A Director’s 20-Year Trek to the Big Screen

He has been honored with every major directing award advertising has to offer. He has directed television commercials with Michael Jackson, Madonna, Michael J. Fox, Bo Jackson, Michael Jordan and E.T. His client list reads like a Who’s Who of International Business, and includes Pepsi, Apple Computer, Nike, Perrier, Michelob and John Hancock Mutual Life.

But it took almost 20 years and six aborted, self-financed film projects before the daring, controversial Joe Pytka, now 50, was able to accomplish his highest aspiration--to direct a feature film.

Pytka’s dramatic comedy, “Let It Ride,” opens Friday. The film, starring Richard Dreyfuss, is about the wild and woolly winning streak of a compulsive, down-on-his-luck gambler at the horse races.

Paramount is treating Pytka’s big-screen debut like a dark horse by scheduling its press screenings on Friday. Screening a film the day it opens is a tactic normally reserved for critical disappointments, because it assures that a film’s reviews will not appear until after its opening weekend. The last picture Paramount opened in that fashion was “Friday the 13th Part VIII.”

“We just finished the film,” and got the final print ready early last week, Pytka said in defense of the studio and his film. “We were geared up to open in September, then the studio moved it up a month to make it a summer film. So I believe they have high hopes for it. They’re spending a lot of money advertising.”

Pytka is buoyed that the trailer for “Let It Ride” is getting laughs in theaters. Still, he admits that he is full of anxieties about how audiences and critics will respond to his work. The impatient Pytka is forced into playing a waiting game uncharacteristic to the advertising field.

The colorful aura of stories that swirl about the director have become advertising folklore. One executive tells of the time Pytka challenged a creative director he was working with to a basketball game to decide a creative issue. The creative director reputedly walked away from the game with a broken arm.

Off the Airwaves

When shooting a $2-million Pepsi commercial at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, a pyrotechnical special effect accidentally set Michael Jackson’s hair on fire. Pytka’s two-minute Pepsi commercial featuring Madonna dancing and singing “Like a Prayer” inside a church was yanked off the airwaves last spring at the insistence of angry Christian groups.

In the conference room of his commercial-production company in Venice, Pytka, who stands an imposing 6-feet-4, calmly shakes off negative criticism. He says Madonna’s commercial was one of the best things he’s ever done, and expresses frustration with critics who “miss the point.”

But not everybody missed the point. Between 1986 and 1988, Pytka’s commercial production company, which he runs with his brother, John Pytka, was named the best at the Cannes Film Festival. In those same years Joe Pytka also took home a carload of Clios, the advertising industry’s equivalent of Oscars, for his work.

Considering his talent and notoriety, why has it taken Pytka so long to get into film making, especially when commercials have proven to be a launching pad for such film directors as Ridley Scott (“Alien”) and Adrian Lyne (“Fatal Attraction”)?

Hundreds of Scripts

Pytka says he was holding out for the right project. “I had read hundreds of scripts before agreeing to do this one,” Pytka said in a booming voice that would fill an empty concert hall. “It’s been a cat-and-mouse game. The studios say, ‘We like your commercials and we like your visual style,’ but they don’t like to take a chance.

“I’m not going to be offered, as a first-time director, a really good piece of material,” Pytka said. “The scripts that I got were dog-eared. Everybody had passed on them.”

Pytka says he was instantly attracted to the whirlwind story line and collection of interesting characters in Ernest Morton’s script for “Let It Ride.” But what really hooked him was Dreyfuss, who came attached to the project.

Two years ago, Pytka passed on the script for “Stakeout” because he thought it was a routine cop-buddy story. Later, when Dreyfuss was cast in the lead role, Pytka was impressed with the actor’s ability to transform the conventional script into a funny, successful film.

Saw the Market

Pytka’s inspiration to direct a film came in 1969, when “Easy Rider” became a hit. As a documentary producer from Pittsburgh who had just started shooting commercials, Pytka instantly recognized the market “Easy Rider” created for low-budget, independent films. Over his career, Pytka would write “about 10” unproduced screenplays but could never get any of his films into production. Meanwhile, his reputation as a commercial director soared.

“The hardest thing in the world that I can see is getting a film made,” Pytka said. “It’s scary. I always wanted to do a film with my own script. I never wanted an agent. I was never interested in the social aspects and the politics of getting into the business. And I never understood the studio system.

“ ‘Let It Ride’ is something I never dreamed I would do. I’m not against studio films, but all of the films that I’ve wanted to do have been my own quirky, personal little films--in the tradition of commercial directors transitioning into film. You start with a low-budget film, kind of nurture it along. Then, if it becomes successful, they let you do something else.”

Extended Play

In structure, “Let It Ride” resembles an extended one-act play. Its thoroughbred pacing follows the rhythms of a race track, which Pytka says is by design.

“People put too many conditions on films today,” he said. “One of the problems with most of the screenplays I read, they were almost all written in the same style. It’s like everybody read the same book, or went to the same school on how to write a screenplay. Each act must end at a certain point--Act I, Act II, Act III. But this movie is like zzzzzip, from start to finish.”

The film’s ensemble includes Teri Garr, David Johansen, Allen Garfield, Jennifer Tilly, Michelle Phillips, Mary Woronov and Robbie Coltrane. Pytka often had three cameras rolling to capture the spontaneity on the set. He was intent not to impose his distinct, close-up, fast-cutting commercial style on the actors.

Visual Stimulation

“A lot of commercial directors today are over-stimulated visually,” Pytka said. “In a commercial you overload a frame, and it’s necessary because a commercial is so short. But you can’t do that in films. You wear out the audience. They don’t know what to look at.

Pytka is working with an unnamed studio to get one of his own scripts, a love story, into production soon. But for now, Pytka is awaiting the outcome of “Let It Ride,” which could help ease the way for his future projects. He is confident that the film will be successful if people only “get the point.”