TV Commercial: Old El Paso Salsa (1989)
This commercial, all in Spanish, was part of a Primo Foods campaign for Canada. Besides the commercial I also shot Print Ads for magazines, newspapers and I believe billboards. So it paid well. Growing up in California I worked with Bracero’s in the fields during the summer and I also took two years of Spanish in High School so I had a good inflection and feel for the language though it wasn’t comprehensive. The copy they had given me to learn was in Spanish and I had it down pretty good though I only had a gist of what I was saying but the accent was right on. While shooting however, the copywriter wanted to make some changes and that threw me off because my command of the language was limited and it was hard for me to improvise. It frustrated the production people so I was never sure if they were satisfied with what the final result was though the copy of the commercial that aired has all of the dialogue I used. Interestingly, they had also hired a professor as a consultant from a university in Toronto to be on set to see if I was saying everything correctly. She was from Puerto Rico and their Spanish is different from the Spanish of the American Southwest. For instance, she kept telling the Director that I was pronouncing the pronoun for “I” incorrectly. Mexican-Americans say “Yo” with a “Y” sound. People from Puerto Rico say “Jo” with a “J” sound. I kept telling the Director she was wrong and the way I was pronouncing “Yo” was correct and the way I had learned it. The Director did a couple of takes with me doing the “Jo” sound just in case and to protect himself. A lesson learned – just because their surnames have the same ethnicity it doesn’t mean they all speak the same language.
Another time my knowledge of Spanish came into play was for a commercial for a soft drink company in Peru. The character was an Asian spiritual master sitting atop a mountain contemplating about what he was going to drink. At the audition my Spanish was right on and I added a little dry humor to its delivery. The casting people and producers loved it and they booked me the next day. While booking my flight to Peru with my Manager, Libby Bush, they brought up a so called minor detail – I would have to shave my head bald. Libby called a halt to further arrangements and said she would have to clear that with me. When she told me I was kind of taken aback though it seemed reasonable given the character was a stereotypical Asian guru. I wouldn’t have objected to the shaved head per se but the question was what would I do after. I mean, I wouldn’t be able to audition for anything for months. Libby said pick a buy-out fee for shaving my head. I said $5,000. She passed that on to them and they said they would consider it. They must still be thinking about it after all these years because I’m still waiting to hear back.
Because they had booked me for the commercial they would have had to pay me at least a session fee even though they didn’t end up using me. But because my union, the Screen Actors Guild, didn’t have jurisdiction over work rules in a foreign country I couldn’t make a claim. So I was out of a session fee and a shaved head.
