- Gregory Solman

LOS ANGELES As Ground Zero CCO Court Crandall's second movie, A Lobster Tale, is released on DVD this week at rental outlets nationwide, he is perhaps counter intuitively recommitting himself to the agency he co-founded.
 
"I have no intention of jumping ship [for Hollywood]," said Crandall. "My hope is that divisions in other agencies starting with branded content and making a big PR deal out of little content will realize that agencies can do more. There are opportunities to build brands not just around product placement. I'd like to play a large part in the movement."
 
Still Crandall said he'd likely to be doing less "on his own," thus the hiring of Curt Detweiler in May as a partner and ecd. That leaves Crandall to personally supervise the ESPN, DiTech, Mercury Insurance and the California Department of Health Services anti-smoking accounts.
 
A native of Winchester, Mass., Crandall's A Lobster Tale screenplay came out of his affection for Maine culture he'd come to know as a youth spending summers at Boothbay Harbor. "I liked their values and the movie's got a good heart to it," said Crandall, whose story for Old School became a movie earlier. "It was my first script. I wrote it phonetically, with Maine accents."
 
After being passed on by a division of Fox and then by the Shooting Gallery, Lincoln Stalmaster, son of the famous casting director, picked it up. It was shot in Nova Scotia and Toronto. Crandall said that unlike Old School, he was able to exercise a healthy degree of control over Lobster Tale's final form.
 
The movie played the film festival circuit in 2006 and 2007, winning a best screenplay and audience-favorite award at the Phoenix Film Festival and a best feature nod in Omaha. It was more popular, Crandall admits, in heartland America where film festivals have no pretense to being about subjects such as family dysfunction, political corruption and fashionable nihilism.
 
Crandall said that he and Ground Zero partner Jim Smith have discussed various film distribution and financing models that might work for launching projects. The agency has met with television networks to pitch undisclosed projects.
 
"If anything, the connection between agencies and Hollywood is getting easier," Crandall said. "There are more outlets for content."

He contends that compared to when he shopped a pilot (The Suttons of Valencia) to ABC in 2003, basically leveraging his Old School credentials, studios and networks "now see us as tapped into culture and more understanding that you have to deliver an audience."