Rick Levine, an award-winning tv industrial director who introduced a big-screen sensibility to the small display screen with broadly celebrated spots, together with a Weight-reduction plan Pepsi Tremendous Bowl advert from the Nineteen Eighties that includes Michael J. Fox risking life and limb for love, died on March 11 at his dwelling in Marina del Rey, Calif. He was 94.
The demise was confirmed by his daughter Abby LaRocca.
Mr. Levine was a product of what’s usually referred to as the golden age of promoting. He rose within the enterprise by the “Mad Males” period of the Sixties and based his personal firm, Rick Levine Productions, in 1972. It was a time when community tv held a hypnotic sway over the typical American family and promoting, like so many different cultural arenas of the period, was exploding in creativity.
Usually serving as his personal cinematographer, Mr. Levine approached his big-budget commercials like a director of Hollywood blockbusters.
“We determined to make our advertisements look as good as films,” he stated in a 2009 interview with DGA Quarterly, printed by the Administrators Guild of America. “I might direct and shoot, so I might have full management.”
The Guild named him the perfect industrial director in 1981 and once more in 1988, particularly for 3 particular spots.
Most notable amongst them was the Weight-reduction plan Pepsi industrial with Mr. Fox, which Mr. Levine made for BBDO New York. It was certainly one of many advertisements he shot for Pepsi.
Referred to as “Apartment 10G,” the industrial stars Mr. Fox as a timid New York skilled who turns heroic after he hears a knock on his condo door and opens it to come across a stupendous blond new neighbor (performed by Gail O’Grady, later of ABC’s “NYPD Blue”). She flirtatiously asks if he has a Weight-reduction plan Pepsi to spare.
When a two-liter Pepsi bottle in his fridge seems to be empty, a bedazzled Mr. Fox, decided to fetch what she requested for, climbs out of his bed room window and clambers down the hearth escape right into a pounding rainstorm on a busy avenue. Mr. Fox, who did a lot of his personal stunts, survives near-miss collisions with oncoming site visitors in a mad sprint to a Weight-reduction plan Pepsi merchandising machine. He returns, soaking and breathless, to current a can to the lady, solely to search out that her equally pretty roommate has proven up with the identical request.
The advert aired throughout Tremendous Bowl XXI (the New York Giants versus the Denver Broncos) on Jan. 25, 1987. It was named the world’s best video commercial the following 12 months on the Worldwide Broadcasting Awards in Los Angeles; cited by ESPN as one of many best Super Bowl spots ever; and honored on the Smithsonian as an artifact of Americana.
Mr. Levine was admired as properly for an additional BBDO industrial, for the chemical firm DuPont, which featured Bill Demby, a real-life Vietnam veteran. He’s first seen lacing up his basketball sneakers in his New York Metropolis condo earlier than heading to a neighborhood schoolyard to shoot hoops with buddies.
When he arrives, he strips down from sweatpants to basketball shorts, revealing two prosthetic legs — produced from DuPont plastic — that he has relied on since being maimed in a Vietcong rocket assault. What seems to be a noble, if doomed, effort to maintain up with the opposite gamers turns right into a star flip for Mr. Demby, as he races across the court docket dishing assists and draining buckets.
Mr. Levine gained a complete of four Clio Awards — promoting’s equal of the Oscars — for each spots in 1988. In explaining his success, he informed The New York Occasions: “I entice the story kind of commercial. Folks don’t come to me only for footage; they arrive with tales.”
Richard Laurence Levine was born on July 10, 1930, in Brooklyn, the one baby of Harry and Sally (Belof) Levine. His father was a philatelist.
After graduating in 1957 from the Parsons College of Design (now a part of the New College), he labored as a graphic designer for NBC and CBS. He later grew to become an artwork director for the storied Doyle Dane Bernbach company, identified for its “Assume Small” marketing campaign for Volkswagen, earlier than shifting to Mary Wells Lawrence’s company, Wells Wealthy Greene, hailed for its landmark “I ♥ NY” marketing campaign. He additionally served as a inventive director for Carl Ally Inc.
Mr. Levine began directing advertisements in about 1970, creating memorable spots for a number of U.S. shoppers, together with Coca-Cola, Federal Specific, Polo Ralph Lauren and Normal Electrical, in addition to for worldwide firms.
He grew to become identified for his episodic approach, following the identical characters by a collection of commercials. One campaign within the Nineteen Eighties — for Pacific Bell, the California phone firm, shot for the San Francisco company Foote, Cone & Belding — performed out like a TV mini-series, with 13 spots following three characters, the shut buddies Garland, Lawrence and Mary Ellen, from their youth within the Twenties into their golden years.
One episode, “The Depression,” set within the determined Nineteen Thirties, portrays an act of selfless friendship when an unemployed Garland, who has been chosen to journey to a day job, purposely slips off the again of a truck crowded with different males and pretends to injure himself in order that Lawrence can take his place.
The industrial, which had the nice and cozy feel and appear of scenes from Don Corleone’s early years in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather Part II,” concludes with Lawrence in his later years, bathed in recollections of the incident, phoning Garland to provide thanks. It gained a Gold Lion award on the Worldwide Promoting Pageant in Cannes, France (now the Cannes Lions Worldwide Pageant of Creativity).
Along with his daughter Abby, Mr. Levine is survived by one other daughter, Susan Levine Henley, who like her is from his first marriage, to Ina Levine, which resulted in divorce; two grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter. His second marriage, to Lark Levine, additionally resulted in divorce.
Regardless of his cinematic aptitude, Mr. Levine by no means forgot his mandate. “It’s a stupendous craft, however a craft,” he stated in a 1976 interview with the commerce newspaper Backstage. “It’s doable to be creative inside the confines of a industrial, in fact, however that isn’t actually my job as a industrial movie director. My objective is to make the promoting come throughout.”
