Santa Paula: MVP in filming for Super Bowl Budweiser commercials

The premise of the commercial aired Sunday was a man rushes into a diner - Smokin’ Joe’s - and announces the bridge is out. Everyone shrugs until he adds that a Budweiser truck is stuck on the other side, and that’s when the fun begins.

Townspeople - it looks like everyone actually - frantically run down East Main Street to the washed out bridge and, seeing the truck on the other side of the ravine, spring to action, forming a human span that the truck gingerly drives across. Like all stories this one has a happy ending when grateful beer drinkers are shown hoisting their glasses, a scene shot inside Garman’s.

Sunday’s ad was not the first time Santa Paula - long a popular locale for film, television and commercial shoots - was featured in a Super Bowl ad: in fact, the city and surrounding areas have been used a whopping four times for ads that appeared on the most watched football game of the year.

This fourth time around Santa Paula was again declared the game’s MVP - Most Valuable Place - for filming, a practice that former Fire Chief Paul Skeels said started in the early 1980s at a nearby ranch where a much smaller scale red barn was constructed to match the larger one on the property.

“Several of the department’s old-timers were in it,” and the Budweiser commercial featured firefighters in a Main Street barbershop getting a shave. The scene cut to a screaming fire whistle and then “obligatory shots of firefighters running out of the barber shop half-shaven.”

When they arrived on scene the smaller barn, standing in for its larger counterpart was afire. Skeels said firefighters were shown extinguishing the blaze, but not before one carried a farm animal out of the burning building. 

“Then,” laughed Skeels, “everybody had a beer.... The guys who were in it had a great time,” including firefighter Bill George, rumored to have collected residuals “that went on and on.”

Interim City Manager Cliff Finley, who was interviewed for this week’s news segment on Santa Paula’s use in the Budweiser Super Bowl commercial, said many people commented on the broadcast aired on Channel 2 and Channel 9.

Santa Paula, he noted, “came off great. Councilman Ralph Fernandez saw it and he thought it was pretty good, it was great for Smokin’ Joe’s and Garman’s,” whose respective owners Joe and Wendi Torres and Clint Garman were also interviewed.