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by Jerry Roberts
Pytka portrait by Elisa Haber
Joe Pytka is a dominant force on any playing field. This time it's a sound stage in Culver City — and the creator of some of the best television commercials ever made is playing two-on-two with crew members between setups on his latest project for Disney World. A 6-foot 5½-inch dude of the power-forward variety, Pytka is clearing rebounds with authority under a portable basketball hoop that travels with him on each job.
One of the most vociferous taskmasters in the business — famous for it — his gravelly voice might have chipped bricks across the courtyard of a military academy. Add to that a shock of flowing white hair to his back and a mug like an alpine crag that secures a schnoz bearing the rough dimensions of multiple realignments.
"I bring the hoop everywhere I can. How do you think I got this?" Pytka asked, as he places an index finger on his nose.
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It seems he easily could have both fit in and stood out as a poleax carrier on his friend, director Ridley Scott's Gladiator. Then again, he's a Pittsburgh guy with a certain amount of life's fundamentals deeply instilled — a jack-of-all-trades guerrilla filmmaker who scrounged to slap together documentaries and other programs for the fledgling Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the 1960s and '70s.
"We had no money for one project. This was 30 years ago at WQED in Pittsburgh," Pytka recalled. "I knew how to run sound equipment and we needed a mix. I knew a guy who worked at a place where we could do it, and it didn't have an alarm system. I came late in the day and stayed in the third-floor bathroom. They closed up and I came out, ran the sound system and did the mix. The next morning while they were opening, I snuck out. For those QED projects, we worked our asses off."
Today, Joe Pytka is a director who's made billions of dollars for the biggest corporations on the planet, directing more than 5,000 commercials that have earned him every award and nomination ever conceived for such endeavors, including three Directors Guild of America Commercial Direction Awards and 14 nominations — the most for that category. Over the past three decades, his stylized images have wedged themselves into the American consciousness.
Using every style, every tool and toy in the boxes, actors of every stripe — athletes, animals, rock stars, everyday people — he sells trucks, food, carpets and beer. Sometimes with special effects, other times with a baby's smile, he instills satire, color, mood and ebullience. His success runs all gamuts on all fronts — and all the way to the bank.
But the big lug, who shows up practically everywhere in worn jeans and a black T-shirt, sometimes struggles to keep the force in check, to tone it down, to access it only when he needs it, in business, on the set, in a foreign nation. "I use fear and intimidation," he once said, "it works for the Catholic Church and it works for me.
"This is a down-and-dirty business, and I dress for it," Pytka says. "I'm crawling on the ground, operating the crane, trying to get the best stuff I can. I like to get my hands on some of the equipment myself."
He once described himself as "An irritator and an agitator — I have no charm." The "stuff" that Pytka gets, the magic in the camera, is a salesmanship variation of fellow Western Pennsylvanian James Stewart's description of his own value in filmmaking: creating "little pieces of time" that people remember.
Those pieces of time include Ray Charles' "Uh-huh" for Pepsi; a frying egg demonstrating "This is your brain on drugs"; an archaeology dig recovering a Coke bottle for Pepsi; Bo Jackson's "Bo knows"; Larry Bird and Michael Jordan doing "Nothing but net" for McDonald's; chimpanzees spouting famous movie lines, i.e., "I'm mad as hell and not going to take it anymore!" for HBO; and, of course, Ed and Frank of Bartles & James saying, "Thank you for your support." There's Cindy Crawford for Pepsi, a child hunger-awareness public service announcement, "Ketchup Soup," a husband and wife in bed whispering sweet nothings in Donald Duck voices for Disney and, following 9/11, his New York City Miracle spots — Woody Allen skating and Henry Kissinger sliding into home plate.
"We've shot in practically every nation in the Northern Hemisphere and half the ones in the Southern — we have crew contacts everywhere," Pytka said. "One time they were holding us up in some country. Austin McCann, who's been my 1st AD for 25 years, keeps a folder with photos of us with people like Madonna and Michael Jordan and other celebrities. Austin opens the folder, shows them to the authorities, and they said, 'Oh, you are celebrities; OK, you can go ahead.'"
Celebs or not, a Pytka shoot is a Pytka shoot. "There is one guy who is great to be around when you're making commercials: His name is Joe Pytka," former Boston Celtics great Bird wrote in his autobiography Bird Watching. "He organizes all the shoots, and he treats everyone like crap, and both me and Michael Jordan love him... Pytka hadn't finished his basketball game yet. People were all ticked off because this director was keeping Michael Jordan and Larry Bird waiting, but it's why I absolutely love the guy. To him we're all the same."
Directors, too. Pytka labels himself a filmmaker rather than commercial director, noting how much the lines have blurred over the years. Pytka directed Let It Ride with Richard Dreyfuss and the hit Space Jam with Jordan and Buggs Bunny. "If anything, the definitions between the kinds of directors aren't as profound as they once were," he said. "And I've done a little bit of everything."
A privilege afforded other types of directors but denied the commercial director is having final cut. That's the prerogative of the client," Pytka said. But it doesn't mean the client is always right.
"The History Channel did a program on the 10 best commercials of all time," Pytka recalled. "One of my commercials on there was a Pepsi commercial where the Coca-Cola delivery guy comes in and takes a Pepsi, and all the cans crash out of the cooler. The original idea was for him to take the can out of the cooler and a little old lady sees him, and, embarrassed, he puts the can back. In prep I said, 'I think we should come up with a better idea.' We did shoot it once with the little old lady, and it was a dog. Then we went and put the cans up.
"The guy says, 'No, no, we're out here for production, this thing has already been approved.' So at the last minute, we got a special effects guy to rig all of these cans to fall out at one time. Now it's a big joke. We shot it in an hour. Two takes. It took an hour and half to set the cans up. I told them, 'I don't want to wait around. I'm tired. Take one or the other. They're both perfect.' In one he does this. In the other, he does that. The special effects guy was a genius. It became the most popular Pepsi commercial of all time.
"The process in commercials is much like that in movies," Pytka continued. "It takes years to get a movie off the ground — you write a script, shop it around. It's a painful process. Commercials are the same way. They'll get written and taken to the client. The client will say, 'Change this, change that.' It goes back and forth and back and forth — and by the time it gets approved, production people have it clutched to their bosom as if it's this precious jewel. They can't see the flaws in it. You say, 'Well, it's not a very good idea.' They say, 'Well, the client bought it.' 'I don't care if the client bought it, it's a bad idea.' With the Pepsi commercial, I said, 'Look, let's do it both ways and see.'"
Pytka continued with another example: "Recently, we did some improvisation with Tiger [Woods] in Florida. We worked out lines on the set more than in front of the camera and gave Tiger's joke to the other guy — and it worked better. If the actors are good enough, it's not so much improvising as making changes on the set to make it more appropriate for what we're doing. We do a lot of that."
Pytka strives to make dialogue realistic, and sometimes that means changing whole lines, following an actor's contribution or wholesale rewriting.
"Unfortunately, a lot of directors are anonymous, and a lot of work is anonymous," Pytka said. "There are writers and art directors who feel that it is as good as it can get when it's on the page. But sometimes I like to put more personality into it. For better or for worse, I put my own stamp on the work. Although I respect the idea, I still want to do it a certain way. Lots of times I write my own commercials. I'll write and rewrite, yet I don't consider myself a writer. But I do know what dialogue should sound like. That's the hardest thing for people to write in a real way."
Pytka, whose commercials have debuted more than 30 times on the national launching forum, the annual Super Bowl telecast, grew up Catholic in Braddock, Pa., a steel mill-rife suburb of Pittsburgh on the Monongahela River.
"My grandmother and grandfather lived kind of an aristocratic life in Poland. She was very elegant, very refined," the director said. "He came to America before her, and when she got here and found out the only work he could get was as a bartender, she was shattered."
The future director was also an athlete and aspiring painter. He originally studied chemical engineering at the University of Pittsburgh because his father suggested it was a way to make a practical living. He hated it, but he got a chance to play basketball for a cup of coffee on the collegiate level on the same team as Mike Ditka, then a legendary All-American tight end who joined the hoop squad after the football season ended in December. "Once at practice I made a move to go around Ditka, and he knocked me clear into the stands — all I saw was white," Pytka recalled.
The colors came back to his life pursuits when he dropped out of Pitt and landed a job at WRS Motion Picture and Video Lab in Pittsburgh. There he learned shooting, editing and recording techniques. He began working on documentaries in various capacities and shooting shows for WQED. He worked on Steeltown Blues, Maggie's Farm and a documentary on air pollution narrated by Orson Welles. He shot a forerunner to music videos called High Flying Bird, featuring Steve McQueen in a four-wheel-drive truck traveling Mexican landscapes. It was then he began shooting commercials to pay for the documentaries. He shot some Iron City Beer spots in actual taverns, including one that recreated a Polish wedding.
When this East Coast commercial work came to the attention of a San Francisco-based ad rep, it was the biggest turning point in his life. "I had done these documentaries that were fairly emotional, but which I had to manipulate to get my point across. I wanted to get to that point in my commercial work, working with real people in real situations," he said. "At the time, no one was doing it. Commercials were real theatrical. As good as Howard Zieff's commercials were and are, they were very theatrical. For about two or three years in Pittsburgh, I was doing these commercials for a local brewery where we'd go somewhere with real people — and they were very successful."
Pytka said that he hates to reveal process, almost never rehearses with actors, enjoys the surprises that art directors and other creative crew can provide for him, and that a storyboard for him is mostly a scrawl on any handy piece of paper — and that's rare. He said that he also learned from renowned editor Dede Allen that using the take with the best performance is usually always better than using the most technically sound one. He rarely gets into music selection.
"All work is painful," Pytka said. "Every day I work is painful. Every day before I go to shoot, even if I've done the same thing many times, there's something unforeseen there. It's like writing, starting out with the blank sheets of paper. I've really got to put myself out there.
"I love John Cassavetes' work. It's totally challenging to watch. You have to suspend some disbelief in terms of some of the techniques, but John always, always cared for his actors. If a shot was out of focus or not perfect, he'd still put it in if one of the performances required it. Watch A Woman Under the Influence and other movies look hopelessly pathetic. If you watch a Cassavetes film, you feel you are there."
On how digital technology has influenced directing commericals, Pytka feels that the really big step is that, "Now you have artistic hands manipulating the controls and for the first time digital technology is able to enhance what we do instead of just implement. We can take film and do things with it that you can't do with just the film. You can take a piece of film, shoot it, and then change the contrast level, the color, the overall look of the film in a way you could not before. And, in commercials, you can do it quickly.
"Not only that," he added, "with the enhanced technology you can shoot film under very distressed circumstances and have a credible image. Digital technology allows you to do things you were not capable of doing before and to be in places you couldn't be in before. The craft has become totally accessible, and you can express yourself in almost any way you want."
Yet, no matter what technology is being used, it's important not to lose sight of the overall goal, which is to capture those "real" moments and performances. "That's what I try for in commercials," Pytka said. "I'm not comfortable as any sort of labeled director. I'm not necessarily a commercial director, even though I make a lot of commercials. I'm not an actor's director even though I like actors. I'm a filmmaker."
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