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Mea Culpa
Writing and producing car commercials.
It was a job, a decently paying job, a full-time job with benefits and I got it on the week my unemployment ran out, knowing that advertising was a low profession and thinking that making car commercials was the lowest of the low.
But I took it. There was some sort of recession around 1989 or so and they let a lot of us go. By that time, I spent most of my time at work doing other things, since doing this didn't take much effort.
Later on, I wrote this, parts of which I sold to Adbusters Magazine. It has never been published in it's entirety...until now.
Mea Culpa
Writing and producing car commercials.
It was a job, a decently paying job, a full-time job with benefits and I got it on the week my unemployment ran out, knowing that advertising was a low profession and thinking that making car commercials was the lowest of the low.
But I took it. There was some sort of recession around 1989 or so and they let a lot of us go. By that time, I spent most of my time at work doing other things, since doing this didn't take much effort.
Later on, I wrote this, parts of which I sold to Adbusters Magazine. It has never been published in it's entirety...until now.
By Tom D’Antoni
FIRST: /sit down in a quiet place and empty your mind of these things. Honesty, kindness, taste, and love for your fellow human beings.
I was out of work. TV jobs had dried up, so had radio jobs. I was knocking out a few pieces for “Sports History Magazine”, which folded while I was working on assignment.
Worse than that, the unemployment was about to run out. Two weeks left, Jesus.
In front of me, was an ad in the Sunday paper for a TV/radio producer/writer at an ad agency. Said I must be comfortable in editing situations. Hell, tape editors were the people I got along with best. And anyway since the unemployment was running out I was prepared to appear comfortable in any situation.
The agency specialized in car commercials for local dealerships all over the country. Same kinds of commercials. Different dealers.
I got an interview, dressed for success, and walked into hell.
SECOND: Learn how to keep a straight face in the presence of bad work produced by your superior. This will serve you well when dealing with clients for whom you must produce similarly bad work.
At my first interview the “Creative Director” showed me some of the agency spots. I had already noted the irony of his title.
I exercised great self control.
I didn’t laugh.
I didn’t ask him if he thought they were funny.
He didn’t think they were funny. They were his best work.
Keeping in mind my last unemployment check was in my breast pocket, I unclenched my jaw and told him he probably sold a lot of cars with those spots. The problem was, I was right.
And it was then I had the Devil’s enlightenment. Screaming men and loud music DO sell cars. At age forty, I as finally approaching a level of cynicism I had only dreamed of.
He was impressed with my TV experience and was unable to read my mind, so he hired me.
Another reason I got the job was because after my interview, I sent a telegram (yes a telegram) to the boss touting myself in shamelessly offensive car commercial language.
He liked it.
I was quickly learning the art of self-mortification in the line of duty. I wasn’t going to approach it quite like I did when I wrote for that supermarket tabloid, I thought. I WANTED to do that. I NEEDED to do this, but it was kinda the same thing. The sleaze level, the lack of taste, and the deception involved.
It was attractive to me in the same way.
My career had gone from idealism to survival.
Making car commercials.
Oy.
THIRD: Demonstrate to the boss how eager you are to learn how to lie, cheat, and steal in order to sell cars.
The first day on the job, the boss called me into his office, gave me a cup of coffee, and sat me down.
I knew I was about to be let in on the secrets. I felt like it was about to be initiated into a cabal from which, once I learned its rituals, I could never escape.
I made a lot of eye contact as he bared his dark little soul about the real secrets of selling cars to you and me.
He explained that there are three kinds of car commercials: product, positioning, and retail.
Product:
We don’t do those, he said. Those are done by the manufacturers’ agency. All it does is introduce you to the car itself. We’d like to do those, but that’s not our thing. What we like to do is give the dealer the lowest priced spot. We don’t go out of our way to spend a lot of his money.
I was incredulous.
Not spend money? Somebody else’s money? And keep a lot of it for yourself?
But I just nodded.
A thought crept into my brain.
I don’t believe him. And why should I? This guy makes goddamned car commercials!
I found, to my surprise, that at least in this regard, he was telling the truth. This agency was successful, in part, because it made commercials real cheap, and still sold cars. Dealers liked that. After all, they had cokehead sons to support.
Positioning:
We do some of those, he said. Positioning is like this: Where does this model fit the buyer? The difference between an Isuzu Trooper and a Rodeo. Same make…different price range…different feeling about the car. It doesn’t really sell the car itself…it tells the buyer if the car fits him or not.
Sounded nebulous to me.
It’s like a retail spot more than a product spot, he said.
Just not the hard sell? I thought. No prices and terms.
We just don’t go in for the kill on it, he said.
I thought so.
“Go in for the kill,” I repeated in my head. The kill.
The language at the agency was loaded with football jock talk. Anything for a win. Anything.
Sometimes I’m ashamed to be a man.
Retail:
This is what we do 90% of the time, he said. There’s a ten day window got for us to convince a buyer to put up his money. And we tell the dealers to make their sales correspond to the second and last weekends of the month. That’s when the paydays occur.
The most important thing is the price and payments. Price and payments. Price and payments.
I got the picture. It was price and payments. And he was selling me like he would anybody else.
And location. If you can put the buyers town, or suburb, or neighborhood or street or goddamned house number in the spot, then do it.
Hence spots that begin:
<VERY LOUD MUSIC>
FIRST SCREAMING MAN: They’re coming from (your town)!!!!!
SECOND SCREAMING MAN: They’re coming from (another town nearby)!!!!!
FSM: They’re coming from (still another neighboring area)!!!!!
SSM: Why?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?
FSM: PRICE!!!!!
SSM: YOU HEARD US…..PRICE!!!!!
Something like that.
I wanted to run, screaming, not persuasively, but in agony at what I knew I had to do in order to keep this job. Still, in the back of my mind was the feeling of deep irony. Now I was going to make pure schlock. Me. Unadulterated evil crap. Not a parody, not an imitation, but the real thing.
God help me.
Fourth: At all time, try your level best to avoid meeting with the client or his representatives as this activity may lead to the furious consumption of alcohol and strong drugs on your part.
Lucky for me I had to endure a few such meetings. It is one thing to go about the task of producing bullshit commercials. It is another to actually face the bull itself.
One such bull was a beefy Italian man who owned a lot of car stores ina major American city. He spoke in the manner Lenny Bruce once described when he was talking about goodfellas sitting in the front row of a nightclub as “tape running slowly backwards” Lenny also said he never told them to be quiet during his routine either. “Go ahead, throw up on my pants if you like,” was his way of saying, “I’ll make any kind of car commercial you like, sir. Just don’t kill me.”
I did have to meet with the slick sleazebag Ford dealer who got himself in so deep with the government and his coke habit that he blew his brains out.
I had to talk to these people. And they had not a speck of irony about them. They were predators who would do anything or say anything you wanted to hear as long as you bought a car from them.
QUOTING FROM A SPOT:
“Bad credit?
No problem!!”
Why? Because they are nice guys trying to help you out? Well, no. Because they could sell the same car over and over again. They liked bad credit because they knew they could repo that sonuvabitch man times.
If I could convince them I was on their team, that I was part of the conspiracy…well, then I was ok. But they were smart, and they didn’t really trust anybody. I guess they figured everybody else was as crooked as they were.
And they sized me up right away. That’s why, I think, the agency head and the “creative” director kept me away from them.
I didn’t mind.
FIFTH: Understand that the process of creating such a monstrous work in NOT like opening the Seventh Seal of the Apocalypse.
As a matter of fact a car commercial, even a TV spot can take under three hours make, from the time the account exec gets off the phone with the client till the label goes on the tape box.
This is, after all, retail.
Here’s how it can go:
The account exec gets a call from the dealer. The dealer has just had too much to drink at lunch and has come up with a sale idea. Something original like….oh….a tent sale.
He really wants to be on the air with it. He can’t have it today? Ok, how about tomorrow.
The account exec, counting his commission as he speaks, says sure, no problem. We’ll fax “the creative” (meaning, a script and a storyboard) in about a half an hour. He finds out how much the guy wants to spend and the particulars of the sale, including the disclaimers.
FIFTH AND A HALF: Accept the fact that the disclaimers are your quickest route to damnation.
You know, the little lines of copy that you can’t read at the bottom of the screen? Even if you tape it and pause the tape you still can’t read them.
They are not meant to be read. They are there because one government body or another said they must be.
What they do is contradict almost everything else that is said in the commercial. That’s the trick.
Say something that sounds like it’s a bargain you just can’t pass up, and then deny everything in the disclaimer.
Oh, that low price isn’t a buy? Nope. The small print tells you it’s a lease.
What? I have to pay all that money down? Well, sure. Didn’t you read the disclaimer?
There are legal limits to size and time on the screen in some states. Even the best of them, it is too small, too fast, and too unintelligible to understand. But that’s alright. Understanding is not what is offered to you.
My personal favorite was Missouri
FIFTH (cont.)
After the account exec gets the details of the deception, and assures the client the agency can deliver (whether he knows it for a fact or not), he runs down the hall to the office of the Creative Director and throws it all on his desk.
The Creative Director bitches and says the account exec owes him one, but turning around a spot so fast is normal for him.
So he gets on the phone with the client to iron out all the gory stuff again and then sits down and writes a script.
This takes, oh, fifteen minutes tops, because the Creative Director has written this spot 45 different ways already. This month. Its always the same because it always works. Why change it?
Then comes the storyboard. Another fifteen minutes and its all faxed. At the point, I have been alerted and am scurrying to find the voiceover guys, a place to record them, and an editing suite to make the spot. All concerned are aware that a call could come anytime day or night, so rounding up all the required components is easy. And if one of the components isn’t available, there is always another that can be plugged in.
And finally the Creative Director calls me into his office to explain the spot. Like he needed to.
I had to endure listening to him read…no SHOUT it to me. Or at me. I never told him that his reading had no relationship to how it really sounded. I knew what he wanted. The screamers knew what he wanted.
Who didn’t know?
I sat there and listened to him and I knew that at a crucial point in the reading of the script he would start spitting. And that the glob of spit would stay suspended on his lips, sometimes passing from his upper lip to his lower lip in a thin strand.
What was I supposed to do except listen to him SHOUT his script to me? The same script he had SHOUTED out to me a hundred times before? Was I supposed to tell him the truth?
I nodded at the appropriate times and got it up enough to tell him “Sounds great! That should move ‘em this weekend!!!!”
SIXTH: Close your eyes and reconfirm that the process of making a car commercial is based on manipulation and deception. And that it is best if all concerned are in on the joke.
My first recording session was a gimmie. I was just along for the ride. It wasn’t that I had never been in on one. I had 10 years in the business. But this one was special. It was my first session in hell.
It took place in a slightly more than amateur studio we used because all the other studios were booked. It was nestled in the basement of an aging voiceover talent’s home. We met with the talent, another aging but still active disc jockey/sports reporter, play-by-play/ voiceover talent/and dinner theater actor with a lot of national radio credentials, who was more interested in showing us the badly shot home videotape of his latest performance in (I don’t know…Carousel, or something like it) than in doing the spot.
The other people in the room, the engineer and his father (who owned the place) had to pretend they liked it even though it was laughable (to me). I couldn’t really tell if it was laughable to them. I hoped so, but I think they really liked it.
I fell right into line and mumbled something about “being really good, Johnny!” Keeping the talent happy was something I had learned a long time ago in TV, even when he (or she) was a no-talent, an egotistic bastard who tried to stab you in the back at every opportunity.
But, there was a moment when everyone was in on the joke. Time to record. And this guy was a pro’s pro.
The “Creative Director’s” passion was writing too many words to really fit into a 60 second spot, and then getting the talent to yell real fast, then faster and faster until he got it all in.
I learned later that this guy had worked with the “Creative Director” for many years and knew what to expect. He looked at the script (for the first time), did a quick read through and nailed it on the second try.
And then he pulled out the dinner theater video tape.
It might have been “Brigadoon.”
SEVENTH: When actually making the car commercial, try to arrange the session so that the session so that the “Creative Director” and the client are not present.
Otherwise you have to hold it all in. If the client or the Creative Director is present, one cannot say, in a clear, loud voice, the following about another man’s spot, or about a spot the client is paying thousands of dollars to make: “Jesus, this really sucks!!!”
As I have done.
If neither is present one can enter the edit room hung-over, throw the storyboards and the audio tape on the desk in front of the videotape editor and say, “Just fucking do this, will you? I need some sleep.” And know that he has done enough of these things to do it right.
As I have done.
EIGHTH: Do not allow the frantic nature of the business to interfere with your own neuroses.
When there are too many words to fit in the time allowed and you must call the Creative Director to cut some.
When the client has sobered up from lunch and has called back the Creative Director to change everything.
When the client and Creative Director are both present in the edit room and you must appear to give a shit.
When you’ve used the same piece of music behind the last fifty spots and know you will continue to use it as long as it sells cars.
When the piece of spit on the Creative Director’s lip is about to make you slap him. Or throw up.
When you think you have finally purged yourself of the guilt of your actions.
When you have discovered you have an addiction to sleaze.
When God tells you its time to quit by willing the bottom to dropout of automotive market and the agency lays everyone off.
Then?
NINTH: Purge this experience by writing the vilest, most aggressive, most shocking car commercial the world has ever heard.
That’s what I did. Here it is.
I suggest you get a friend and read it aloud, pretending to be screaming car commercial guys. And as fast as you can.
FIRST GUY: FUCK YOU (YOUR TOWN)!!!!
SECOND GUY: IF YOU WANT TO BUY A NEW CAR THIS WEEKEND
FG: YOU’RE A BIG ENOUGH SCHMUCK TO COME TO (YOUR FAVORITE DEALER)
SG: BAD DEALS!!
FG: CARS THAT BREAK DOWN!!
SG: THIEVES!!!
FG: N IF YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING TO FIND A BARGAIN AT (THE DEALER) ….
SG: YOU CAN KISS MY ASS!!!!
FG: IT IS OUR BELIEF THAT YOU’RE SUCH A STUPID MOTHERFUCKER…
SG: YOU’LL FALL FOR THIS BULLSHIT….
FG: GUARANTEED!!!!!
SG: IF YOU FIND A BETTER DEAL…
FG: SHOVE IT UP YOUR UGLY ASS!!!
SG: YOU HEARD RIGHT!!
FG: SHOVE ITUP YOUR UGLY ASS!!!!
SG: BRING YOUR TRADE…
FG: BRING YOUR TITLE…
SG: BRING YOUR WIFE…
FG: WE’LL FUCK HER!!!!
SG: THAT’S RIGHT, WE’LL FUCK YOUR WIFE!!!
FG: BECAUSE AT (YOUR DEALER)….
SG: YOU’RE FUCKED SIX WAYS
FG: TAKE A HIKE…
SG: TO (THE DEALER)
FG: HOME OF CHALLENGE PISSING!!
SG: THAT’S RIGHT……
FG: CHALLENGE PISSING!!!!
SG: HOW DOES IT WORK?
FG: IF YOU CAN PISS SIX FEET IN THE AIR STRAIGHT UP AND NOT GET WET…
SG: YOU GET NO DOWN PAYMENT!!!!
FG: DON’T WAIT!!
SG: DON’T DELAY!!
FG: DON’T FUCK WITH US OR WE’LL RIP YOUR NUTS OFF!!!
SG: ONLY AT (YOUR DEALER)!!!
FG: THE ONLY DELAER THAT TELLS YOU TO FUCK OFF!!!
SG: HURRY UP ASSHOLE
FG: THIS EVENT ENDS THE SECOND AFTER YOU WRITE US A CHECK.
SG: AND IT BETTER NOT BOUCE OR YOU’RE A DEAD MOTHERFUCKER!!!
FG: (YOUR DEALER)!!!
SG: (YOUR TOWN’S) FILTHIEST!!!
FG: AND EXCLUSIVE HOME OF THE MEANEST SONS OF BITCHES IN THE STATE OF (YOUR STATE)!!!
SG: GUARANTEED!!!!!!!!
This commercial actually exists. I cut it one afternoon after we had done all the other spots.
It helped.
TENTH: Live with your guilt. Do good works to try to allay it. Drink if you have to.
After the agency laid us all off, I lost my other two jobs. My girlfriend left me. And I ended up driving a cab for awhile.
One day the owner bought some new cabs. I looked at the dealership logo on the trunk.
I had done their spots.
I deserved it.
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