CA-Sen: Fred Davis – The Creative Genius Behind The Political Curtain

I think you will enjoy reading this profile of Fred Davis and why the GOP is banking on his work to help replace Senator Barbara Boxer with Carly Fiorina.

It’s early on a Sunday morning and Fred Davis, perhaps the most sought-after ad man in politics, wants his client in the zone. “Today will be a battle between toughness and twinkle,” he e-mails Carly Fiorina, the Republican Senate hopeful in California. She pings him back: “I’ll come twinkle in hand.”

Soon, Fiorina arrives at a large soundstage near the Paramount Pictures lot here to film a series of campaign spots, and Davis is scurrying across the set, a stopwatch dangling from his neck, assembling the crew of more than two dozen. He is the campaign’s creative director, and this is the big show.

Are the scripts loaded onto the teleprompter? Check. Is the fog machine working? Check. Is Fiorina’s black stool at center stage? Check. The caterers are serving coffee and breakfast burritos. The makeup girl is waiting in a mirrored side room. The fashion photographer Philip Dixon, whom Davis praises as being “up there with Annie Leibovitz,” is breezing around in his signature hippie-pajamas ensemble adjusting two massive floodlights that he will beam against a white wall to delicately light the candidate’s face.

“I want it to look perfect — as good as anything in Vogue,” Davis says. “This is how you shoot a Hollywood movie. This is not how you shoot a political ad.”

Davis is orchestrating a simple shot. Fiorina, alone, speaks to the camera against a dark, moodily lit backdrop, her hazel eyes twinkling as commanded. A tech turns on the fog machine. In the blue light, the effect is ethereal. Fiorina, the tough, smack-talking former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, is transformed into a delicate angel.