Master of the Mini-Ha-Ha

The new TV season is two months old and one thing is clear: the situation comedies are getting better than ever. Not those dreary half-hour retreads, but those one-minute mini-ha-ha's called commercials.

Some of the best of them are the work of Manhattan Director Howard Zieff, 40, a short, hyperactive man with a zany sense of humor and an apparently limitless imagination. He is the leading practitioner of what the trade calls the indirect sell: the product is visible and so is the pitch, but the commercial zings across chiefly because it is entertaining and refuses to take itself seriously. To dramatize Braniff Airways' airfreight division, Zieff shows a man crated and shipped by air, arriving at his destination with not a hair out of place. For Whirlpool household appliances, he marches a repairman into a rainswept courtyard where a Gestapo-type supervisor charges him with neglecting his customers and then strips the company emblems off his shirt.

Zieff and his staff spent several weeks producing a commercial that will appear next month for Volkswagen. After an assistant toured Europe for two weeks scouting shooting sites, Zieff flew to Paris, loaded cast, cameras, costumes, props and his 36-man crew into five trucks and a bus and went on location at the Marksburg Castle near Koblenz, Germany. The scene, which required three days of near round-the-clock filming, shows an angry mob of villagers storming the castle, battering down the doors, and chasing a mad scientist and seven assorted monsters who hurriedly gather their gear and escape in a Volkswagen station wagon. The only dialogue is an announcer's voiceover: "If you've created a rather large family and you have an awful lot to carry, chances are a normal station wagon won't be large enough. Maybe you ought to consider something not quite so normal--like a Volkswagen." Cost of the film: $52,000, or roughly $1,000 for each second of air time.

People People. Zieff, who has made 200 commercials in the past six years, is obsessed with detail; he shoots 9,000 ft. of film to get a usable 90 ft. He demands that his sets have a lived-in look--right down to scuff marks on the door. For a takeoff on old aviation movies for Utica Club beer, he screened the 1938 movie Test Pilot to see exactly how Clark Gable flipped back his goggles. For a series of quick shots focusing on a variety of stomachs for Alka-Seltzer, he spent ten days "interviewing abdomens," auditioned 40 belly dancers until he found one without stretch marks around her navel. In one three-second shot of a boxer battering the stomach of his opponent, he used Middleweights Johnny Cesario and Joey Archer. The scene was so realistic that Cesario, caught in the cheers of the extras, the smoke and the popping flash bulbs, confided during a break: "I can take this guy."

Zieff has also composed some striking magazine ads: the chubby kid eating Kellogg's Corn Flakes on the back steps, the tattooed cowpoke smoking Marlboro cigarettes, the Indian munching Levy's Rye Bread ("You don't have to be Jewish . . ."). Now that he is the top director in TV commercials and earns about $300,000 a year, he is in the fortunate position of being able to turn down six job offers for every one he accepts. He deals only with those few agencies--Wells Rich Greene, Doyle Dane Bernbach and Carl Ally--that will allow him a free hand; in most instances, he is given an outline or "story board" and then "takes the commercial out of the commercial" by improvising freely.

By casting "people who look like people" and treating each scene as "a first-run movie in miniature," Zieff has helped turn the TV commercial into something of an art form. Now if only some of this expertise would rub off on the rest of TV programming.

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