Don’tcha hate it when that happens?

The 1993 Chrysler campaign has come and gone (to Los Angeles for posting), but it will take some time to be forgotten.

The 11-plus Canadian shooting days, covering the badlands of Alberta, Dinosaur National Park and parts of B.C. went without a hitch.

Texas, though, was something else.

A friend of a friend tells the story this way.

New York-based Steve Vaughan got the assignment to direct a spot in Amarillo, Texas. The location was a ranch that is famous for its Cadillac graveyard, a Stonehenge-like sculpture that features Cadillac cars buried nose-down.

Apparently, even before the cameras got rolling, the shoot was cancelled and everybody left town.

The agency and production house high-tailed it out of Texas and ended up going across the continent to California where, under the original sculptor’s approval, the Cadillac ranch was recreated and the commercial shot.

Off to Germany

LTB Productions’ Phil Kates, who along with Dale Heslip of The Partners’ Film Company is probably one of the two hottest directors in town at the moment, is getting known in parts across the big pond.

Kates and Wayne Fenske are on their way to Frankfurt, Germany for preproduction on a Kellogg’s shoot out of the Frankfurt office of Leo Burnett, which goes by the name Michael Conrad/Leo Burnett.

The job is for Honey Nut Loops.

Kates will shoot the live action sometime later this month over a couple of days and Toronto’s Animation House is slated to do the animated portion.

A&P set to open

Look any day now for an announcement about the opening of the new Toronto office of Ammirati and Puris.

An offer has gone out to a potential Canadian president and rumor has it that a top art director in town is considering joining chairman and copywriter Tom Nelson, who has already set up house in Toronto.

Expect big creative things from the agency that helped put bmw on the map and handles accounts like ups parcel service and Compaq computers.

Speaking of off-shore

If it weren’t for the action that Toronto commercial production houses are getting from the u.s., the fall would be looking like a real disaster.

Buoyed by a low Canadian dollar and the discovery among more American ad agencies that Canada can produce Grade A commercials, a growing volume of work seems to be filtering in from the u.s.

Toronto remains cold. Talk continues of a lot of work in progress, but little appears to be making its way through.

A master card

Director/cameraman Mark Celentano, with Imported Artists in Toronto, has just picked up an envied three-day shoot for MasterCard out of ad agency Communique.

Talk Talk Talk

There’s all kinds of whispering going on about impending corporate changes at Supercorp, the John Labatt-owned company that controls Partners’, and ultimately its many associated companies, as well as media-buying company Harrison Young Pesonen and Newell and, of course, the Sounds Interchange and the Supercorp complex.

– Former Supercorp grand pooh-bah Syd Kessler is making the rumor mill again with talk ranging from the opening of a new production company to the purchase of a sound facility.

– The newly operational Kessler Irish Films doesn’t even have an office yet , but has landed its first commercial project from a Toronto ad agency.