Ed Gorman
Rough Cut
ONE
As the lights went down in the screening room, the sweet, weedy aroma of marijuana rose from the back, near the projection booth.
There are a lot of holdovers from the flower-power days in our advertising agency. Invite them to view a rough cut of our new commercials and they think it's like seeing Fantasia back in '68.
The projector completed an exceptionally bad day for me by breaking down midway through the leader, throwing the room into darkness, catcalls, and a few giggles.
As if the day hadn't been bad enough. I was still considering swallowing a few dozen sleeping pills because of what a certain sleazy private detective had told me a few hours ago.
The house lights came up. The dozen people scattered throughout the movie-theater seats looked like escapees from the world's last disco-trendy to a fault. Many of the guys were dressed like cowboys to reassure themselves and others that they really were manly, while others were got up in less obvious but no less goofy costumes-short ties, pegged pants, sport coats that looked like bellhop jackets, even a few white-hunter numbers, apparently made necessary by the dense vegetation that Harris-Ketchum Advertising finds itself surrounded by here on the eighteenth floor of a Loop office building.
A few of the ladies were no less ostentatious. This fall the fifties look was back. Some of the women looked like chorus girls in a production of Grease. Fortunately, the majority were sensibly dressed and their looks didn't suffer a bit.
At the moment I was the only guy in the room with a regulation Wembley necktie on, and a suit that Richard Nixon would approve of. I am Michael Ketchum, forty-one-year-old partner in one of the city's most prosperous agencies.
At least that was true for the moment. Given what the private detective had told me, I had some serious doubts about our future.
The door to the screening room opened up and a kindred spirit walked in, a slight man in a dark brown suit. He looked like the sort of guy who ushered at church on Sundays and spent his leisure time building playthings for his kids. Except for his haircut, that is. He had one of those fancy razor cuts that belongs only on a Vegas lounge singer who uses his finger like a pistol when he wants to point out somebody special in the audience. For forty-four-year-old Merle Wickes, the haircut was all wrong: flashy to the point of being comic. It did not go with his jowly face or his beagle-sad eyes or his defeated little mouth. It was like putting Continental hubcaps on a rusted-out Chevrolet.
Merle came down the aisle and seated himself a few rows back from me. When we made eye contact, he glanced away nervously. Merle and I did not speak often these days. As far as he was concerned, the Harris-Ketchum agency had only one real boss-Denny Harris, the same guy who had transformed Merle's formerly traditional haircut into something that Wayne Newton would think was swell. Harris had transformed many other, less obvious things about Merle, too.
At least that's what the private detective had told me.
The commercials the writers tell you about, and that the art directors show you in storyboard form, are almost never the commercials you see in the screening room.
In the studio or on location, things happen, things change. An actor has trouble with a line, so it must be rewritten or altered in delivery so much that it carries a different nuance. Then there's the editor. He or she thinks that the third scene should go where the script calls for the second scene. So that gets changed.
Et cetera.
By the time you sit down in the screening room, you're likely to have a different commercial from the one you scripted. Sometimes the changes lift what was a mediocre commercial into something special. Sometimes the changes turn a thoroughly enjoyable, if unpretentious, spot into a piece of incoherent gibberish.
The lights went down.
The film flickered on the screen again.
What appeared there for the next thirty seconds was a prime example of incoherent gibberish.
The lights came up.
It was obvious from the faces that my cursing had been audible throughout the screening room.
Everybody stared at me. Waiting for me to speak-to tear into Ron Gettig, the producer, who sat in the rear. He was one of the guys wearing a jungle jacket and toking on a joint. He was also one of the guys I always kept in mind when I was working out three times a week in the gym. The thought of him kept me moving around the weight room, getting myself in shape for the inevitable day when I smashed in his smug, Marlboro-man face. He only looked tough. In a bar one night a small man he'd insulted had made quick work of his nose. He'd deserved and gotten a bloody face and a reputation as an empty bully.
Immediately, people started leaving the screening room, calling out the names of the bars where they could be found over the next few hours. It was autumn and early dusk made the trek to waterholes seem all the more urgent. By the time Merle Wickes left, knowing what was coming, seeming anxious about it, only Gettig and I were left.
He had his size 12 feet, encased in snakeskin cowboy boots, propped up on the back of the seat in front of him. A cheroot was in the corner of his mouth. He upped the ante by putting amusement in his blue eyes.
Once a year I went to management seminars where consultants always pushed the same point. Deal courteously and patiently with employees. Give them the benefit of the doubt, even when you're seething inside. Ask questions and listen sympathetically to answers.
"I'm really tired of your bullshit, Gettig," I said, standing over him.
Two days ago, when I'd seen a rough cut of this particular spot, Pd pointed out to Gettig that the ending was wrong for our marketplace, and our particular consumer. Pd told him I wanted the ending reshot. Instead, he gave me the same ending, only edited in such a way that the offensive scene played an even larger part in the commercial.
But you don't know what I'm talking about, do you?
Traynor Chain Saws is this agency's largest account, spending an average of ten million a year on television, radio, and print advertising. Without the Traynor account, we would be half our size and a very mediocre agency. There was even a good possibility that, if we lost the account, we would be perceived as being on the skids, and the rest of our clients would seek help elsewhere. Clients like to be associated with winners, and an agency that's just lost half its billing hardly looks like a winner.
The Traynor account is special in another way. It appeals to an older demographic of middle-middle-class (and upwards) craftspeople. The Traynor costs more than any other saw but the Traynor customer doesn't mind spending it because he knows it's worth it.
Now, you can probably deduce from what I'm telling you what the average Traynor customer is like. Over forty, financially secure, a man who takes quiet pride in his work, whether he uses it to make a living, or just cuts off an occasional branch in his backyard.
He is not your beer-commercial macho type. Any gusto he gets comes from professional pride.
Yet it was the beer-commercial machismo that Gettig kept giving me. The last scene showed an overly muscular sweaty guy cutting down a tree with enough grimaces and groans to fill a half hour of professional wrestling.
The guy may be somebody Gettig is related to, but he was somebody who would offend the average Traynor customer.
Gettig stood up. He's six three. I'm five nine. He hoped to intimidate me. He didn't.
"I'm taking you off the commercial," I said. "Giving it to Molloy."
"Molloy," he sneered. "He says eek when he sees a bug."
"He's a good producer."
"Meaning he takes orders," he said.
"Meaning he does what's appropriate."
He grimaced, much as the man in the commercial had grimaced. Then he leaned toward me a bit. "Maybe someday I'll do what's appropriate."