Xzibit "Chrome Valley Customs"

A commercial for Chrome Valley Customs starring Xzibit, directed by Rick Wayne.

Talent-led brand films are their own discipline. The performer arrives with an existing public relationship to the audience, and the director's job is to decide whether to lean on that relationship, complicate it, or get out of its way. Get it wrong and the film reads as a rental. Get it right and the casting stops being a media buy and starts being the idea. Xzibit and car culture is not an arbitrary pairing, and the film is built on that fact rather than around it.

Wayne's stated approach to performance is worth reading against this kind of work. He trained at Second City, and he credits improv with teaching him that the best creative happens when you build on what is in front of you instead of protecting what is in your head. On a set with a strong personality in frame, that is a practical instruction. The thing in front of you is a performer with instincts of their own, and the director who insists on the version they wrote in preproduction usually gets a worse film than the one available.

He also holds that the best idea wins with no hierarchy attached, and that he has had assistant camera operators save a scene and production assistants catch what the agency missed. That is a real operational position rather than a nice sentiment, and on a short schedule with a name in the chair it is what keeps a set from calcifying around the call sheet.

The film is one of the shorter pieces in the selected commercial work at 0:35, and it sits in a cluster of films Wayne published in May 2024 that includes the Ball 140 Years film, the Sharpie Creative Marker anthem, and the first year of the Rookie of the Year platform.