on late night TV with lawyers enticing parents of CP kids to sue the pants off their obstetrician.
Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect, 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love, and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces, primarily by TV commercials.
At its best, MTV puts a face to the names, if you know what I mean. I think if you can take the expression of a song much farther, that's great. And it's one of the only outlets there is for artistic filmmaking. But it's a double-edged sword. At it's worst, MTV is just a lot of TV commercials for songs.
I did about 10-12 national commercials and then got one line parts in things like 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' and the show 'The Unit.' Got a little part in the movie 'Redbelt' by David Mamet and kept slowly grinding up and then started getting bigger parts in independents and getting noticed by Liz Meriwether.
I wake up every morning bolt upright, whether it's a commercial, not that that's a good thing or a bad thing, because I shoot commercials in between movies. But whether it's a commercial or a movie where I'm shooting a major train wreck, the thing that worries me most is when I'm doing a performance thing.
I was always snobby about soap operas, and commercials, too, but one does have to eat. I remember auditioning for a commercial for a mouthwash or chewing gum or something, and I had to pretend to be the back end of somebody in a horse costume. After that, I said, 'That's it. That's it. You've sunk too far!'
The more successful sons and daughters know when to lean on their parents - and when to go their own way. George W. Bush helped run his father's presidential campaigns in 1988 and 1992. But in his winning campaign for governor of Texas, he never mentioned his father's name in any of his campaign commercials.
Modelling was never a career option for me; it was always a hobby. I was modelling while I was pursuing my B.Tech, so the obvious choice after finishing my studies was to do a job. But while I was modelling and doing TV commercials, I really loved being in front of the camera. I enjoyed the shooting process.
There's no reason my films can't work as hard as VR does to hook an audience and never let them go, so I think that that it turns the volume up a little bit on storytelling. The same way when I was doing commercials and then I went and shot 'Go,' and 'Go' has a level of pace that is unlike any of my other movies.
I did tons of theater in school, and then when I was 16 and got my driver's license, I started driving to Los Angeles, along with my friend Eric Stoltz, who was a year ahead of me and was doing the same thing. So we had the same manager, and we started auditioning for things and doing commercials when we were 16.
Actors go, 'I just want to act.' And I say to them, 'You know, stop for a second and think about what charges you up the most. Do you want to be on the stage, do you want to be in film, do you want to be a comic actor? Do you just want to make it for the money and capitalize on your look and do commercials and soaps?'
Growing up I did commercials and things like that, but nothing serious. As I got older, my family is really hardcore into academics. They weren't wanting to necessarily support an acting career; it's a really fickle business, and it can be difficult and unstable. They were rooting for education and the whole nine yards.
I have a different relationship with Chucky because he's been on top of my bookshelf in the corner of my living room for my entire life. He was a great tool for scaring friends, and when I see him in different theme parks I've been to, or in commercials, my heart swells a little bit, and I'm like, 'Aww! It's my Chucky!'
My mom had done some TV and commercials before I was born, and so when I was born, she knew I had a really big interest in acting because I was always acting in plays with my dolls, and they were sort of boring, because I've seen them on tape; they always involved a lot of singing and dragging them around by their hair.
Making music on TV used to be as common as commercials. In the '60s and '70s, prime time was stuffed with variety shows headlined by such major and treasured talents as Carol Burnett, Red Skelton, the Smothers Brothers and Richard Pryor, who had a very brief comedy-variety hour on NBC that was censored literally to death.
I landed about one a year. Just enough to make me question the gas money and all the driving in rush hour. When you audition for commercials, it's a lot of driving. What I netted wasn't exactly matching the hours I was putting in. I figured I'm not a face that makes people want to buy Lysol. Then I auditioned for Progressive.
Soaps are great. You learn to work very fast - some say superficially, but that's not really true. You do some very serious character work. I've never had any feelings about a stigma attached to it, and nowadays there seems to be less snobbery about what you do. More and more big names are doing TV and commercials and voiceovers.
I was a bartender in New York and I overheard this girl saying she made $3000 doing a commercial. A kid at work told me, 'Hey, I know this director and he'd really like you!'. So I walked into this guy's office and was like 'I was thinking maybe I could make $3000' and he hired me for commercials, short films, like 15 jobs in a row.
When we developed the 'Seinfeld' show, we took a bet on Jerry Seinfeld, who was not a household name. But Jerry had a voice. He was appearing on 'Late Night', on 'The Tonight Show', had some commercials out there, his voice of observational comedy, looking at the world around him, that voice was really starting to come into its own.
I was the singing voice of a cartoon character. I did dog food commercials. I did a lot of commercials, actually, and helped pay my rent and my classes. Then I'd get one good line or two good scenes. I was building my career and building my own experience and learning technically what it was like to be on a set and all of those things.
I was from such a large family that when I first met my wife, I told her: 'You can go work outside of the house and I'll stay home and continue making my cartoon strips. Maybe I'll make some commercials nearby, you know I'll do anything locally, but I would love to just stay at home and raise the kids like I did when I was growing up.'
Grunge was so self-consciously lowbrow and nonaspirational that it seemed, at first, impervious to the hype and glamour normally applied swiftly to any emerging trend. But sure enough, grunge anthems found their way onto the soundtracks of television commercials, and Dodge Neons were hawked by kids in flannel shirts saying, 'Whatever.'
In terms of comedy, there was a Seinfeldian era of comedy that I love but got played out. Seinfeld was great, but then after him it was people acting like Seinfeld and making observations that we felt like we'd kind of heard before, and then you're seeing Seinfeldian comedy in commercials. Suddenly everything is observational funniness.
Most advertisers spend millions upon millions of dollars to buy commercial time during the Super Bowl, and millions in creating eye-popping ads, hoping to create catchy, unforgettable commercials. Unfortunately, most Super Bowl commercials end up being unmemorable. Costly mistakes for brands and creative flameouts for advertising firms.
I always looked up to great actors and great films. A lot of my family would be like, 'Come on, you should get into these plays that are going on.' I'm like, 'Nah, nah, music's my thing.' I just fell into it. I moved to Atlanta, got with an agency out there, started doing little voiceover commercials, and it started getting kind of fun.