Dick Sittig - photo by Brian Davis

“I’m a contrarian,” says the creator and director of the long-running Jack in the Box campaign featuring the CEO with the giant, smiley Ping-Pong ball head.

Sittig never set out to direct, but when he was executive director at the ad agency Chiat/Day, he proposed the campaign and was encouraged by a producer to do it. “The first day of the shoot, there were probably 50 people from the agency there to make sure I didn’t screw up,” he says. “That was 11 years ago.” The Jack commercials became the impetus and cornerstone campaign for his independent ad agency, Secret Weapon.

Shooting an average of 22 Jack spots a year has given rise to infinite variations. In one, “The Visitor,” Jack pays a call to a scruffy young man who’s refused to try Jack in the Box. The action, captured in gritty cop-show style on a handheld video camera, shows Jack chasing him across the grass and wrestling him to the ground to force-feed him fries and a shake.

“Anytime you can have your company mascot go to someone’s house and beat the crap out of them, you know you’re not copying McDonalds,” says Sittig with satisfaction.

When it comes to directing, he focuses on storytelling and delegates much of the rest. “My approach is that if you can see the finished spot in your head and you share that vision with the DP, set designer, casting and wardrobe and let them do their jobs, it all comes together.

“The part I trust about myself is whether it’s funny or not,” says Sittig. In the end, it’s about the audience’s affection for Jack, who faces challenges with a buoyant, imperturbable je ne sais quois that is a dead ringer for Sittig’s own voice and demeanor. “I can’t really say if I’m the voice or not, but I’ve been told that it sounds like me,” he says with a Sphinx-like smile.

Raised in a small town in Illinois, Sittig came west to study finance at USC, but realized it wasn’t his calling. “I was a smart aleck and there’s no room in the financial world for that.” He started out offering his services for free to a small ad agency before getting a job at Chiat/Day where he advanced quickly from copywriter to creative director to executive director, eventually going solo with the Jack in the Box campaign. He’s won many ad industry awards—his original spot for the Energizer Bunny campaign was recently inducted into the Clio Hall of Fame.

Briefly, after the Jack campaign launched, Sittig entertained offers to work in long-form entertainment and dabbled in writing features, but found it “kind of depressing—I went from having lots of autonomy to having none.” He ultimately decided that the life he was living was a better one. “I’m having more fun in advertising. I’m not spending six months in Toronto shooting a feature; I’m having dinner at home with my family. And I still think I’m doing funny work, so I’m happy.”

Janet Knutsen - photo by Brian Davis

It might be figuring out how to budget an episode set at a remote Canadian fishing resort, or devising an economical way to shoot an outdoor protest demonstration featuring 100 topless females. Whatever the challenge of the week, Knutsen is the mediator between the artistic goals and financial realities of a given episode.

“The UPM puts the script through the money machine and asks, ‘how essential is every element?’” she explains. “You want to be sure an episode isn’t going to cost more money than you have to make it.”

A Minnesota native, Knutsen says the job found her as much as she found it. “I studied piano and hoped to be creative, but in high school I won the best business student award,” she laughs. “I like working with money, and coming from the Midwest I feel like I’m just born frugal.”

Her artistic bent drew her to the University of California at Irvine in the late ’70s, where she studied film and heard about the Directors Guild-Producer Training Plan. “I clearly remember thinking, ‘I can do this, this is for me.’” She passed the test in 1979, and got her first break as a trainee on the movie Nine to Five.

By the time she was married, Knutsen wanted to travel less and start a family—and television was the ticket. She was an AD for five years on Sisters, then found a home on The Practice, which morphed into Boston Legal, now in its third season at Manhattan Beach Studios.

“For the UPM, a long-running show has its challenges,” says Knutsen. “It gets more expensive, because everyone’s salary goes up. You want to be as responsible as you can on both sides—to the people putting up the money and the creative people making the show.”

Knutsen directed a few episodes of Sisters earlier in her career, so she really knows the ropes. “Boston Legal uses a lot of repeat directors, but we try to bring in at least a couple of new people each season,” she says. “I have a lot of interactions with them during the seven-day prepping stage. I love to hear what each director has in mind, and we kind of meld ideas.”

Denise Van Cleave - photo by Brian Davis

Denise "Diddy"
Van Cleave:
Hospital Associate

All of which makes for quite a training ground—one that Van Cleave has been immersed in since she joined the show as a 21-year-old intern right out of Cal State Fullerton.

“I needed an internship and I didn’t know where to apply,” says the Orange County native. “My sister is a nurse, and one of the people she worked with was the medical consultant on General Hospital. So she told me who to contact, and I ended up getting the job.”

That was 13 years ago, and Van Cleave has been reporting to work at ABC’s historic Prospect Studios in Los Feliz ever since. She moved from intern to assistant production coordinator to production coordinator, then backup production associate. About six years ago, she became a full-time production associate and joined the DGA. Currently, she also spends many days assistant directing and stage managing.

“We try to shoot about five scenes an hour, and the director blocks them all at once,” says Van Cleave. Timing episodes is a big part of her day, as is creating lists for props and wardrobe, plus the taping schedule and actors’ call sheets, all of which requires a well-honed sense of what can be accomplished in a given period of time. “It’s all about putting out fires in advance and thinking three steps ahead, because once you’re on the set, people expect you to have things, whether they’re going to ask for them or not.”

Recently, Van Cleave was given a glimpse of the bigger picture when she attended Super Soap, a fan event held in Florida. “People had flown in from Europe; people were there from all walks of life. You realize that what we do really impacts people. It gives you a whole different perspective.”