Day of Pigs
By Sonny Lufrano

Since moving to New York three years ago, I have worked at five advertising agencies and freelanced for a few others. I have landed jobs by bribing a potential boss with dog bones for his twin Rottweilers, sending e-mails pretending to be an old friend of the company president and having my mother call a recruiter to ensure the agency that her son was, in fact, very talented. Despite my best efforts I have yet to land what anyone in the industry would consider a good job.

A good job for a copywriter is one where you are paid handsomely to have fun and come up with creative, often humorous, ways to sell a client's product. A bad job in advertising is everything else which, according to my experiences, is about 98 percent of the jobs out there. So when my friend Ann called the other day and asked if I wanted to accompany her on a shoot in New Jersey I jumped at the chance. Ann is a writer for Mother, a creative shop that originated in London and recently opened a Manhattan offshoot. It's one of those places where everyone is super-hip because they're not trying to be super-hip which, of course, makes them even hipper. I figured spending a day on a shoot would give me valuable experience at spending a day on a shoot; to say nothing of the opportunity to impress the Swedish creative director and land a job at Mother in the near future.

"There's only one catch," Ann said. "You have to be a pig."

The Van

I arrive in the city at 6:00AM, the earliest I've been up since 1992. A group of advertising looking people is meeting in front of the Just Delicious Deli on Varick and Houston. I know these are advertising people because one of them is wearing a vintage Coca-Cola bottling company shirt, the kind that screams 'Hey look, I'm wearing a really cool vintage Coca-Cola bottling company shirt.' There is also a cameraman, two set designers, a driver and an actor. Twenty minutes out of the Holland Tunnel, and half way to our location in New Jersey, the actor's cell phone rings.

"Hello?" she says. "Yeah. We're on the way. What do you mean? What are you talking about? Hey, does anyone know what shoot this van is headed for?"

"I think it's some sort of training video," the driver says.

"You mean this is not the Revlon van?" she laughs.

"No. It's the Chipotle van."

"Oh Jesus H. Fucking Christ," she says. "I'm on the wrong van. I'm such an idiot."

The next twenty minutes the driver fields numerous phone calls from the actor's agent to determine how long it will take to transport her from the Chipotle shoot to the Revlon shoot. There is also a juicy little argument about which company will pay for the mishap. I'm just happy to be in a van with a real actor.

Good Show

The shoot this morning is not for a TV commercial but for a training video. The video is for a fast growing restaurant chain called Chipotle. Chipotle (pronounced Chip-ot-le) makes tacos and burritos with fresh ingredients and feeds people all across the country in brightly lit restaurants with cool music playing in the background. The video will be used to attract potential Chipotle employees and to make people laugh at parties.

The first thing I notice about an advertising shoot is the food. There is lots of food. This particular shoot is being done on a shoestring budget so there are no ridiculously elaborate spreads where tons of food is wasted and at the end of the day you go home feeling guilty because of American excess. However, off to the side of the grassy knoll there is a midsize camper with the words "Catering For TV & Film" written in big letters on the side. I walk up behind a rather large man and listen to him order a breakfast burrito with steak, eggs and cheese. Not wanting to be difficult, I follow and order the exact same thing. While I'm waiting for the burrito I scan the fold out table in front of me and end up eating half a bagel with nova lox and cream cheese and a 10 foot long cinnamon twist. There's something about being in front of free food when you're waiting to step into a pig's costume that makes you really hungry.

Thankfully, my friend Ann shows up before I make a complete fool of myself.

"Hey. Did you see your costume yet?" she says.

"No," I reply.

"I think you have to go into that trailer. Just tell them you're the pig."

Inside the trailer are two make-up girls, one costume fitter and someone passed out on the couch. One of the girls shows me the costume. It's big and furry and pink. No big deal. I can do this. The only problem is you can't see once you put the pig's head over your head. Whoever made the pig's head made the inside so big that the slots for the eyes end up falling all the way down to my cheeks. This causes a problem in that I like to be able to see where I'm going.

"Hey. Did you know when you put the head on you can't see anything?" I ask one of the costume girls.

"Oh, don't worry about that. Someone will tell you where you need to go."

The first shoot involves a short scene with the pig, the cow and the chicken. The chicken is being played by a girl who works at Mother in some logistical capacity. It's a little early to tell but I think she has a crush on me. When we were in the RV she grabbed my pig's tail without asking and gave it a stern tug. A sign if ever there was one. The person who was supposed to play the cow didn't show up so the RV driver has been drafted to take his place.

The pig, the chicken and the cow walk up a small hill and sit on a park bench where we are each given our lines for the first time.

ANNCR: What makes you guys so special?

Pig: Well, we work out a lot. And we don't take recreational drugs.

Cow: We were raised with the utmost respect.

Chicken: And we're mostly vegetarians!

Despite not being able to see the camera, or the chicken or the cow, I nailed my line. Totally nailed it. I'm like Robert De Niro pig. I sense the director sensing this about me but I can't be totally sure because I can't see the director. We move on to the next scene.

The next part involves the entire instructional video cast. The pig, the cow and the chicken are joined by a cowboy, two cops, a seventeen year old stripper, a man in a very tight, light blue Speedo, a magician, an overweight next door neighbor, a Samoan wrestler with long, frizzy hair dressed in jeans and a wife beater accompanied by his make believe Chipotle teenage son also dressed in jeans and a wife beater, an annoyingly photogenic All- American family and, of course, two actual Chipotle employees. The idea is that we are all Americans united by our love of Chipotle burritos and tacos. The scene calls for this entire ensemble to prance up a hill singing the cheesiest Chipotle song in the world while showing "great enthusiasm and love for the burrito."

The person in charge of making sure the cast is showing the proper amount of burrito love is Amy. Amy is a short white girl with black hair, black jeans, a tiny headset and the kind of positive attitude that could make Iraqi soldiers believe in democracy. Here's the way the chain of command works. The director sits in a little director's chair under a tent about twenty feet away from the actual camera. The director relays his opinions to the director's assistant who stands right next to the director. This director's assistant then relays the director's message to Amy who in turn relays the message to us. It's a bit strange because the volume on Amy's headset is up a little too loud so that we can hear the first guy's direction only to have Amy repeat them again in a much more people friendly manner.

Example:

'We need more interaction and more burrito love,' the headset screams.

"OK Guys. We're doing great. It all looks really great. We just need a little more interaction and a little more burrito love. When you're skipping up the hill, it's OK grab someone and do a little jig. The cowboy can grab the stripper. The neighbor can do a little dance with the chicken. It's all about showing the world how much you love Chipotle!"

The next time up the hill is a calamity of errors. The magician, a former Brooklyn College professor of music who appears to be in his late 60's, is having stamina issues. The suburban father, in his exuberance to lead his family to burrito heaven, races out too fast and leaves the rest of us behind. The cowboy and the portly neighbor bang heads in a failed attempt to chest bump. The stripper gets tangled with the chicken and the cow trips over his own hoofs and falls flat on his face.

"Cut," the director cries. "That was brilliant."

"OK guys. That was brilliant," said Amy. "Catch your breath and then back to first position. We want to shoot it one more time."

It went on like this for most of the morning. We must have ran up and down that stupid little hill at least 30 times. Somewhere along the way I realized I wasn't getting much experience and I wasn't getting any closer to landing a job writing for Mother. What I was doing was running up and down a hill in the middle of New Jersey with a bunch of strangers singing a song whose chorus included the phrase "Celebrate burrito love" as my ass began to sweat like that of a genuine swine.

Still, the day was not a total waste. Lunch included a succulent cut of strip steak with a tasty hollandaise sauce. The chicken gave me her phone number. And on the way from the park to the second location of the shoot the creative director walked by and said, "You're doing a helluva job, pig."