Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1126636
20 DGA QUARTERLY FOCUS MADISON AVENUE | CONTINUED a p p r o a c h e s a n a d , e s p e c i a l l y i f s h e 's working with everyday people instead of professional actors. Gehrig creates a bible for every project and two separate storyboards, one called "conceptual" and the other "shooting." Though she spends "countless hours" putting the materials together, she says she'd rather commit the details to memory, not referring to them constantly on set, so she can be "completely present and in the national soccer team, show how Gehrig delib- erately changes her aesthetic. "I love to genre-hop," she says. "And rath- er than strategizing what kind of director I am, I let the work tell me." She's a research junkie, scanning film, photography, art, current headlines and any other media resources that may help her un- derstand the subject matter from all sides. Casting, which she considers a critical part of her job, often informs how she moment." She's agnostic when it comes to equip- ment, using everything from handheld cameras to cranes and massive lighting rigs, preferring that the story lead the way. And because there's so little time on commercial shoots—three or four days, max—she's look- ing for "visual and performance efficiency." But the shoots, for her, are only part of the assignment. She's devoted to the editing pro- cess, which she thinks can be indispensable for finding the heart and tone of the piece. ("Viva" took more than three months in the editing room, she says, and she and the 95% female crew were "there for the long haul.") With two young daughters, she's spent the last five years steeped in short-form content like music videos and commercials that re- quire less time away from home. Her back- ground also includes an early stint at Mother London, a renowned advertising agency where she was an art director before picking up the camera herself. In the months ahead, she'll be crisscross- ing the country, from Los Angeles to the South (for a music video), between trips to Europe for brand campaigns, committing to ideas she finds authentic and challenging. "I love work that can change behavior and have a positive impact," she says. "But I hope it doesn't become a trend for its own sake to do socially conscious ads. A brand needs to have a robust reason and find the right way of doing it. No one should be shoe-horning in an ethical message." ® SCREENPULLS: NIKE; PHOTO: PHOTOFEST » From the inception of the DGA, one of the leading goals was to establish the right to a Director's Cut, but it took over 20 years to achieve this objective. Elliot Silverstein experienced the need for it firsthand in 1961 after directing an episode of The Twilight Zone. "[The] editor refused to cut it the way I wanted it cut," said Silverstein. "The only [postproduction] right we had in the early '60s was to make suggestions for improvements in the rough cut to the associate producer." The Bill of Creative Rights M I L E S T O N E 1964 "The Director's Cut was to be definitive; it was to be the cut the director made, the cut that he or she wanted to appear on the screen." —ELLIOT SILVERSTEIN Silverstein found that other directors were having similar problems, so he and a group of 24 directors met with DGA National Executive Secretary Joseph Youngerman to see what could be done. When the Negotiations Committee, chaired by former Guild President Frank Capra, presented its demands for a Director's Cut to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the producers resisted. To break the stalemate, Capra ingeniously proposed that if a director held up postproduction, the DGA, at its own expense, would fly in one of 12 top-notch directors to finish the job. The notion that directors would work for love rather than money removed the producers' objections, and the Guild ultimately secured a Director's Cut as part of a landmark Bill of Creative Rights in April 1964.