STORY Stays True to its Midwest Roots

STORY Stays True to its Midwestern Roots

By Anthony Vagnoni

So it’s just a week or so before the Super Bowl, and someone in your creative department comes up with a really great idea for a TV spot that you just might be able to run in a few key markets.  The script is banged together, the client approves it in a hurry, time is cleared for the buy. Now what?

If you’re Dennis Ryan, Chief Creative Officer at Element 79 in Chicago, you simply call your local neighborhood big-time film production company, and trust that they’ve got the contacts, the savvy and the temperament to pull the job off in next to no time.

Ryan laughs about it now. “It’s the most fun I ever had overworking,” he says, but adds with all seriousness, “Mark Androw and his team at STORY were all over this.” The spot in question was a corporate ad for Frito-Lay titled “This is History,” and it commemorated the fact that in 2007, for the first time ever, both NFL teams in the big game were coached by African-American head coaches—Lovie Smith of the Chicago Bears versus Tony Dungy of the Indianapolis Colts.

Even with the increasing democratization of production, Ryan points out—you can basically produce world-class work from just about anywhere—it still matters to have people close at hand you can trust. “The fact that Mark and Cliff never gave up on Chicago is important,” he says.

Of the “History” spot, Ryan says, “We needed it done fast, good and locally.”  The STORY team connected the agency with a local African-American theatre company to cast the spot and brought in a documentary director, Scott Smith, to shoot it. “It was like putting on a show in a barn,” Ryan says, “but it came off without a hitch.”

Ryan describes Androw and his crew as straight-shooters reeking with integrity—qualities often attributed, in simpler times, to being old-fashioned American Midwestern values. “Mark champions the local community, he gets involved,” says Ryan, who’s known the EP for over 15 years. “He’s not interested in getting out to the coasts.

“I trust him implicitly,” he adds, “which is a rare thing to say in this business.”

When asked how things are going at STORY these days, Androw is philosophical: “We’re rolling along,” he says in an upbeat way. “The jobs are steady, but the budgets are lower. We’re adapting to a new way of doing things. It’s like we’ve gone from making big SUVs to smaller cars with better mileage-but we’re still making cars.”

The company has been in business since 1989, when it was formed as the Chicago office of the shop formerly known as Story Piccolo Guliner (now Crossroads). Androw took the company independent in 1994.  He runs the shop with fellow Executive Producer Cliff Grant.

Androw says that one thing that’s unique about STORY is that, while it’s a national firm (they have a production office in Santa Monica and a small office in New York), the executive producers are still based in Chicago.  “That works for us, since we’re playing in the same backyard as many of our agency clients,” he says.  “Cliff and I go golfing and bowling with our clients all the time.”

Bowling?  This is the Midwest, after all, but this comment speaks to a deeper part of the STORY culture—that of being the kind of company that fosters a sense of community with its agency clients.  “Out of all the executive producers I’ve dealt with, Mark is one of my very favorites,” says Michele Conner, a senior producer at Leo Burnett in Detroit.  “He’s so even-keeled and so calm, and nothing fazes him.  Knowing that, I love working with him—and he’s surrounded himself with good directors, too. It just instills a sense of confidence.”

Conner has worked with STORY three different times during her career, at three different agencies and on three different accounts.  Each time, she’s been left impressed with his sense of fair play. “Even in this economy, I’ve never felt nickled and dimed by them,” she adds. “I think that says a lot.”

Androw says that keeping the company’s EPs in the Midwest makes sense for them, and not just to be close to the agencies based there.  “Yes, it’s partly a sense of loyalty to the market here,” he admits, but adds that it’s also a centrally-located city that allows either he or Grant to be just about anywhere in the US in a short period of time.  And production in Illinois has shot up, he adds, since the state instituted a hefty tax credit to producers who work there—it’s basically turned Chicago into the new Vancouver, he says.

The company boasts a highly complementary roster of directors, Androw points out, ranging from talents like the documentarian Ondi Timoner, a two-time winner at Sundance, and feature director George Tillman, Jr., who made “Men of Honor” (with Robert De Niro and Cuba Gooding, Jr.) and “Notorious,” the 2009 Biggie Smalls biopic and Soul Food.

They also rep comedy director Andy Richter—that’s right, Conan O’Brien’s former sidekick on NBC’s “The Tonight Show,” who, Androw now jokes, has a lot more time for agency conference calls than in the past.  Also on the STORY roster are commercials mainstays Laurie Rubin, Blair Hayes, Jeff France, David Orr and John Komnenich, children’s performance specialist Bob Ebel, director/cameraman Toby Phillips and the fashion and beauty icon Rebecca Blake.

“Our directors all specialize in one category of the business or another, so we’re able to keep their reels pretty focused,” Androw observes. “We find that helps us cut through the clutter of all the directors out in the marketplace.”  The roster is diverse enough that they have appeal outside of the confines of just thirty-second spots, too.  “We know how to work in a flexible enough way to make these kinds of projects go,” he says of the increasing amount of branded content or web video work available today. “It’s a different way of working, but all of our directors like the form.  It’s still storytelling and it’s still filmmaking.”

Looking forward, Androw feels that big brands—and, to some extent, their agencies—have gotten over the shockwave of ‘08 and ‘09 and are beginning to come up for air.  “We actually started to begin to see more activity in the third quarter of last year,” he notes. “And while the workflow has been steady, budgets are still sliding. It’s a different world out there now when it comes to budgets.  For example, we’re shooting in the US more, and less in South Africa, South America and Canada.  People are finding ways to make budgets work here at home; things like our tax credit have helped.”

Locally, Androw is optimistic about how much work they’re seeing in town as well.  Again, he credits the Illinois tax break for producers, pointing out that much of the work in Chicago is for out-of-town production houses.  Rattling off a roster of names of major New York and L.A.-based production companies that have been in and out of Chicago lately, there’s not a hint of rivalry.  If anything, he sounds pleased.  “It’s good for us, in that it keeps the production infrastructure and crews healthy,” he says.

Published Feb. 2, 2010