Jeff Weiss

Steve Olson: Where are you from?
Jeff Weiss: I was born in Hollywood. I lived in North Hollywood till I was seven. Then one night my dad came home bloody from a fistfight with a guy he caught my mom in a car with. The next day he didn’t live there anymore and my folks divorced. This was 1960. I kept running away and pulling knives on teachers until finally they let me go live with my dad.

My dad was Romanian. All his family was annihilated in the Holocaust, so he and his twin brother came over here to fight the war. But he was like, old European Jewish. “Straight A’s or don’t come home.” So I flipped. I straightened up. I still got in a lot of fights ’cause I was always really little.

Till the time I was 11…12, there was nothing but my dad. He defined what it was to be a man. We were poor as shit, but he went to work in the morning wearing a shirt and tie, changed into painter’s clothes, and came home wearing a shirt and tie. So I grew up thinking being a man meant women, fist-fighting, and working. That was it.

I wanted to be an astronaut, and my dad loved that. In the 11th grade they told you that you had to have four art-elective credits to graduate. I was like, “What the fuck do I need art for? I’m going to the moon, and you can’t draw up there.” The summer between 11th and 12th grade I start in this art-history class, and I was like, “This is just fucking suicide.” I go back to the guidance counselor and she says, “Well you know you can do a graphic design course.” I said, “Design sounds good. It’s kind of like building shit.”


My teacher was a cat named Patrick Nagatani, who was 23, just graduated college. This cat was fuckin’ out there, man. He would blindfold us and give us clay and put music on. He’d go from like Joni Mitchell to Hendrix, just to see how different the piece would be. He entered me into a contest for a pollution poster and I took third place or something, in the state. He explained to me that there was a vocation that involved this; it wasn’t play. He took me and three other kids to Art Center [College of Design]. These guys were designing cars, fuckin’ making films, designing logos, designing electric mixers, and painting naked women. It was like this fuckin’ floodgate opened. I spent every day, including weekends, from eight in the morning till eight at night in that design shop that summer. The next year, my senior year, I threw out all of my math courses and I took graphic design, architectural design, yearbook. Like four of my classes were with Nagatani. When my step-mom told my dad I had dropped all my classes to take art, he was like, “Not in this house!” But I was 16, so all of a sudden my dad saying, “You have to do this,” wasn’t enough. Nagatani had taken my dad’s place as the guy I wanted to be like.

At that moment in my life I’m just graduating high school, just getting my first taste of a woman, getting a draft notice, and basically getting kicked out of my house. My best friend, Marty Weiss, he went through this thing with me. He was gonna be a doctor, his dad was a European Jew, when I went to the art thing he kinda went over with me. One of our buddies, his mom owned a catalog company. She says, “I need to hire two paste-up artists. Do you guys know how to do that?” We were like, “Yeah, we did the yearbook.” So Marty and I both worked at this catalog agency around ’71…’72. At a certain point Marty had become the head of production and I had become one of the top art directors, and I learned about photography and how to do layouts and how to present things.

We had gone to a Memorial Day party out in Encino and we’re driving home at like two o’clock in the morning to our house in Venice. All of a sudden this car comes screaming, doing like 80 miles an hour, weaving back and forth. We get hit at full speed on the driver’s door. I woke up two or three days later with my head half shaved and my left arm and left leg in traction. Me and Marty had started this little company called Weiss 2 in high school. We did pamphlets for local tennis shops, stuff like that. So he walks in and says, “If you can get the fuck out of this bed, we’ve got six months of disability to try to make this thing work.” We’re 22. So we spray-painted our garage white and we really start this little Weiss 2 Designs. We got too big for the garage and went and rented a studio. By that time my dad and I had made up. He helped build the studio. He thought I was nuts to have thrown it all away, but he saw the passion.

Everything I was doing was derivative of West Coast design. I remember Mike Salisbury’s West magazine covers as being different. In ’76 I was 23, Weiss 2 was in its second year. We had three or four cool accounts. We had Pottery Barn, when it was still five stores; we had Richard Shoes; we had Celine in Beverly Hills; and Big 5 Sporting Goods. We were doing a magazine ad here and there, a lot of catalogs, posters. At that point we had four people working for us. I needed a fashion illustrator for something, and this buddy of mine turned me on to Terri Taylor. Killer. Same age as me, but like ten years older than me. She was part of this whole Art Center scene, and I fell for her like…bad. She turned me on to three things: she took me to a museum for the first time in my life. She turned me on to cocaine. And she said to me, “You have to meet Moshe [Brakha].”
SO: Why?
JW: I don’t know! So she has this big Valentine’s Day party for the specific purpose of me meeting Moshe. And I’m really uncomfortable because everybody there is an artist, and I’m an ad guy. Back then you said “advertising” under your breath. You were the sell-out. Moshe had just done Boz Scaggs and Richie Havens, and he’s beyond on fire.
SO: He’s the album-cover guy.
JW: Yeah. So he walked in and Terri goes, “Moshe! This is Jeff! Jeff! This is Moshe!” I can’t stand him, he can’t stand me.

So this photographer has a party. Moshe walks up to me and he goes, [thick accent] “Jeff Weiss. Let’s take a walk.” He says, “Here’s my car.” He’s got this little silver Porsche Targa. We sit down in his Targa. We found out that both our dads were Romanian, both of us were Capricorns…we talked all fuckin’ night. The sun starts coming up and I said, “I’ve got an ad that I’ve got to go shoot. You wanna do it?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” We shot our first ad that day.

Later, Moshe calls me one night. He says, “Dude, I gotta go to the Whiskey [A Go Go] tonight. Go with me.” He took me to the Whiskey and we saw The Screamers, and it scared the fuck out of me.
SO: Why, though?
JW: ’Cause it wasn’t music, man; it was cannibalism. It’s like these guys were cuttin’ themselves and bleeding. This has got to be ’77 now. All bets were off. What I thought was art, wasn’t art. What I thought was music, wasn’t music. What I thought was advertising, wasn’t advertising. Moshe became my partner, much more so than Marty. If I had a fire going, Moshe came by and poured gasoline on it. He was opening doors to, “Smack ’em in the fuckin’ face and then French kiss ’em.” There was something about understanding McDonalds and Kodak and the whole world of advertising that I gave to Moshe as a gift. And there was something about punk and art and sheer creativity that Moshe gave to me.

I remember for Richard Shoes we had these new shoes that were all perforated and woven leather. Moshe was like, “We’re gonna photograph these on the pier.” I glued the Polaroid in my sketchbook and underneath it I wrote, “Two cool Italians.” And that was it. Moshe could cast this line right out there and I could hook it right back in for normal folk.
SO: So it made sense to the masses.
JW: Yeah. Mo would have an album cover to do, he’d say, “Do the album cover with me.” I’d have this to do, I’d say, “Do this with me.” If we could work every night, we did.

Weiss 2 was 1975…’76 to 1980. Then things got shaky with me and Marty, ’cause he couldn’t work with Moshe. We did this job for Valentino, for men’s shoes, and we had to come to New York. I kept putting off going back to LA, then finally I said to Marty, “We’ve gotta move to New York.” Still at that point I didn’t know that there was like “advertising agencies.” All I knew was there was a lot of fashion people here that didn’t know rock ‘n’ roll, and our work was rock ‘n’ roll fashion. I also felt like I could come here and be me. Not my dad’s me, just me.

The four people that worked for us, we gave them Weiss 2 in LA. Marty and I moved to New York, but separately. I came here and I freelanced at first. I’d go and do the work and give ’em a bill, and they never paid me! Finally I got so broke that I lost my apartment and I talked some old lady into subleasing the place from me. A friend said, “There’s a book called The Advertising Red Book that is a list of every advertising agency.” I started at the A’s and called AC&R Advertising and got an appointment. They were like, “Love your work.” So I started working for them, and then...Moshe. [Laughs]

The first thing AC&R gave me to do was an ad for London Fog Children’s. And I had done this layout that the client loved. Moshe rolls into town and he’s like, “Let’s do it on the roof!” It ended up looking like a fucking Ramones cover. I bring it back to show them and they were like, “We sold the client on the other idea!” I was like, “Well this is better.” I would come up with an idea, they would sell the idea, and then I’d jam with the photographer, which is the way I always did it in LA. After a couple of times of that, they were like, “We gotta fire you.” I was like, “That’s cool. I get it.” So I was only there for six months.

Now, I’m broke. No light at the tunnel, no money coming in, and I’m freelancing for a photographer. I’m down there and this other art director comes in. She’s like, “I just went for the best interview of my life and it was on Kodak and they loved me!” I’m writing it all down. I look up Kodak and the agency is J. Walter Thompson and the creative director’s a guy named Andy Romano. I call and I’m like, “I forgot. Can you tell me who Andy Romano’s secretary is?” “It’s Maureen.” I call back, “Hi, can you put me through to Maureen?”…“Hi Maureen, it’s Jeff, Andy’s friend from California. Can you tell him I’m on the phone?” This cat gets on the phone and he goes, “I don’t know any fuckin’ Jeff from fucking California. Who the fuck is this?” “Ay Mr. Romano I’m sorry! Blah blah blah!” And he’s like, “You know what, come over right now and bring your work with you, ’cause I need an art director.” So I go over there. The guy says, “I like your work. I think you’re what we need. When you come in on Monday you’re going to meet Steve August. He’s going to be your creative director on Kodak. Bring your reel. Show him what you do on TV.” And I said, “You got it!” [Laughs] I call this buddy of mine who’s a producer at the first agency I got fired from. I say, “What’s a reel?” He shows me all these reels of directors. I’m like, “These are great, man! Let’s take that and that and that, and that’ll be my reel!” I go in the next week and I’ve got a book that’s all punk, rock, and fashion from LA, and a reel that’s the biggest TV commercials in Europe. He’s like, “Wow, this is great work,” and they hire me. The first night I go home from work I get a call. My dad died. Heart attack. I go home and bury him. This is 1981. As far as I know I quit my job.
SO: But you didn’t get fired?
JW: Andy Romano was an ex-Jesuit priest that gave it up to play guitar in a rock band, who then discovered art, and he got it. He said to me, “Listen, you need somebody to trust, and if you don’t, you’re never gonna make it in this business. You’re ten times more creative than anybody here, but you have no idea what the fuck you’re doing. So trust me.” And I did. I became a very hot gun at J. Walter, on the biggest clients in the world. Moshe and I did Kodak, Moshe and I did Goodyear....

I got to be like 32…33 years old, I’d been at Thompson five years. I was hot as shit and everybody else was making a lot more money. So I interviewed with Young & Rubicam and they doubled my salary, that day. Then I met my first great writing partner. This guy Vic.
SO: Victor Levin.
JW: Victor was cornball as they come, but classic. He was “big advertising,” and when you took that and combined it with this hip, So-Cal rock, punk execution, it was like…the “toilet.” It was things that people hadn’t seen before. So at Y&R Vic and I started freelancing for Margeotes [Fertitta] and we’d pitch and pitch and pitch for them, and they’d win all this stuff, but they didn’t know how to do it so we had them over a barrel. “You wanna hire us, it’s gonna be a hundred grand.” It was like, They’ll never pay that. Then they were like, “OK!”…“And we don’t report to anybody!”…“OK!” So we went in there and it was like a pitch every day. I would say that if there was anything that really exploded me, MFW [Margeotes, Fertitta & Weiss] was it. It was five years of complete hits. It was Harper’s, Häagen-Dazs, Newsday, Sak’s.

I’m flying out to shoot with Mo tomorrow, except now I’m bringing my 15-year-old kid with me. Today we were talking about college. I said, “All that matters is that you do something you love doing. If you do something you love doing, you’re never gonna work. And if you do it all the time, you get great at it.”


SO: What’s your favorite victory in the game of advertising?
JW: Martini Man.
SO: Thank you. ’Cause that’s my favorite of your guys’ work, too.
JW: You and Mo and me and [Paul] Opp[erman], all of us are in David Charles’ character.
SO: There’s a certain amount of cool in the Martini Man that is—
JW: Punk. And mass. It’s like “Two cool Italians.” Everybody gets to get the joke.
SO: Everything comes around full circle.
JW: Everything! Opp and I are starting over in a little studio, doing the best work we’ve done, enjoying it like Weiss 2. I feel as scared and as excited going into this shoot with Moshe as I did with Richard Shoes. I have no idea what we’re going to come out with on the other side.

If you love to fuck, the first time is always the first time. That’s why men always need to go somewhere new, because they’re always going for the first time. I’m so lucky because every time I start with a blank piece of paper I have no idea if I’m going to be able to put anything in it. When Opp and I go away to work, I don’t go, “This is gonna be a cakewalk.” We sit there and we start drinking, we start thinking, and I have no idea if this will be the time that they realize it’s all been a fucking charade. Thirty years of faking it, today I get caught.