He drives around in the security cart with his sunglasses and hat, but behind that is an artist. Richard Burton was a successful artist who worked for various companies.
“My one thing that I was good at was art, I sucked at everything else,“ said Palos Verdes High School’s own security guard Richard Burton. Burton was a graduate at Palos Verdes High School.

After graduating PV, Richard signed on with The Navy and used his artistic talents there. “I got out of doing so much work when I was in The Navy because I was a really good painter. I would paint the emblems on the side of battleships and get out of working because the captain would make it a priority for me to finish.” Once Richard finished with the Navy he went to work for several advertising companies.

Before TV became mainstream, ads were published by companies and passed out on the city streets, in hopes that their company would attract some business with a well-designed ad.
“Before I aspired to be a ‘campus supervisor’ I was an artist. I worked for several ad agencies around Orange County and LA,” said Burton.
“One of the first ads I worked on was fifteen to twenty years ago for a company called infospace.com ‘The brand that’s building the internet.’”
Infospace.com was unlike anyother site on the internet at the time. Unlike most sites, Infospace’s purpose wasn’t to help spread scientific information but information on everything. There icon was a surfer hence the term ‘surfing the web.’
“I was the art director so my job was to talk with all of the talent for our shoots and for the infospace ad, all of the actors were big fat people with big fat butt cracks. Their slogan for that ad was ‘Some people are perfectly happy with 86% coverage’ and then under the quote was a big fat guy bending over with a plumber’s crack. I spent two days looking at pictures trying to decide who had the biggest, fattest butt crack. Very little retouching necessary.”
Despite being a fun series of ads to make, it’s a little unflattering to say the least. “I wanted to…work with actual models. So I worked with a gal named Cindy Margolis who became the most downloaded girl on the planet at the time which was around the ‘90s. She was like the next Play Boy girl. We used her for an Infospace ad, too, and we said ‘86% of the internet users have seen the hottest thing on the internet and she ain’t it.’” Cindy Margolis played one of the Fembots in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery and also modeled for Reebok and Sunkist, so it’s nothing short of a step into the world of glamour for Burton.
Richard’s work with actors was not yet finished, however.
“Another real fun guy I worked with was Leslie Nielsen, who starred in [the] Airplane and The Naked Gun movies. We made a Dollar rent-a-car ad that was a spoof of the OJ, pre-murder, Hertz commercial where OJ was running through the airport and jumping over seats with his briefcase to get to the rental car place. So we turned it into the exact opposite and replaced a cool OJ with this bumbling idiot running over a guy in his car.” Nielsen’s advertising with Hertz is similar to a more recent celebrity, Ron Burgandy, with Dodge. Both actors are hilarious and are media titans.

Advertising isn’t always working with huge celebrities. Most of the time, you just have to start creating something pretty.
“I did a lot of beauty pieces, which basically means art with no concept, for a real estate company down in Newport Beach. There was no point to any of the picture except to look pretty and to convey people to come down and spend a million dollars on a house or something.”

At the end of the day, advertising was still work but still different from any other media industry.
“The great thing about advertising is that there’s no rules. It’s a business with no rules. Our motto was ‘Find whatever works.’ Just sell the client,” said Burton. “I remember presenting an ad idea to a board of about twenty executives and their president was like ‘What is this?’ I said ‘We call it art’ and he said ‘I call it shit.’”With no rules possibilities seem endless for advertisers, but also for their competitors. “Advertising is an extremely cut throat business because everyone is trying to get rich off of doing it. There is a lot of stolen ideas, name calling and hurt feelings.”