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By Barry McNamara
Monmouth College’s 2007 commencement speaker, Jerry Marxman ’56, had a
diverse career path that saw him wear the hats of rocket scientist,
entrepreneur and environmentalist.
Roy Skillicorn ’71 and his wife, Elizabeth Witt Skillicorn ’72, can
relate. Art has been at the root of Skillicorn’s professional
experiences over the past four decades, but he has gone from being the
artist himself, to the teacher, then the agent and, now, an owner and
executive producer.
He does the latter with his company, Backyard Productions, and two of
its offshoots, Transistor Studios and Seed. Backyard, which he
co-founded in 1989, has grown into a large, live-action film production
company headquartered in Venice, Calif., that has consistently been in
Shoot magazine’s top 20. The company is in the arena of creating
television commercials, including an Under Armour ad that aired during
the most recent Super Bowl and popular ads for American Express that
featured Jerry Seinfeld. The latest Backyard production is a promotion
for MTV’s Video Music Awards that not only stars Britney Spears but a
9,000-pound elephant.
Backyard was named to Creativity’s top 25 worldwide production company
list in 2008 for the seventh year in a row, and Skillicorn, who works
out its Chicago office, serves as its owner, executive producer and head
of marketing sales and public relations. He founded the company with
partner Blair Stribley, one of his former students, who used to produce
short films in Skillicorn’s art classes at St. Viator High School in
Arlington Heights, Ill.
That Skillicorn was involved in art at all was not part of the plan when
he was a child. Growing up in Buffalo, N.Y., Skillicorn assumed he would
follow the career paths of his extended family, who all found work at
the General Motors plant.
“Dad wanted me to work on the line at Chevrolet like all of my
relatives,” he said.
But a directive from above blocked that path, and it would not be the
first time that Skillicorn encountered an employment obstacle.
“The plant had a hiring freeze, and my father was very upset,”
Skillicorn explained. “So he decided he was going to send me to
college.”
He reported being “totally lost” in his large high school, and he and
his father agreed that a small college offering a liberal arts education
would be best for him.
 “I
was taken by the fact that I’d be away from home and on my own,” said
Skillicorn, who wound up being the only one from his extended family to
go to college. “Monmouth also offered the opportunity to experience the
Midwestern work ethic, which I’ve come to appreciate.”
Although Skillicorn studied art under professors like Harlow Blum and
George Waltershausen, what he remembers most is the life lessons that
college taught him.
“I learned to be independent,” he said. “College matured me. I had been
very misguided in high school.”
Skillicorn also got to learn how the other half lived.
“I was one of the poorest people on campus at that time,” he said. “I’d
look around, and some of my classmates were driving Jaguars. I could
barely afford a pack of cigarettes.
“In college, I learned what I was missing. I came from a blue collar
family, but I learned that people lived a more enhanced lifestyle than I
did. Although they came from a more affluent society, I learned that I
was just as good as those people, and that made me work even harder. I
left college with more than I had going in.”
Besides those lessons, Skillicorn did take one other thing from his time
at Monmouth – a wife.
“I met her in the art room,” he said of Elizabeth. “She was an artist, I
was an artist, and we got swept up in the art world. It was pretty much
love at first sight. I’m still with her, and I still love her.”
One “til death do us part” commitment did not go as smoothly, Skillicorn
said.
After graduating, “I tried to be an artist. I quickly realized it’s not
a short-term deal. That’s a lifetime commitment” if it’s going to be a
primary source of income. So Skillicorn did other work to make ends
meet, tending bar, doing carpentry and taking on various other odd jobs.
A year after he graduated, Skillicorn found an art-related position with
the federally-funded Color Wheels program in Buffalo. He taught art from
a bus that traveled into the inner city for the next two years, and the
experience taught him, as well.
“I learned a lot about social differences,” he said of his experiences
in the ghetto. “Guys would come by and goof around on us. I remember
kids trying to roll over the bus, and there was another very angry man
who came onto the bus and directed a lot of racial slurs at me.”
Of his two co-workers on the bus, Skillicorn explained with sound
reasoning, “I chose them because they were big.”
He added, “Everyone wanted free lessons, and we went everywhere … senior
citizen homes, hospitals. I also had a show on this brand new thing
called cable TV.”
The bus was in Buffalo, but Elizabeth’s home was in Chicagoland, and
that’s where Skillicorn settled when the couple was married in 1974.
Around that time, he also earned a master’s degree from Northern
Illinois University.
“I got a teaching job at St. Viator, and it was a wonderful experience,”
he said. “We incorporated a lot of independent study and
interdisciplinary arts that I had written about in my thesis.”
But just as that career was gaining steam, “they cut out the art and
music departments and I found myself unemployed.”
Skillicorn again tried to be a working artist – this time a photographer
– “but I realized there were a lot of people better than me. So I
decided I would be their agent … That business expanded into talent
representation for designers, illustrators and finally to filmmakers and
animators,” including Pixar, which he helped land its first paying jobs.
He was with them for eight years before starting Backyard.
Said one Web source about his company in connection with an ad for
Adidas, “Skillicorn and Stribley’s backgrounds, artistic eye and
relative innocence to the business of commercial production allowed them
to bring a fresh approach that was sorely missing in the market at the
time. They were willing to take chances where others were not, which
separated them from the pack and gave them a distinctive edge. Backyard
takes pride in their incomparable track record of spotting potential
young talent and taking chances on developing new directors.”
Four years ago, Skillicorn started Transistor Studios, which is based in
New York City and does animation, as well as design for digital media,
motion and Web sites.
The following year, he opened Seed, which is a creative think-tank that
creates branded entertainment for TV, Web sites and in-store
programming. An example, Skillicorn said, is Bud.TV.
“It’s a ‘Wild West’ area,” he said of the work Seed does. “Commericials
are scarcer now. We’re forerunners in the Web-based and interactive
advertising market.”
Asked to describe a typical day at the office, Skillicorn replied, “I’m
in charge of marketing, PR and sales for all three companies. I talk to
directors and clients on a regular basis and essentially serve as the
liaison between the creative artists and the community.”
An example of a day out of the office came this summer, when Skillicorn
traveled to Asia.
“I recently returned from China, Japan and Singapore, where we are
currently focusing our sales effort. I brought back our first Chinese
project, a commercial for the Ogilvy and Mathur agency in Shanghai. We
are also going to shoot a TV series pilot about tea in Asia, so we also
scouted locations and sought English-speaking talent.”
As he nears retirement age, Skillicorn has no thoughts of stopping.
“I like what I do,” he said. “I probably won’t ever stop. Even if we
were to sell our companies, I’d like to stay on in some capacity.”
And, in keeping with the evolving nature of his career, the successful
businessman said that, lately, his interests have turned to music.
That’s in part because of the career aspirations of his daughter,
Jessica Rae, who’s a singer/songwriter living in Nashville (www.myspace.com/jessicaraemusic).
Elizabeth also helps with her daughter’s career in addition to
continuing to work as an artist in several mediums.
Once destined for an assembly line job, Skillicorn constantly adjusted
to life’s twists and turns, sought out higher education, took risks when
opportunities arose and dared to be different, enriching his life in the
process.
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Released
by the Office of College Communications
Barry McNamara, Associate Director of College Communications
Phone: 309-457-2117
Fax: 309-457-2330
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