If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

We were lucky enough to have Steve Golin stop by the agency last week.

In case you’re not aware of his work, he produced Wild At Heart, The Game, Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Babel, Spotlight and The Revenant, for which he won the Oscar for Best Picture (to go with his Palme D’Or/Emmys/Baftas etc.). On TV he brought us True Detective, Mr Robot, Twin Peaks and Beverly Hills 90210. He’s also the founder and CEO of Anonymous Content, so you might have made an ad through his company (full list of his stuff here).

So he’s pretty fucking good at what he does.

Here are some of the interesting things he told us…

John Malkovich agreed to Being John Malkovich reluctantly. Then he watched the final film and said he wished he could afford to buy it back and have it destroyed. Steve still made him go to Venice and promote the film, which then got a great reception.

They shopped Mr. Robot everywhere before the nicey-nicey USA network came in for it. He was going to turn them down (they said they’d change and make Mr Robot as gritty as it needed to be but he wasn’t sure) but the creator needed cash to pay his rent so they went with USA after all. The rest is Golden Globe-winning, Emmy-nominated history.

Many people currently lament the disappearing middle of the film business; films are currently either overblown CGI superhero crap or small indies. Steve says the intelligent mid-budget fare has simply moved to TV.

He was in the right place/right time for the birth of MTV. His was one of the few outfits set up to make music videos, so that’s where he cut his teeth. He then had an overall plan to take his directors from videos to commercials to movies. It worked.

It took 5 years to get the script for Eternal Sunshine finished. The Revenant took 12 years to make: “Woody Allen said ‘80% of success is just showing up’. If you show up every day, and work pretty hard, things will happen. When you’ve been doing it for a long time, if you’re smart, you have a lot of projects. It’s always interesting to see how things get momentum. You are never quite sure when it’s going to happen.”

The Revenant was all set to go but then someone came in with the cash to make Wolf of Wall Street and DiCaprio went for that instead. They’d been shopping WoWS around for years with no takers. Steve thinks The Revenant would never have been a big hit without Leo. He’s right.

The creative process goes: story/script then package (actors together with directors etc.).

He has loads of projects on the go all the time. On a typical day he comes in, looks at the list and works out what he can do to move any of them forward.

Alejandro G. Inarritu was supposed to direct True Detective but he dropped out to do Birdman, so Cary Fukanaga got his chance.

No one wanted to make ads for 6 months after 9-11. Nearly bankrupted him. Same as the 2008 crash.

David Fincher legitimised big directors doing TV when he agreed to do House of Cards. Matthew McConaughey did the same for big actors with True Detective.

Overall he seemed like a really nice guy. He said that he got pretty vengeful and bitter when his company was bought out in the late 90s. Coincidentally (or not) that was also when he got cancer.

Things we can learn from the above: you can start small and make it very big; never give up; always do what you can to move something forward; you can bounce back from the biggest disasters; have patience; fate can give you unexpected legs up but it helps if you’re in the right place at the right time; trust your instinct but be prepared to be wrong; don’t be mean or you’ll get cancer.

Bowie’s 100 favourite books (thanks, T).

The roots of every story in 4:33:

Army figures doing yoga instead of killing people (thanks, G).

Evolution of stop-motion (thanks, D):

Remember Those Great VW Ads documentary (thanks, S. And don’t forget the excellent book of the same name):

What animals would look like if they had eyes at the front (thanks, D).

Amazing raw footage from Mad Max Fury Road:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfm4gvxNW_o

All sentient beings sponge, that is they soak up elements of their environment and then use them in some way. For people in the creative industries this process is thought to be essential to producing their work: a few manga cartoons + Culture Club’s greatest hits – a La Recherche Du Temps Perdu = brilliant novel/ad/scene/album.

But I have a few questions regarding the extent to which this is/isn’t helpful:

Does the quality of the input affect the quality of the output? Is watching nothing but Adam Sandler movies worse than reading nothing but Dickens novels? The obvious answer would be that it is; after all, the plotting, elegance of writing, depth of human truths and originality of character are clearly far ‘better’ in Dickens novels (because in Sandler movies they are utter toilet). But you could make a case for the opposite being true. You never know what influences are going to come out at what point or in which creative endeavour, so it may be that the Sandler ‘jokes’ lead to more connections with other things that then go on to create more original thoughts. If it’s impossible to be sure, why not shove it all in?

The other possible benefit of soaking up ‘lower quality’ material is that it can point you in the direction of what to avoid. Clichés can repel you, acting as markers for what not to include in your own work, so perhaps it’s a good idea to see what’s not good in order to realise that it’s not good. I see this often when my kids watch certain ‘kiddy’ movies: they tend to enjoy them more because it’s not the umpteenth time they’ve seen a certain gag/character/twist. But by the time they’ve seen these things many times they should understand that they ought to steer clear of them in their own work.

Still on the subject of kids I wonder about the cartoons they watch vs the cartoons I watched. Theirs are far more inventive, irreverent, original, creative, clever, crazy and inspiring than anything I saw. Compare Button Moon to Adventure Time, or The Flumps to The Amazing World of Gumball. The distance between them is light years, and that makes me wonder if what my kids are soaking up is turning them into far more creative people. My wife used to work with Vince Squibb and he once told her that he used to watch TV all the time, something to which he attributes his amazing level of creativity. Yes, he watched all the same shite I did and still became one of the greatest creatives of all time, but would he have been even better if he’d been a kid now?

Does the quantity of the input affect the quality or quantity of the output? In the case of Mr. Squibb it clearly did (or at least that’s what he thinks). Then again I’m sure there have been many, many kids who watched an awful lot of crappy TV but didn’t use those influences to create great work of their own. That may be because they didn’t have an outlet that would allow them to express those original thoughts, but you’d have thought it would have come out somewhere. Have they all painted their houses unusual colours or made crazy birthday cards? Did they want to but found that such ideas were frowned upon enough times to put them off suggesting them?

My kids have watched a huge amount of very creative stuff and they’re now very creative kids, but is that down to what my wife and I have encouraged them to do, or is it because their boundaries have been stretched by the massive amount of innovative work they’ve experienced?

I suppose that if you only had a single book to read then your creative expression would be somewhat limited (perhaps not entirely confined to what was found in the book, but probably missing the beneficial influence of the solo of Voodoo Chile). If we take that logic to its nth degree then surely the more you take in the better the chances of something interesting coming out. The random connections your mind can make must be greater in number, leading to odder and more original combinations and fresher thinking.

Does the diversity of the input make a difference? Similarly to the above two questions, it’d be interesting to know the extent to which hopping from Bollywood movie posters to Ansel Adams photographs to Whigfield albums creates more innovative work. It seems to make sense that putting together ingredients that don’t usually mix would create a final result that is less likely to have been seen before. Then again, if you’re trying to write an opera, is it better to watch a double bill of Beverly Hills Cop and Un Chien Andalou or sit through some John Cage, Brian Eno and Wagner? If you have a certain aim in mind, should you stick closer to the things in that neighbourhood, or stick to the diversity plan and take a helicopter all over the world? I’m sure I’ve heard of instances of the packaging on a jar of gherkins inspiring a classic album or a page of Dr. Suess providing the fuel for a documentary on gang violence, but I suppose hoping for that kind of serendipity takes a bit more confidence.

I used to enjoy flicking through old D&AD annuals, but not so much for the ads. Instead I’d look in the pop promo or environmental design sections to see what was going on away from my own industry. And it wasn’t even to look at the concepts; it was more to see hundreds of different random subjects in a short space of time: T-shirts, school books, frogs, Marshall stacks, Kate Bush, Korea, trees, a certain shade of orange etc. Award books are so far out of date that their innovation is non-existent, but the little odds and sods they contain are pure gold.

Does the timing of the input make a difference? I always wanted to be one of those creative people who kept a little notebook of all the funny little cartoons and photos that might prove useful at some point in the future. Then I read an interview with John Hegarty where he said it was a bad idea because then you weren’t giving your mind the opportunity to rearrange them in unexpected ways. If they sat in a big jumble at the back of your brain they might attach themselves to each other less predictably, possibly connecting things you’d seen decades apart from each other. Then again, I know plenty of people who have had successful careers keeping such a notebook, so i suppose you should just do whatever works for you.

Sometimes you get a brief that immediately screams at you to put two things on your office wall together in a Gold Lion-winning combination, but more usually you end up subconsciously marrying a line from an episode of Grange Hill circa 1984 with a passage from a Shakespeare sonnet you heard at a wedding last month. What puts them together? Who knows, but something is creating the alchemy and the timing of those connections could be crucial.

So sponge away. There seems to be little method to it other than the more the merrier…

The banter in a photo of Etonians who met Putin.

Amazing animation of the slave trade.

The gluten free museum.

One of the all-time great movie endings.

Trump Facts well animated (thanks, D).

Kerouac’s 30 “beliefs and techniques” for writing and life.

Excellent replies to Chinese photoshop requests (thanks, G).

Very cool version of Sound of Silence (thanks, G):

Mike Figgis in conversation with Tony Kaye (thanks, J):

Christopher Walken reads the Three Little Pigs (thanks, A):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp_a9TLISoM

I was just reading this interesting article about the ways in which emotions trump facts

“…people are not automatons. People are flesh and blood, heart and soul, and we aren’t moved by numbers alone. We live on stories. We thrive on emotion. We want to laugh, to cry, to rage. So if the political establishment wants to prevent a slide to ever increasing extremes it needs to learn the lesson that Brexit has taught us so starkly: learn to speak to people’s hearts as well as their heads. Otherwise, we may find ourselves headed for some very dark political times indeed.”

So far so understandable, but the tricky thing is that emotions are ever-shifting, subjective, personal and hard to nail down. We can always try to tug at the heartstrings to exactly the right extent, but how many times has ‘touching’ come off as mawkish or sentimental? How often has ‘thrilling’ fallen short and instead become dull? And I’ve lost count of the myriad times ‘funny’ has ironically been more like its opposite.

Emotional persuasion is taking more of a risk: presenting facts is a fairly simple and straightforward process, but emotions carry baggage. Many of us don’t like to feel as if we’re being manipulated into some kind of reaction, particularly if the intention behind it is to sell soap powder or cars. Huge companies spending large sums of money to employ ‘experts’ in an attempt to make us cry/sympathise/worry in order that they might make large profits are not the most likeable entities.

Then again, when it’s done well you don’t really notice the blueprint beneath. Or at least the effect works well enough for you to forgive any manipulation. Then you’re left with an experience that allows the irrational to supersede the rational and a communication that hits harder and becomes far more memorable.

What are the tacts behind this? These Levi’s jeans are a bit roomier? I have a feeling very few people left with that new piece of information, and if they did I don’t think it’s what made them seek out the trousers. But I’ll bet thousands asked their friends if they’d seen that Levi’s ad where they run through the walls:

The facts: John Lewis sells stuff that people might like. Is that really going to get you to visit one of their shops? Of course not. But a little story about what that stuff might mean to someone, a story that has you blinking back tears? Perfect.

Kmart ships stuff. So do loads of other shops. Big deal. Then again, if you make that point in a very funny way you can jump to the front of the shops-that-ship queue.

Clearly emotion trumps logic, but in my experience we rarely get explicit about that during the brief or creative review. It’s kind of left unsaid or assumed that the work we produce will elicit an emotional reaction. Perhaps a more deliberate approach would leave us with more hits than misses.

Famous album covers with Star Wars characters.

Literal video of Total Eclipse of the Heart (thanks, W):

RIP Gene Wilder:

All of Christopher Walken’s dancing:

https://vimeo.com/90407771

15 music videos filmed in one take (thanks, Y).

Ghetto hikes (thanks, A).

The 25 best unscripted scenes in movies:

Girlfriends describe their boyfriends’ penises to a police sketch artist:

Anonymous writes:

Hi Ben,

I was just wondering what you thought of this ad directed by Spike Jonze 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABz2m0olmPg
Sorry it’s completely unrelated to your post, I was just wondering what your thoughts were on perfume advertising, it seems a different world to the work most agencies do. They either seen completely random or metaphors. I don’t quite understand how an agency presents a perfume ad back to their client.

Thanks, Anonymous.

I think it’s delightful, but I get your point. When I showed it to my kids yesterday they asked what it was for and when I told them they thought it was bullshit. Then again, most perfume ads are ‘bullshit’: you can’t convey the scent so you just have to convey some sort of vibe that will make it seem cool or at least worth trying next time you’re in Selfridges or an airport. Clearly this spot, which is currently clogging up all my social media feeds, is doing a great job of that. Who knew or cared about Kenzo two days ago? Nobody. And now? All of us. Will I buy some? Nah, but this might be the opening move in a situation where I grow to like the brand enough to buy into it. Or maybe not. Either way, it’s a big step in the right direction.

Also, most ads these days are metaphors, so no problem there.

When I’m at home with my ten-year-old son we sometimes watch a movie. He’s now old enough to watch most 15-rated films, particularly those from the 80s, when 15s were apparently more innocent. So I look through the choices on Hulu, Netflix, HBO and iTunes and try to find him something that he’ll like but isn’t just a load of old kiddie crap.

And it’s hard work. This is because he likes what he already knows: cartoons, space, pirates, dinosaurs, CGI etc. So when I try to broaden his horizons I come up against cynical resistance. But there are of course many, many films he doesn’t like the look of but will enjoy immensely if he gave them a chance. (Only last week it took half an hour of diplomatic-level persuasion to get him to try The Matrix, which he loved.)

As frustrating as this can be, it’s also frustratingly familiar: whether we’re ten or eighty, we all tend to consume that which falls within our comfort zone. As adults we have tried many kinds of food, books, music, holidays, clothes etc. and we now know what we like, so we attempt to experience more of those things, ignoring the rest.

This also seems to be the basis of the algorithms that quietly shape our online worlds. Whether from Google, Pandora, Facebook or whoever serves up your news, the overriding principle seems to be ‘here’s more of what you already like’, and that makes sense makes sense; after all, if you were a Brexiteer you’d hardly want to be fed a steady diet of Remain articles. And if you happened to enjoy Neil Young it’s unlikely you’d want a musical stream solely devoted to Whigfield. A regular at Heston Blumenthal? You’re unlikely to be interested in McDonald’s discounts.

But…

Where do you draw the line? Just like my son, people benefit from being exposed to influences beyond their usual menu. Sticking only to the familiar leads to a small and dreary life. And how did you find that comfort zone in the first place? By trying things you didn’t know you were going to like.

Social media appears to be creating an ever-shrinking feedback loop where you think your news is the news and the opinions of your friends the opinions of everyone. Where are those who disagree with you? Where is the music that doesn’t quite fit with your playlist? Where are the restaurants that might not hit the bullseye first time but could grow on you? Hiding in someone else’s algorithm, I’m afraid.

Yes, I understand that you have developed a ‘taste’ over the years, a set of experiences you’re more likely to enjoy, but you also need the other stuff. You need to see what else is out there, just in case it’s waiting to become your new favourite.

Do the current algorithms take that into account? Not in my experience. It’s becoming harder and harder to look through the other windows because they’re becoming increasingly invisible. And where will that end? Smaller and smaller bubbles and more and more separation from each other.

Ironically that’s neither what I want nor what I need.

Movie plots explained by Trump (thanks, D).

All the insults in Whiplash:

The 57 most influential album covers (thanks, T).

Fantastic post about the business of screenwriting.

Best visual effects Oscar winners supercut:

I just read an excellent article that suggested everything is fiction:

“And I mean that—everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.”

So we all go through the same trials and tribulations as any professional writer, but as it’s a kind of second nature we’re generally unaware that we’re doing it. Perhaps it’s worth having a look at a few of the limitations a writer experiences that also find their way into all our abilities to tell stories:

When most of us tell stories it’s often spontaneous. We don’t rehearse them or write several drafts before giving them to people. So what does that do? It means we have to find the best word/sentence/image/analogy our brains are able to come up with at that time. Does this lend itself to accuracy or the kind of evocation that reflects the essence of the story? Probably not, but once you are called upon to tell the story you suddenly have the writer’s worst nightmare…the deadline. This is especially important when you are called upon to tell a story that you don’t want to tell; the kind of situation that forces you, with very little notice, to make up a lie. That’s an even more demanding form of fiction that leaves you researching and creating simultaneously, as well as attempting a delivery that does not betray your mendacity. Thank god we get loads of practice at it as kids.

Tonality is a huge factor: do you convey a story in a duller way because that’s how it really was, or do you embellish it to make one person sound snickier/braver/louder/funnier/ruder? Is the important thing the story or the truth? I once had a colleague who used to tell stories with a great deal of drama, particularly when he was conveying the way another person spoke. This left me with the impression that this was an interesting person who often found himself in all manner of crazy situations, where the people around him reacted as if every little thing was of major significance. Then I started working more closely with him, leaving me able to compare the ‘real’ situation with his telling thereof. You may be unsurprised to discover that there was quite a large discrepancy between the two that often left us in quite different circumstances. But let’s be honest: we’ve all ‘massaged’ what really happened so that we might influence an outcome or appear in a more positive light. The real question is: how can we possibly know when that’s happening to us? All fiction writers are limited in their ability to convey tone, leaving the words on a page as an approximation of what is in their heads.

The audience has a significant effect. Few people speak to their boss in the same way they speak to their kids. Instead we pare and shape the facts and tone until they work in the way we think we intend. How does that affect the truth? Ask a newspaper or CNN. Every fiction writer has an intended outcome, which can only work if they bear in mind the way the words will land. If you want to scare someone or inspire them you will use the same story in different ways, again, without even thinking how you’re doing it.

Sometimes you don’t have the vocabulary because it doesn’t exist (I’ve written before about the way we use the word ’emotional’ to mean something we don’t really have a word for. And although I can’t find the link, I’ve also mentioned how strange it is that we have a word for what bukkake is, but not for that thing you do when you put your hands out, palms up, to protest your innocence). We also misuse words (eg: ‘literally’; ‘infer’) until they lose their original meaning and we collectively concede that we’re just going to use the new meaning, leaving us with no word for the old meaning. Or we use words that have a million different, often subjective, meanings (‘eg: ‘wrong’; ‘good’, ‘cool’) as if they have just one, and we all know what it is.

I mention the above because people seem to be increasingly inclined to describe advertising creatives as ‘storytellers’ without really considering what that means. If a car has a slightly boring story about the efficiency of its airbags we’re generally inclined to embellish that story in order that we might elicit a desired outcome (eg: people buying the car). But like all human beings we’re usually inclined to bend things in our favour, even if that does unspeakable things to the truth.

So sure: be a storyteller, but be aware of all the little tricks you’re employing to tell that story, and be aware of what that means.