adgrunt comments

flickhead71's picture

Where are the other spots? I love the "Fake ID" spot...

flickhead71's picture

I don't remember this one running during the 1998 Superbowl. Network Associates ran a "Who's Watching Your Network?" campaign that did indeed have three different spots, though. One featured a Sharon Stone looking vamp, and I was in a different spot as a tattoo-faced hacker. It was my spot that ran beyond the Superbowl (and ended up earning me about $40,000), and they called me back in to do a magazine shoot as well. They offered to fly me to their annual convention the following year, as a paid appearance but I was booked on another commercial and had to turn them down. About two years later I spotted that magazine ad taped to a wall in the IT department at Universal. That felt pretty good...

I can still remember the script: "Why would someone spend their own time to hack into your company's computer and post your confidential files on the internet? For the same reason we pierce our tongues!" which was followed by a sinister laugh and me sticking my pierced tongue into camera.

My spot was costumed by Bob Ringwood, and Danny Williams applied the fake face tattoos (which took about four hours). We shot it at Raleigh Studios.

flickhead71's picture

We had to sign injury waivers -something I never did again!

flickhead71's picture

I was actually in this commercial. I'm the short guy being dragged by a larger guy through the hallway.
The audition for this spot is one of the more notorious Hollywood casting stories:
They put five sets of actors into five different rooms after narrowing down to 25 after three callbacks. For this final callback, they had us all get down on our hands and knees. They placed a can of soda about 15 feet away from us and made us race on a very short fiber carpet. The person who got each can had to open it and slam the whole thing. I won in my group by rolling over the backs of all the other much larger actors. In so doing I won the spot of that group, but when I stood up, the casting director (Billy Woodruff -this was over at Sheila Manning's facility) stared in horror, as I had rug-burned the skin off of my elbows and knees. I was seriously bleeding. It didn't heal in time for the shoot, so I had to wear flesh colored bandages. Puck was at the height of his fame, and while he was definitely conceited, he was an ok guy. This was a brand x spot when we shot it, so the can was green and art was blown in later. The commercial was directed by Joe Pytka. I worked for him a few times before leaving the acting trade to go into film licensing and marketing. Pytka was a very demanding director, but one of the best I've ever worked with. I've heard a lot of tales about his behavior on other sets, but he was a gregarious, interesting guy on the set of "Hallway".
Soon after, he started using TLC casting exclusively, but I did three spots for him and got called in to audition for him on almost everything he shot for about four years.