Larry Bridges Portfolio

Chiat\Day
Director David Bailey
Editor Lawrence Bridges

My break out on the East Coast came through my collaboration with Chiat\Day New York, an agency I remember very fondly as my time as an editor and director. I got a call to their offices where I met with Mark Sitley and Lee Weiss in the production dept. They gave me a coffee table book of David Bailey, the legendary British Photographer who was chosen to do these extremely daring series of spots that called people of all ages and demographics to assert their personalities and individuality with Reebok’s shoes. It would be one of David Bailey’s first live action jobs, and I knew that it would be a series of surreal vignettes and static montages which would be a challenge for me since I loved to work with movement. There was no storyboard, just a tagline,

“Reebok’s Let U.B.U.”

I had always done “weird” work with Chiat\Day, but I knew this would take the cake, and that I would find it very rewarding. I went back to LA awaiting dailies from the shoot, and while I was out to dinner, I heard some very distinctive music featuring a Bandonean (like a small accordion, often part of tango groups,) a piano, and a string quartet. I knew right away that I had the music for the U.B.U. spot. It had this tongue and cheek sound that reminded me of Kurt Weill or Charles Ives, with the contemporary strokes of the brilliant film composer Michael Nyman. I approached the composer, Evan Lurie, who was at the piano, and got a cassette tape of the piece I liked, along with others which I would use for many commercials thereafter.

The U.B.U campaign came around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Americans were still captivated by this turn of events and were still anxious about the Soviets. I was quite inspired by Pravda, the mouthpiece of their state capitalism. I decided that U.B.U. needed a voiceover, and I thought to myself, if we in the West wanted to do an unabashed piece of propaganda (and who says we haven’t been doing it ourselves as long as the Soviets have,) we could do it with this spot. To me, the paragon of self empowerment (which is the American ideal advertisers, politicians and educators propagate as strongly as any message put out into the world by Pravda,) is Ralph Waldo Emerson. I took his great essay Self Reliance, and lifted quotes from it then went to a studio and read it with a dramatic flair of Hal Holbrook and EQed the track to get the quality of one of FDR’s fireside chats. The spot, which to that point had no copy whatsoever, (save for titles in frayed Courier reading “U.B.U.” and the end tag reading, “Reeboks Let U.B.U.”,) now had Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“Who so would be a man, must be a non-conformist…

A foolish consistency, is the hob-goblin of little minds…

To be great, is to be misunderstood…

There is a time in every mans education, when he arrives at the conviction;
That envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide,
And he must take himself for better or for worse, as his portion…

Insist on yourself, never imitate…

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards…

Discontent is the one want of self-reliance, it is affirmative will…

Nothing is a last sacred, but the integrity of your own mind…

Society everywhere is a conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members…

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you and your private heart, is true for all men, that is genius.”

That voice over, which many people still don’t know was me, got me into SAG and led to more voice over work on subsequent national spots.

Instead of placing the titles statically, I showed the letters one by one, allowing them to build momentum in a sort of type story. This way, there was continuity and some structure against the live action that had no formal narrative structure. Along with the quirky but self assured music and the voice over, I had what I felt was one of my greatest and most complete edits.

I showed the agency, which agreed to the cut I made, and wanted to do a full quality transfer for the client presentation. The agency ended up producing many commercials as part of this campaign, running with the idea of using philosophers for the voice over. One I remember, quotes Isaac Newton, “Nature abhors a vaccume.”

My company, Red Car, was very busy working on these ads and along with some amazing billboards, it all came to a tragic end only only six weeks later. Nike had chosen to stop competing as a mere apparel brand, and focused on performance. Whereas Reebok wanted everyone of all ages to wear its tennis shoes, Nike focused on superstar athletes and hero worship. It was a creative decision that changed the game, and one that I was obviously a part of. It was sad to see such strong creative work fall by the wayside, but Nike had certainly won the battle of athletic shoes.