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What is it about
the advertising/marketing business that makes people who work in it so
irresistible to folks writing screenplays?
This month Ben
Affleck plays an advertising guy who switches plane tickets with some poor
schmuck only to see the plane he wasn’t on crash. More important to the plot
of Bounce seems to be the fact that Affleck’s character is a
recovering alcoholic. Other than that, the picture looks to be a less
gigglesome reverse-gender take on Sliding Doors. (Gwyneth Paltrow is
in both movies; probably less significant than it seems.)
The ways ad folk
are deployed in movies and television shows would leave a person baffled.
Look more closely, and it just seems weird. One of the toughest aspects of
this question is figuring out what these people do — more specifically than
“working in advertising.” Do moviegoers and TV-watchers who actually work in
advertising ever wonder what these fictional counterparts do? Are they moved
to critique their conduct, or is part of the fun guessing what they’re
supposed to be responsible for in their fictional agencies? Are they account
executives? Creative directors? Why is it always impossible to figure out
exactly what advertising people in movies and TV shows actually do at the
agencies where they supposedly work?
Still, advertising
people on screens big and small do seem a lot more versatile as a group than
TV doctors, cops or lawyers, even if their work is always incidental to the
plot rather than central to it. Roger Thornhill, the “middle-aged
advertising executive” mistaken for a spy in Ernest Lehman and Alfred
Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, didn’t get pursued by Cold War
evil-doers because they didn’t like a particular campaign he was responsible
for. They thought he was somebody else. And that may be why advertising
people are so tempting for screenwriters. They can be slid easily into just
about any situation. Sticking with this theme, the perfect movie/TV ad
person is a mix of Jerzy Kosinski’s Chance the Gardener in Being There
and Leonard Zelig, the eponymous subject/protagonist of the Woody Allen fake
documentary who fit so well into any group or situation that he was a human
chameleon.
That kind of thing
is fine for a movie. The events can be a departure from the central
character’s regular life. But a television series demands recurring, regular
things viewers can depend on. We have no idea what most of the Golden Age
suburban TV dads did for a living. It could have been classified government
work. But it could just as easily been advertising, for all that was ever
revealed. Hell, they could’ve been dope-smoking ninja assassins for all the
difference it made.
Bewitched
tried to change that. What Darren did for a living was the pivot-point on
which about every fourth episode hinged. There’d be a creative problem, some
witchcraft, Larry Tate baffled, about to figure out what the deal was with
Samantha, then shrugging, impressed with something that Darren was supposed
to have thought up but which was actually Sam’s work. Given the number of
times that happened, Samantha should’ve gotten at least a job offer from
McMahon & Tate, or started her own boutique agency.
Or maybe she did,
and it eventually got acquired by McMahon & Tate, two employees of which
left to start their own outfit, thus providing a key plot sequence for
thirtysomething and the Busfield/Olin agency. (I don’t remember what it
was called because I didn’t watch the show.) And that doesn’t matter,
really, since in the 1980s that same agency was acquired by Demanda Wormwood
as played by Leather Hamhock on Melrose Place, and she renamed it D&D
Advertising, which I always figured stood for “dumb and dumber,” but which
could have meant something else.
The few movies that
have actually depended on advertising qua advertising for their plots have
been unkind to it, mostly. OK, there’s Disney’s The Horse In The Gray
Flannel Suit, but would you expect a scathing indictment of the evils of
marketing from Frosty Walt? Of course not. There are light, joshing jabs at
advertising — Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and How To Succeed
In Business Without Really Trying come to mind — and there is satire, as
in How To Get Ahead In Advertising and Putney Swope.
Everybody working
in the movie business seems to have worked in advertising at some point.
Maybe they want to appear ignorant about it to cover up their earlier
dues-paying. Or are they scared somebody from an agency where they used to
work will make them go back to work there? Or — worse — lean on them for
help breaking into the movies?
Series television
is completely different. You can tell what most of the commercials are
trying to get you to buy. But what, exactly, is the rest of the signal
selling? |
