| Posted 9:05pm, Monday, July 22, 2002 Being born and raised here in San Francisco, I want to stay in the city. My wife just wants space. When we happened to see the sign for new homes that were going, we decided to take a look. We were impressed with the size of the places and the amenities. We decided to take the plunge. First up came the negotiating process. Even though the dot com bust is in full swing, homes were being snatched up left and right for people who had saved during the boom. Remember, the median home prices in the Bay Area are over $400,000. That’s not a typo and remember, this is average. This was well above average. But we knew theses models were moving slowly. We were gonna squeeze the bastards. We worked a pretty good deal and with our decent finances and zero debt, the loan approval was painless. Then we had to sign. There is no scarier feeling than signing papers that will keep you in debt for the next twenty years. The move-in… one odd thing about moving. Moving from a one bedroom apartment to a three bedroom house should provide you ample space for all your stuff, right? Wrong. As we begin moving boxes to our new place, the fact that you have too much stuff will become quickly apparent to you. Those of you who have moved into bigger homes are chuckling to yourselves right now. Where did all this shit come from and where are we going to put it? All those piles of boxes that were piled up your old place are still piles of boxes. Only now, they’re piles of boxes in your new home. Your new home that you’re trying to decorate tastefully. The home that you hope will give you space for all that shit you’ve been saving for all those years. One problem though: your beautiful new home doesn’t want your crappy old shit around. Thank
God for the two-car garage.
Make no mistake, I am totally, 100% confident in my ability to come through without a writer, but that’s not the point. Being partnerless in an agency creative department is like showing up without a wife at a swinger’s party. You could be the greatest lover in the world, but pretty soon people are going to start wondering what they need you for. Whatever. -Ron
Back to work. Welcome to the inaugural edition of The World According To. With this new format, I hope to reclaim some of the venom and piss I was full of in the early days of the web. Before I hit my thirties and started making some real coin, I was a bitter, angry youth. I'm not suggesting that this new page will remind you of WWE Raw (WWE... will we ever get used to the "E"? Curse the World Wildlife Fund!), but I am hoping for a bit of the old vitriol to return. Maybe even get a bit more personal in the columns. I have
noticed that my writing gets a bit more interesting when work sucks.
Considering that my job has a bit of sameness to it lately, this could
be good news for you readers.
Fuck, I'm getting old. I'm in advertising because it's a cool, well-paid job where you get to sit in a room and make stuff up in the name of commerce. Some of the prerequisites for this job is that you watch a lot of TV, see a lot of movies and listen to a lot of music. You absorb all this shit, distill it and regurgitate it all for mass consumption in the name of selling stuff. Hopefully, it's stuff you like or believe in. More often than not, you doing it for something you have no interest in whatsoever. You get to work with some smart, interesting people. Sometimes, you get to work with really talented directors and actors who turn your ideas into reality. Occasionally, you'll hire a famous person to appear in your ads, shake hands and take pictures with them and sometimes, even eat a meal with them. A lot of time, you meet assholes who delight in making your life a living Hell. If you're fortunate, you'll not only get well paid for all your efforts, you may even win awards. You'll ascend a stage, smile and wave, perhaps say a few words and collect a cool statue of some kind. Or, you could be a "hack." You'll produce shitty ads that no one respects and that wins no awards. You'll work with hack directors because none of the good guys will touch your crap storyboards. Your co-workers will whisper about you and your work behind your back. However, to the general public, you could be a hero: the guy who invented the Tidy Bowl man. Or Mr. Whipple, or the Pillsbury Doughboy. Maybe you'll write a memorable jingle, like "My bologna has a first name." You could coin a phrase like "Nobody doesn't like Sara Lee." You could be that guy... the one who wrote the thing. Sounds pretty good either way huh? Most of all, I'm in advertising because I haven't yet convinced anyone to buy my doodles or turned my half-assed ideas into a major Hollywood motion picture and I'm man enough to admit that I'm too lazy to do it myself. Oh, and
I am an obsessive collector of all things Spider-man. Someone recently sent me a Quicktime clip of a Robert DeNiro outtake. He shot a promo for a Tribeca Film Festival special that was going to air on Fox. This clip epitomized everything that's wrong with the advertising business. Witness the following exchange between Robert DeNiro and the Fox promo producer:
Ouch. This clip makes me feel ashamed and dirty. I think of all the times I've had talent amp up the client’s name or price or phone number. How many times have I asked an actor to "do it with a bit more smile"? I've asked a lot of people to compromise their art in the name of commerce over the last ten years. And this Fox producer... he was talking to Bobby fucking DeNiro and he had the balls to tell him how to read the script! This is the guy who was in Godfather II, Taxi Driver Raging Bull, GoodFellas. Bend over.
Don't all actors sell product? Think of feature films. They are there to make money for the movie studios. These are Hollywood productions with multimillion-dollar budgets. This isn't time for fucking around. This is business. Don't bring up indie films either. Those are not charities or non-profit projects. If someone, somewhere didn't think they could "market" a film, it would never get made. Some indie producer will always be "shopping" your movie around. Yes, sadly, even independent filmmaking is a commercial prospect. I once worked with a great, award-winning commercial director who would do all his casting in fast forward. Which is to say, he’d have a casting person tape the auditions, then watch them in double speed. When he liked someone’s look, he’d stop the tape and watch their performance. My copywriter and I commented on what a harsh way of casting that was. His response? "I didn’t tell them to become an actor." -Ron
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