Chris Applebaum Loves to Watch

Chris Applebaum Loves To Watch

The Believe Media director’s passion for capturing
both sultry beauty and the energy of a live performance
has served both him and Carl’s Jr. in good stead.

By Anthony Vagnoni

Let’s get a few things straight at the outset regarding Believe Media director Chris Applebaum’s bio.  He’s had a ton of music videos at the top of the MTV charts.  He’s shot those remarkably hot (and widely praised, panned and parodied) Carl’s Jr. TV spots with such celebs as Paris Hilton, Padma Lakshmi and, most recently, Kim Kardashian.  He’s worked with artists such as Britney Spears, Rihanna, Fergie, Mariah Carey, Miley Cyrus, Mandy Moore, Mary J. Blige and others. And he did indeed direct the super-hot Rachel Hunter in the classic “Stacy’s Mom” video for Fountains of Wayne.

He did not, however, serve as the inspiration for the Macarena, as he claims. He is not a G.I.A.-certified gemologist, he did not win the freestyle flamenco competition at the Tel Aviv Invitational back in 1990 and he did not break the world record for eating Ferrero Rocher candies in under a minute.  

But with a resume like his, it’s easy to be forgiving.  After all, he did direct the MTV Music Video of the year in 2007 (“Umbrella,” starring Rihanna and Jay-Z), and was nominated for Director of the Year.  He did direct the first music video that was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (Semisonic’s “Closing Time”). And he was the youngest director ever to sign with Satellite Films, the upstart division of long-shuttered Propaganda Films, back when he was 22 years old. 

Seems Applebaum has an ability to get noticed.  Since dedicating himself to working in commercials—which he did earlier in this soon-to-be-over decade—he’s been no less prolific than he was in his music video days.  He’s shot sexy, fashion-oriented work for such brands as John Frieda, Hugo Boss, Cover Girl, Mandalay Bay Resort, Candies and Old Spice. The hallmark of his spot work, as with his videos, is the capture of a performance that simultaneously elevates the brand as it engages and lifts viewers.

“Whether it’s dialogue, music, dance, it’s one of the things I truly love,” he says.  “The kind of work that I’m most drawn to is when that performance can really provoke a conversation that I’m having with the talent."

Performance has always been a part of Applebaum’s life.  He grew up in Hollywood, the son of a classically trained musician who played with everyone from Nancy Sinatra to The Turtles.  Being a part of the show biz scene from his earliest days, he wanted to get far from his roots when it came to college, and ended up in the film program at Hampshire College in Massachusetts.  While there he got tuned in to the local music scene, and was asked by a local band to produce a video for them, since he was the only person they knew who also knew something about film and video production.

He was paid just a couple of hundred bucks for the gig, he recalls, for a band called Monsterland, but the clip ended up on MTV and generated a phone call from the network’s offices in New York, offering Applebaum a summer internship that eventually turned into a full-time gig.  There he joined a department that would, over the years, produce a number of top directorial talents, including Mark Pellington and Pam Thomas. 

What followed was a move into the music video scene that saw him produce clips for a wide range of bands and artists, starting in the early 1990s.  The video work, he claims, served him well as he moved into the next phase of his directing career.  “As I’ve started to emerge as a commercial director it’s been great, because I get to enter the arena having fifteen or sixteen years of filmmaking under my belt,” he says.  “I have an enormous amount of confidence when I walk onto the set, but it can also be frustrating, since in some respects it’s like starting over again.”  

Applebaum—who if anything is a student of the business trends shaping the type of work directors are being asked to do, both in the music industry as well as in advertising—sees parallels in the commercials scene to what happened when the music business imploded earlier this decade.  These similarities have informed and influenced his approach to commercial-making, where he’s had to make clear to clients that he fully appreciates and knows how to realize their marketing objectives.

“The first thing to go back then was the enormous revenue stream,” he points out about the Napster-induced collapse of the music biz.  “And the big thing that changed, as fear swept through that industry, was that the value of a creative idea wasn’t as important as making things balance on a spreadsheet.” 

Lucky for him, he’d already established something of a reputation in the video industry by the time the bottom fell out.  “I was seen as a reliable, go-to music video director, particularly if you had a female artist and wanted to make her feel fantastic,” he says.  “I became known as a director who could make women look fantastic, and that’s initially what I became known for in commercials as well.  If there was female talent—especially celebrity talent—I was often on agencies’ short lists to direct.

Applebaum earned this reputation, he says, thanks to some early successes in videos, most notably with Britney Spears.  But it was helped by the fact that he relished this aspect of his work. “I realized that I truly enjoy beauty,” he comments, “and what it was in particular that I loved was combining that with understanding a storyline and understanding a personality behind the story, then meshing them together.  That’s what I found to be so much more intriguing.”

This goal of taking beauty and adding both a sense of narrative and mystery became something of an obsession for Applebaum.  “It became an assignment I gave myself on each job, to constantly work towards creating that,” he says.  It carries over to his spot work as well: “In the commercial world, you have to define what’s the most important thing you want to convey, the most important thing you want to sell.  It usually comes down to just a few things.  So I applied this same approach to the brands I was working for.”

A good example, and one that Applebaum is eager to talk about, is the now infamous “That’s Hot” spot with Paris Hilton for the West Coast-based fast food chain Carl’s Jr.  

In the spot, Hilton is seen in a quite skimpy bathing suit as she washes a car and devours a Carl’s Jr. burger at the same time.  The suds, the buns, the meat—it was just too much for quite a few critics, who assailed the spot as an exercise in commercial porn.  It also shot off the charts, and was, for a time, arguably the most-watched TV commercial in the US, savored even by those back East who would need to book a flight on JetBlue just to sample the item.

“They wanted the experience of eating to be pleasurable,” Applebaum explains of the agency team at Mendelsohn Zien in Los Angeles.  “So with the Paris campaign, I was approached by them to come up with something interesting and sexy.  They didn’t know Paris, and I did, and so they asked me how far she would want to take it—what the parameters are with her, so to speak—and then we tried to define a creative idea based on that.”

The rest, as they say, is history.  The commercial continues to be referenced as an example, good or bad, of how sex sells.  Applebaum, curiously, notes that for all the attention the commercial got, very little accrued to him.  “I’ve never had a rep who wanted to put that spot on my reel,” he says. Yet he feels it’s a great example of what he likes to achieve as a director. “I love creating a strong performance that people connect with, even aspire to,” he says, “something that can move them in one way or another. I feel as though I’ve done that in more successful ways with some other projects, but this one was an enormous hit.”

There’s another example of what this spot represents for him, and that’s progression: “The last few years, for me, has been going from being tagged as the award-winning music director to one that’s evolved into a beauty director who, within the last year, has evolved yet again into a well-rounded commercials director.” With the territory of commercial success comes the accompanying pigeonholing, but for Applebaum it’s kind of welcomed.  “It’s funny, because to a certain extent I’m asked to do the same things over and over again, but I love it,” he explains.  “I love capturing performances and creating a new way for people to see things.  I love this endless pursuit of the creation of heroes, and the ability to allow people to escape.  I think these are incredible things.  For me, especially right now, we’re living in a time when we should have heroes out there.  And if you see yourself reflected in them, then it’s empowering.

“At the same time, I love being part of the creation of something that’s perfect and beautiful and obtainable,” he adds.  “You know, you don’t have to be as perfect as the person you see on the screen.  My job is to make people see that they’re personalities that you may be able to relate to, or aspire to.  I don’t know why I pursue that as an endeavor, but I love it.”

Published Dec. 1, 2009