Joe Sedelmaier, the gifted, Chicago-based TV commercial director and creative force who shunned the coasts while producing iconic TV ads like the “Where’s the beef?” spots for Wendy’s and the “fast-talking guy” for Federal Express died on May 8 at home in Lincoln Park.
The death, of natural causes, was confirmed by Sedelmaier’s daughter-in-law, Anna Sedelmaier. He was 92.
“He was so true to himself, and I do believe that showed in the work. And he enjoyed what he did, and that showed in the work,” said Marsie Wallach, Sedelmaier’s longtime executive producer.
John Josef Sedelmaier was born in 1933 in Orrville, Ohio, the home of J.M. Smucker Co., maker of jams and jellies. He was raised in Orrville and then moved to Chicago, where he attended the University of Chicago before earning a bachelor’s degree from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1955.
Sedelmaier originally had dreamed of a career as a cartoonist. He soon shifted to advertising work by day, while making his own short films outside of work. He worked at the Young & Rubicam ad agency in Chicago from 1955 until 1961, followed by a three-year stint at the Clinton E. Frank agency and a role as an art director and producer at the J. Walter Thompson agency from 1964 until 1967. In those agencies, his family said, Sedelmaier felt like a cog in a big machine.
“When I was working as art director and producer at the agencies and went to the studios in New York, the thing that bugged me the most was that the director wasn’t in on the casting and whatever; he was just a little machine,” Sedelmaier told the Tribune’s Clifford Terry in 1979. “I thought, ‘When I get into it, I’m gonna follow through all the way on a project.’ You’re gonna spend so much time in this business, you might as well have fun doin’ it.”
In 1968, Sedelmaier started his own, now-defunct Chicago-based firm, Sedelmaier Film Productions Inc., located in studios in what was the old Chez Paree nightclub at 610 N. Fairbanks Court in Streeterville.
“Everyone in New York said I was crazy, setting up shop in Chicago,” he told the Tribune in 1979. “But I’ve got a good lab … that gives us overnight services, and besides, I like living here. You can’t bring up kids in Manhattan, and I’m not a commuter.”
By the 1970s, Sedelmaier had built a national reputation for cranking out dozens of TV commercials a year, almost all of which were 30 seconds long. It was part of an industry trend toward shorter commercials, and Sedelmaier’s value-add was to refine ad agencies’ basic ideas.
“A lot of times people come to you and think you can save them, but you can do only so much,” he told the Tribune in 1979. “I’ll add or change certain things, but never the concept.”
Sedelmaier produced local ads as well, including one in 1971 for WLS-Channel 7’s “Eyewitness News” team that depicted a fluffy competing newscast that had an empty-headed meteorologist named Wanda the Weather Bunny. With a background in comedy — it “comes naturally to me,” he told the Tribune in 1977 — Sedelmaier had a knack for producing commercials with several layers of humor, including visual humor and at times, parodies of classic films.
Sedelmaier’s process worked — his firm won dozens of Clio awards (the Oscars of the TV commercial industry).
“What stood out the most is … the courage of his convictions,” Wallach said. “He had a definite point of view, right? So if he thought something would work or not work, you did not push him around. He was like, this is it.”
Sedelmaier also built a stable of unusual performers, sometimes through “spontaneous inspiration,” the Tribune wrote in 1977.
“I’ve never gone out looking for people,” he told the Tribune in 1993. “It just happens, all different ways. I’ve found people at neighborhood playhouses. Sometimes I have a waiter who looks interesting. One guy brought in a picture of his grandchildren, and they were nice-looking grandchildren, but I liked him. I said, ‘You’ve got a great face.’” Another time, my receptionist saw a guy in the supermarket, an architect, and told him he ought to stop by, and I used him in a lot of stuff.”
Sedelmaier’s most famous casting discovery was Clara Peller, the Hyde Park manicurist and grandmother described in the Tribune in 1985 as a “pint-sized woman with a 55-gallon drum of a voice.” Sedelmaier saw Peller’s raspy voice and spunky manner as ideal for certain TV spots, and he cast her in 10 Wendy’s commercials starting in 1984, as well as in earlier ads for Mr. Coffee — in which she blew a trumpet — and for Jartran Truck Rental. Sedelmaier first began using Peller in the 1970s when he shot a commercial that showed the hands of a manicurist at work.
The Wendy’s spots — complete with Peller indignantly demanding “Where’s the beef?” while portraying a consumer outraged by competing fast-food chains’ disappointingly small hamburger patties — were pure advertising gold. Wendy’s officials attributed the commercials to increased corporate profits. The commercials also made the widowed Soviet immigrant and Belmont Hotel resident a cult figure and they also considerably elevated the national profile of Sedelmaier, who told the Tribune in 1984 that “I’ve never had anything like this.”
Another famed campaign was the “Fast-Paced World” spot for Federal Express, in which a fast-talking man spews a lot of alliteration in the ad, saying, “I know it’s perfect, Peter, that’s why I picked Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh’s perfect, Peter, can I call you Pete?” That commercial’s star, actor John Moschitta Jr., was a fast-talking talent whom Sedelmaier had spotted on an episode of the TV show “That’s Incredible.”
In 1982, Sedelmaier’s agency won five Clios for its Federal Express work. Advertising Age magazine in 1998 named both “Where’s the Beef?” and “Fast-Paced World” as two of the 50 best TV spots of the previous 50 years.
“It seems to me that you should want to stand out if you’re trying to sell something,” Sedelmaier told the Tribune in 1984. “But so many commercials don’t. They’d rather blend with the wallpaper.”
Wallach acknowledged that Sedelmaier worked during a time when commercial decisions were made less on data and surveys and more on creative professionals’ gut reactions.
“It was really a charmed time, but I believe he would have done his work the same way and been just as successful even in times when everything was ruled by focus groups,” Wallach said. “He didn’t care about that. He had to like it, he had to entertain himself, and that was it.”
Sedelmaier stopped making commercials in the mid-1990s when, he told the Tribune in 2009, “I got to the point where I didn’t want a product at the end anymore.” However, he had long taken an interest in making actual films. Sedelmaier was the original director for the 1983 comedy “Easy Money” before he had a falling-out with star Rodney Dangerfield. A 2003 short film he made, “OpenMinds,” was screened at the Sundance Film Festival, while a short film he made in 1964, “Mrofnoc,” dealt with a young man who found himself in a world where everyone else walked backward. A 1967 short film, “Because That’s Why,” won first prize the following year at the San Francisco Film Festival and at the Mannheim International Film Festival.
Wallach created a 40-minute documentary retrospective about Sedelmaier’s work, “Point of View,” which was released in 2009.
“Working with Joe and for Joe was incredibly challenging,” she said. “He pushed, and all of us who were so fortunate to be in that circle. He made us better, he made us grow, and for me, my philosophy of how to work in this business came from him and from being with him.”
Sedelmaier’s wife of 47 years, Barbara, died in 2012. He is survived by two sons, J.J., a noted animator, and Adam; a daughter, Rachel McElroy; six grandchildren; and three great-granddaughters.
Services are being planned.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
