Karen Sands – Producer/Writer, Cinemax
It’s the ultimate you-had-to-be-there humor: The Cinemax Watchface ID “Movie Cliches,” for which
downtown performance artists Chazz Dean and James Siena (both from the seven member group for
which the campaign is named) play obsessed movie nerds acting out classic movie scenarios –
slapping their own faces while repeating “My sister. My daughter,” in homage to Chinatown,
breaking squares of styrofoam with their foreheads and yelling, “Heeeeeere’s Johnny,” imitating
Jack Nicholson in The Shining, biting off Barbie doll heads while the theme from Jaws builds to a
crescendo.
“We told (Cinemax) management, ‘We can’t explain to you what this is. Trust us. Let us spend your
money. It’ll be good.’ They had no idea what this was about,” says Karen Sands, about the
campaigns. “It was really hard to write a script and proposal. I tried to type something up – ‘One will
be standing in a chair, the other will be waving his arms.’” The concept looked bizarre on paper, but
Cinemax subscribers related to the final results.
The campaign’s three spots and three seasonal IDs were all shot on film in Manhattan for under
$30,000. “It was bare bones,” she says. “We took a shopping cart and just dragged everything out
of the prop room. We didn’t have the money to go out and buy stuff.” There were a few minor
purchases, Sands admits. For example, nobody offered up their own Barbies for artistic sacrifice.
Sands stresses the effort was extremely collaborative. “It wasn’t the Karen Sands Show,” she
explains, crediting James and Chazz, director Paul Fuentes, executive producer Sarina Israel, and
production manager Elizabeth Hummer. “We all sat around a table and just threw out all these
ideas, honed them down, and this was the result,” Sands says. “It was great, but, as a producer, it’s
also my job to put a structure around it. This was a different kind of project. We don’t usually do
concept pieces,” says Sands, who was hired at HBO (Cinemax’s sister company) as a secretary six
years ago, when she took a leave of absence from college after her sophomore year. She was
promoted to production assistant within a year and has been a writer/producer for the last three
years, winning awards for the HBO Max Headroom campaign before transferring to Cinemax.
The Watchface IDs posed a new and welcome challenge for Sands, who was now addressing an
audience tuned to the “hip network.” “You have to grab their attention and get a message across at
the same time. That’s hard to do in an original way. If they know there’s some weird stuff going on,
maybe they’ll stay. But of course, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I just put weird stuff on the air. It also
has to say ‘Cinemax is the place for great movies.’”
Sands has worked on image spots called “umbrellas” for Cinemax’s genre-oriented programming
packages – Drive-in Saturday Night, Vanguard Cinema, the Classics Collection, and Military Max.
As a Cinemax producer, she also worked on promos for an HBO production based on the life of
Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Sands asked if she could work on the Wiesenthal film, and her
Cinemax employers said yes – an example of why Sands cheerleads for her company. “I can do
everything here: image spots, campaigns, movie promos, music,” she says. “It’s a wonderful place
to work.”