Rick Levine turned a bad experience into an award-winning television commercial that he directed for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1984.
“I was hemorrhaging, passed out in the rain in New York City, asking for help,” recalled Levine, 84, from the living room of his apartment at the Canterbury, an independent living facility in Rancho Palos Verdes.
“Everybody passed me by,” he said. “I kept putting my hand up for help — they thought I was drunk. Finally, a guy helped me.”
In the commercial, a mugging leaves the man helpless on the ground. After several people continue walking by him, a man drives up in a station wagon and helps him in.
A close-up on the man’s broken glasses, lying on the pavement in the rain, “saves time and shows how badly he’s hurt,” Levine notes.
The commercial was one of three that Levine directed for the Mormon Church and that won the award for best series award from the International Broadcasting Awards.
It also exemplifies the type of commercial that plays out like a full-length film that won Levine many awards as both a director and director of photography and cemented his position as a major figure in the history of television commercials.
He’s had offers to direct full-length films, but rejected them.
“I turned down movies because I was very successful at what I did,” he said. “I didn’t want to close my company” Rick Levine Productions, which had an office in New York City and Los Angeles. He said he doesn’t regret his decision.
“I’ve been well-rewarded financially and with awards,” he said.
He might still be at it if he hadn’t lost his eyesight about 10 years ago from an eye condition called macular degeneration.
“When I lost the sight in one eye, I kept shooting until I lost the other one,” he said.
He still has his peripheral vision, he said, but can’t really watch television or any of his commercials anymore. The irony isn’t lost on him.
“Can you imagine my disappointment when my eyes went on me?” he asked.
Nevertheless, he’s in top shape mentally and physically. He lifts weights every morning and swims every afternoon, and doesn’t seem like the type you’d find in a retirement home. He tries to use his vitality to cheer up those around him.
“I help people here who are less well off than I am physically,” he said. “I’ve been a spirit here.”
His spirit and eye for the visual have been translated to his apartment, which is filled with art and objects from past houses in Connecticut, New York City, Palm Desert and Malibu. The full body armor of a Samurai sits in his office, next to a shelf containing stacks of awards, such as his two medals from the Directors Guild of America for outstanding directorial achievement in commercials, which he considers among his highest honors. Masks from Inuit tribes hang on the walls of his bedroom. A giant framed photo of Marilyn Monroe hangs in the entryway.
Levine sold his house in Palm Desert and moved to Palos Verdes over a year ago when he suddenly found himself very alone.
“All my friends died on me,” he said.
He became depressed and so his daughter, Abby LaRocca, encouraged him to come to the Peninsula, where she lives.
After staying with her, he decided that he wanted to be independent and so he moved five minutes away to the Canterbury, where he’s lived for a little over a year.
Levine appreciates that he can share his career with his family, many of whom he’s worked with.
“The whole family is steeped in film,” he said. “I like being together with the old crew. We all know the business.”
He called his wife Lark Lane, who was an executive producer at Rick Levine Productions and is living in Santa Monica while receiving medical treatment, “one of the greatest producers I’ve worked with.”
“She guarded me so I could do creative work,” he said.
His daughter, Susan Levine Henley, a former casting director, grew up watching her father, attending shoots when she could get out of school.
“We’re born into this business,” she said.
Henley cast one of her father’s most famous commercials, a piece for the company Du Pont, which manufactured the plastic used in a revolutionary new prosthetic limb, the Seattle Foot. They used a real Vietnam vet, Bill Demby, who had lost both his legs in combat and was one of the first to test the foot. In the commercial, Demby, who had played basketball in high school, joins a game of pickup basketball with non-handicapped players. Demby had been found in Tennessee, but Henley went out everyday to different New York City ballparks to find the men to play the players.
“I have an eye like my father,” she said. “I know what he likes as far as realness. We were looking for the real New York City.”
The commercial, which first aired in 1987, made Demby a national advocate for disability awareness. It ran every Sunday morning for five years, Levine said.
Henley recalled that her father had a talent for “getting what he wanted” from the people he directed. A 2009 article published by the Directors Guild of America on the work of Levine and other commercial directors said something along similar lines.
“Levine was known for creating kinetically exciting scenes and coaxing affecting performances from his actors,” it read.
One such performance was from a young Michael J. Fox, who starred in a Pepsi spot that Levine directed. Not wanting to disappoint a new female neighbor who asks for a Diet Pepsi, Fox’s character tells her to wait while he disappears through his apartment’s fire escape and jumps into traffic, climbing over cars in the rain and running to a vending machine. He did all but one of the stunts, Levine said.
The commercial earned Levine one of his Directors Guild awards, was named the world’s best commercial of 1987 by the International Broadcasting Awards and is in the Smithsonian Institute’s permanent Americana collection.
Levine didn’t start out in commercials. Born in Brooklyn, he studied graphic design and film at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan. After college, he went to work at NBC as a graphic designer. While there, he was sought after by Louis Dorfsman, a graphic designer who was in charge of the advertising and corporate identity of CBS for 40 years. Levine credits Dorfsman with making his career. When asked what he learned from him, he sighs, trying to condense his thoughts.
“I used to be worried about design rules,” he said. “Lou taught me to break the rules.”
He said Dorfsman was “like my father,” and the two kept in touch long after Levine left CBS, until Dorfsman’s death in 2008. A book about his mentor sits on one of his shelves.
“Lou Dorfsman made my life happen,” he said. “I owe that man so much.”
After CBS, Levine became an art director at the famous advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach in the early 1960s, and then went on to become a creative director at two other firms, Wells Rich Greene, creator of the “I (Heart) New York” advertising campaign, and Carl Ally.
“I was one of the original Mad Men,” he said.
It was while he was at Carl Ally that he got his big break when he offered to direct a commercial for Hertz for free.
“They couldn’t afford to do it,” he said. “So I went to my boss and said, ‘If you let me direct the commercial, you don’t have to pay me any money.”
His boss said yes, and the phone started ringing with people wanting to know who directed the commercial.
“I found out I could direct a commercial better than most people,” he said.
When asked how many awards he’s won over his career, Levine’s not sure he can remember. He estimates that he’s won around 40, including “at least 20 Clios,” 15-16 lions from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and the two awards from Directors Guild of America, among others. Although his apartment is spacious, he doesn’t have room to display them all.
“I started off with a bang,” he said. “And I went out with a bang.” PEN
