Joe Sedelmaier, an award-winning director who oversaw an antic universe of television commercials — including the classic “Where’s the beef?” ad for Wendy’s — that featured average-looking nonactors deadpanning their way through weird situations, died on May 8 at his home in Chicago. He was 92.
His son J.J. confirmed the death.
Mr. Sedelmaier stuck to comedy for his nearly 1,000 commercials. “I don’t feel there’s that much to be serious about in a commercial,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1993. “You’re serious about selling the guy’s product, but comedy has a way of putting things in perspective.”
He added, “What I find funny is when people play things straight. I don’t like comedy that winks at you.”
Mr. Sedelmaier’s success in the 1970s and early ’80s led Esquire to profile him in a 1983 cover story. CBS’s “60 Minutes” featured him the next year in a segment called “It’s a ‘Sedelmaier,’” which the correspondent, Ed Bradley, defined as a “little piece of nonsense that earns Joe Sedelmaier big bucks.”
In Esquire, Lynn Hirschberg wrote that Mr. Sedelmaier’s commercials are “slightly surreal 30-second dissertations on the fears of everyday life, and they are, by far, the strangest advertisements on television. They may also be the best.”
In 1984, Mr. Sedelmaier shot the Wendy’s ad, his best-known commercial, which starred the octogenarian Clara Peller, a retired beautician and manicurist. She reacted with outrage at the sight of a tiny hamburger patty inside a giant bun at a fast-food counter.
“Where’s the beef?” she demanded in her raspy voice.
The line was originally “Where’s all the beef?” (“You don’t have a lot of time in a 30-second ad,” Mr. Sedelmaier told The New York Times in 1984, by way of explanation. “Things get shortened.”)
“Where’s the beef?” entered the cultural lexicon, perhaps most prominently when Walter F. Mondale used the question during a debate to deride the policies of Gary Hart, one of his opponents in the 1984 Democratic presidential primary.
For FedEx (then called Federal Express), Mr. Sedelmaier cast John Moschitta Jr., whose talent for manic speed talking, with alliteration, symbolized the company’s promise about when a package “absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.”
In one of a series of commercials in an Alaska Airlines campaign, a passenger flying on a rival carrier lacks the 50 cents needed for the pay toilet, so he bargains along the aisle with other passengers (“two quarters for $5, please”) as he tries to dance away his urgency.
Bob Garfield, a former critic for Advertising Age, wrote in an email that Mr. Sedelmaier “overstated by understatement. Human movement was reduced to near paralysis. Voices were monotone. The camera was locked at dead center. Nobody even blinked. Maximal minimal minimalism. And the effect was absurdity.”
Mr. Garfield added: “At his best — which he usually was — the absurdity was in the service of the selling point. He was as crucial to Federal Express, for instance, as the airplanes.”
Mr. Sedelmaier, who was known for tightly controlling every aspect of a commercial’s production, did not want to work with clients who couldn’t accept his vision. He would routinely rewrite scripts and dispense with agencies’ storyboards.
“I wouldn’t say he was uncompromising, but you had to buy into what he was doing,” Marsie Wallach, who produced many of Mr. Sedelmaier’s commercials, said in an interview. “He didn’t lack for confidence.”
Mr. Sedelmaier, who won more than 50 Clio Awards, the ad industry’s highest honor, was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 2000 and the American Advertising Federation’s Advertising Hall of Fame in 2016. “Point of View: A Retrospective,” a short documentary about Mr. Sedelmaier directed by Ms. Wallach, was released in 2009.
John Josef Sedelmaier, an only child, was born on May 31, 1933, in Orrville, Ohio. His father, Josef Sedelmaier, a German immigrant who worked as an accountant, died in 1941. His mother, Anne (Baughman) Sedelmaier, was a nurse who became the assistant director of maternal and child health for the Ohio Department of Health.
An aspiring cartoonist, Mr. Sedelmaier earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1955. After graduating, he worked as an art director at four agencies: Young & Rubicam, Clinton E. Frank, Leo Burnett and J. Walter Thompson, where he started as a director on commercials for accounts likeChun King canned Chinese food. In 1967, he opened his own studio in Chicago.
The commercial that built his national reputation was for Southern Airways in 1974.
The idea, brought to him by the airline’s agency, emphasized the carrier’s one-class service. In the ad, a man flying on a rival airline enters a plane in which the first-class passengers are in the midst of a lobster-eating, Champagne-popping bacchanalia. But the man’s ticket is for the “second cabin,” behind a curtain — where, as a funereal dirge plays, he finds a grim-looking, peasant-filled steerage compartment.
The ad — called “Orgy” — won numerous awards, including Clios.
For the next two decades, Mr. Sedelmaier created commercials for dozens of companies, including Del Taco, Timex, Little Caesars, Dunkin’ Donuts, Kay Jewelers and Fiberglas Pink, an insulation maker in Canada.
In the mid-1990s, he retired from directing commercials. “I got to the point,” he later told The Chicago Tribune, “where I didn’t want a product at the end anymore.”
Mr. Sedelmaier’s talent for making funny mini-movies led him to Hollywood, where he was preparing to direct the Rodney Dangerfield comedy “Easy Money” (1983) when he dropped out in a dispute with Mr. Dangerfield over the script.
“I would love to make a feature,” he told Esquire at the time, “but it has be done on my terms.”
Twenty years later, Mr. Sedelmaier directed “OpenMinds,” a dark comedy short that was screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2003. He also made, “Mrofnoc” (1965), a seven-minute film about a man (known only as the Conformist) who is bewildered, even a bit frightened, by the sight of people walking backward on a city’s streets — until he joins them.
In addition to his son J.J., whose mother, Marie Svolos, was divorced from Mr. Sedelmaier, he is survived by another son, Adam, and a daughter, Rachel McElroy, from his marriage to Barbara (Frank) Sedelmaier; six grandchildren; and three great-granddaughters.
In a 1985 Wendy’s commercial that became nearly as famous as “Where’s the beef?” Mr. Sedelmaier staged a Cold War-esque “Soviet Fashion Show” at a country club in Chicago. (It was written by Cliff Freeman, as was “Where’s the beef?”)
To emphasize the chain’s breadth of hamburger toppings and other accouterments, the ad showed a plus-size model (played by Lilly Monkus) strutting on a runway, wearing a babushka and the same drab, sleeveless dress that the female announcer, herself in military wear, calls “dayvear,” then “evening vear” (accessorized only with a flashlight) and finally “swimvear (with a beach ball).
Ms. Monkus told The Associated Press in 1986 that she had answered a casting call for ethnic-looking women and impressed Mr. Sedelmaier enough to abandon his plan to use three different models.
“He takes the person that we all know and see every day and puts them on camera,” she said. “Everybody isn’t Joan Collins.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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