The director Howard Zieff died this past weekend of complications of Parkinson's disease, at the age of 81. Odds are that the name doesn't mean as much to you as it might. Zieff made his best pictures in the 1970s, but his name simply wasn't one of those that people associated with the glories of that movie era. And he had a special problem, so far as his lingering reputation goes, in that his biggest hits tended to be less distinctive than some of his flops, so that to the degree that he had an image as a director, it may have been as something of a hack. But Zieff, like Michael Ritchie (Smile) and the screenwriter W. D. Richter (who wrote Zieff's first movie, the 1973 Slither), other eccentric talents who left their mark on that period without winning much acclaim for it, he was a smart, funny entertainer with his own peculiar comic sense and a feel for everyday American insanity. He first made his presence felt in the culture with his work in advertising, both as a director of TV commercials and his work in print ads. Zieff was one of the first directors to develop a name for himself as a promising talent based on his ad work: in 1967, when he was 40 years old and still half a dozen years away from his first movie job, he was the subject of a profile in Time magazine, which noted that he had made 200 commercials in six years and called him "the leading practitioner of what the trade calls the indirect sell." (Translation: his ads inspired public affection for the products they touted not because they made such a great case for the products themselves but because the ads were so entertaining.) More recently, Zieff's ad photography was the subject of a 2002 show at a West Coast gallery.
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