‘Hello, Angels’

Young Chang

Since he was a child, Joseph McGinty has gone by “McG.”

His teachers at Eastbluff Elementary School in Newport Beach, the

friends he hung out with during junior high and now the movie-watching

public know the “Charlie’s Angels” director by that nickname.

While a student at Corona del Mar High School, McGinty played video

games at the Fun Zone. He ate cheeseburgers at a local joint on West

Coast Highway and spent a lot of time at Gary’s Deli.

Today, the 30-year-old’s so-called hangout is the Columbia Pictures

studio in Culver City.

“It was a dream come true on a daily basis,” McGinty said about making

the film that topped the box office last weekend. “I look over to my

left, here comes Cameron Diaz. Lucy Liu is in a race car outfit and here

comes Drew [Barrymore] dressed up as a geisha girl.”

The award-winning commercial and music video director, who now lives

in Laurel Canyon but considers Newport Beach home, is happy with his

feature film directorial debut. He and the cast achieved each of their

goals, McGinty said.

This meant making the comedy scenes as funny as they could be, pumping

up the sexiness factor and packing action scenes with high doses of speed

and hype.

The movie, starring Diaz, Liu and Barrymore as the three angels and

Bill Murray as Bosley, involves a murder-revenge plot that threatens to

kill Charlie, his angels and privacy around the world. Diaz, Barrymore

and Liu perform martial arts, scale cliffs and go undercover as belly

dancers.

“I wanted to press all those buttons in the interest of exploding the

nerves in the pleasure center of the audience’s brain,” McGinty said.

Gregg Schwenk, executive director of the Newport Beach Film Festival,

thinks it worked.

“[McGinty] is exceptionally well-respected and well known for his

ability to craft really cutting-edge commercials,” he said. “And I think

that’s highly impressive -- to be able to take that same energy and

vision and produce a fun, campy, highly entertaining feature film.”

Despite media accounts of strife on the set and production problems,

he is cheerful about how the process went.

Early in the game, he read the script to “Charlie’s Angels” and

contacted Barrymore, who starred in and co-produced the movie. She

canceled on him seven or eight times, but finally they met.

“We started talking about John Hughes movies, heavy metal movies,

relationships and the fact that we wanted to make a pop-wheely kind of

movie,” McGinty said. “Soon after, we realized what kind of movie we

wanted.”

Their version of the ‘70s action-comedy television series uses the

original voice box from which the unseen character Charlie speaks. The

cast is new and the plot’s technology more advanced, but everyone on the

set was concerned with honoring the original show, McGinty said.

“And to take it to be a show for kids that aren’t necessarily all that

familiar with [‘Charlie’s Angel’s,’]” he added.

Childhood friend Paul Nordlund, who says he knew McGinty since he wore

braces, is not surprised by how far his friend has come. They would pass

lazy summer days on the beach, playing volleyball and, most often,

renting, analyzing and discussing movies in “great depth.”

“He’s always been good about bringing people together and that movie

had a lot of teamwork and such a big budget. A lot of people had a lot to

say about what went on in the movie, and I think he did a good job of

keeping the balance,” Nordlund said.

McGinty has directed about 50 music videos for artists including Mase,

Barenaked Ladies, Korn, Everclear, Sugar Ray, Smashmouth and Wyclef Jean.

In 1997, he received Billboard’s Pop Video of the Year Award for

Smashmouth’s “Walking on the Sun” and the Pop Video of the Year Award

from the Music Video Production Assn. for Sugar Ray’s “Fly.”

He is also the director behind the Gap Country commercials, for which

he won a top honors at the London International Film Festival. He has

directed long-form documentaries for Korn and Sugar Ray and commercial

spots for Major League Baseball and the Coca-Cola Company.

Schwenk qualifies these commercials as “works of art.”

“But everything I’d ever done before was in an effort to get to this

place,” McGinty said.