UNEASY (Jim) Parsons

To promote my talk at the New School/Parsons this evening I’m revisiting the Jim Parsons session, so beautifully displayed in UNEASY.

The basic idea came from Kleber Menezes, a friend in advertising. We were working on a job together, and I was brainstorming an approach to the Jim Parsons shoot. He said, “Oh, why don’t you have him making out with a robot,” because his character on The Big Bang Theory is cold and analytical.

My client, Rolling Stone, loved this idea, and we got to work trying to find a suitable robot. At some point, I think someone from the magazine suggested Maria from Metropolis, the 1927 Fritz Lang movie, and I was like, wow, if we could do that, it would be amazing. So they started looking for it.

They were having the hardest time, and searching online we found this collector who had it. It turned out the collector had passed away, and we didn’t know who had his collection—then, finally, at the eleventh hour, they found it.