The first spot I did with Cindy was Pepsi’s KIDS. We were in the middle of production having cast another girl and the creative director, Lee Garfinkle, saw a Cindy Crawford calendar over the weekend. He got Pepsi to use her and the rest is history.
The spot originally called for Cindy to be getting out of a limousine but I thought that was lame, having seen the shot a million times before. In fact, the spot was originally written for MacCaulay Culkin but he wanted Michelle Pfeiffer to be the girl and the costs were getting out of hand. So the spot was simplified and I talked the creatives into using a Lamborghini with gullwing doors.
No big deal.
The big deal was the wardrobe. I think the wardrobe decisions took four or five hours and I had very little time to shoot her since she had to be back in Hollywood for some MTV Awards thing. That and a bunch of little kids and all their restrictions. We shot all their coverage the next day.
The spot was a HUGE hit.
Cindy credits the spot for creating the next stage in her celebrity, almost creating the supermodel thing in the American public’s eyes. We did a ton of Pepsi stuff after that.
The best story was DEPRIVATION TANK with Cindy, Michael Richards, and Rodney Dangerfield. Rodney screwed that one up because he wouldn’t wear a red dress. The joke was that Cindy goes into the tank and Rodney comes out. I shot Cindy’s stuff last.
“I’ll do anything for science.”
She asked me why and I told her that I didn’t want to be with Michael Richards or Rodney Dangerfield at two in the morning. Michael Richards had one of his famous meltdowns on this shoot. He was playing a mad scientist but took the MAD stuff too seriously. It may have been a precourser to his other infamous blowup.
Another time I shot Cindy with two other famous supermodels and the next day, after the Superbowl, people asked me if I did the Cindy Crawford commercial. The other girls were invisible. That was Cindy. Once, Hal Riney asked me if he could have his picture taken with her. Ted Sann spilled water on her lap at dinner. He tried to wipe it. She wouldn’t let him.