If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

We had an excellent guest speaker in the office last week.

Jack Amiel is the showrunner for HBO show The Knick (podcast interview here). If it has yet to reach your shores, it’s kind of a graphically bloody much better version of Grey’s Anatomy set around 1900 with a main character who is a racist drug addict played by Clive Owen.

Oh, and it’s shot by Steven Soderbergh.

Those of you who listened to the Robert Rodriguez stuff from a couple of weeks ago might like to know that Steven operates in much the same way: he is the camera operator, DOP, editor, director and exec producer, so when he shoots he only captures exactly what’s needed for the edit in his head. This saves the show around 35% of its budget each year, allowing them to spend more on massive, authentic sets with ceilings (very unusual).

Jack was very pleasant, funny and entertaining. He started in the world of sitcoms and told us how different shows have entirely different geneses. For example, Friends writers worked until 5am, while Everybody Loves Raymond‘s writers worked from 9 to 5. Roseanne had a writers room of 12 TV writers and another room of 12 stand up comedians to add more jokes. Apparently everything we’ve enjoyed in the world of American sitcoms was basically invented by Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball’s then-husband. He dispensed with live shows and came up with the multi-camera format which every show followed until the single camera format began to make an impact in recent years. He also invented the repeat/rerun.

Jack then told us an excellent story of how he pitched a script ‘exclusively’ to two producers. When the pitch was over the producers didn’t hang up properly and then proceeded to take several more calls from other writers who were pitching the same project. Jack and his partner listened to all this then sent an email saying they weren’t interested because they didn’t feel they could do it justice. They then heard the two producers receiving the email and panicking, saying they had to offer Jack and his partner the gig right then and there, which meant Jack had to hang up so the producers could get through to him with the offer (which Jack still declined).

Another fine story: Jack was talking to a director on set when a crew member came up and asked if she wanted the cameras set up left or right for the next scene. ‘Left,’ she said immediately. Jack then expressed amazement that she would know the answer to that question so quickly. She replied that she had no idea where the cameras should be for the next scene, and didn’t even know what the next scene was, but if you hesitate you lose the crew. She then looked up what the next scene was and realised she wanted the cameras set up on the right, so she got Jack to scribble some changes on the script and went back to the crew member. ‘Look at this,’ she said. ‘Jack’s made all these damn changes, so know we’re going to have to set up the cameras on the right’.

But the most interesting stuff was about Soderbergh. Apparently he ‘retired’ because he felt he had made too many good films to have to go cap in hand for funding. The straw that broke the camel’s back came with Behind the Candelabra, which no one would fund, despite the inclusion of Michael Douglas and Matt Damon. So now SS owns his own Red camera and can shoot faster and cheaper than anyone, and better than almost anyone. Apparently he heard about The Knick in June a couple of years ago and said, ‘Right, I’m going to start shooting this on August 22nd. I really hope I’m going to be shooting something you (HBO) are going to own’. The title of this post is how Jack described Steven’s working method.

He also keeps a strictly closed set. This became funny when one of the actresses playing a nurse asked if her dad could come to the shoot, only to be told that it was closed to all. SS didn’t budge, even when (or perhaps because) the actress explained that her dad was Bono.

Check out The Knick. Grow the balls of Steven Soderbergh. Furnish the planet with greatness (thanks, Jack)..

People draw their ideal sex dolls (thanks, J2).

James Brown’s miso soup commercials (thanks, J):

Barbie Instagram (thanks, G).

All fictional characters meet in Hell’s Club (thanks, P):

McDonald’s secret menu (thanks, J2).

Fun in Apple stores (thanks, C).

Oops… I put this up a day early. I’ll add other stuff tomorrow if it appears.

Hey Ben,

Me and Chris were going through some old stuff and we found the book that got us into Fallon.

However, it wasn’t our ad-book that got us the job,
it was a slapdash book of C&J nonsense that accompanied the ad-book.

We’d been stuck at TBWA\London and nobody wanted our sweet asses based purely on the ads we’d made so we made a second book.

We get a lot of junior-middleweights coming to us who are “a bit stuck” so we’ve put it on our site because some people might find it useful.

Or they might think it’s self-indulgent balderdash.

Either way its up there.

Fuck it.

J&Cx

Fuck it, indeed.

Or have a look.

Here it is.

As the blurb says: ‘I never thought we’d make an episode of Freakonomics Radio extolling the virtues of a series of TV ads for a financial-services firm. But I hope you’ll agree this was worth talking about — and I’m all in favor of raising the level of TV ads.’

Oooh… That kind of continues the theme I started yesterday. Spooky coincidence or yawn-worthy non-event? Probably the latter

Anyway, here are some of the ads (guess which one broke a world record):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3pFHPgH3oU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBqZh2suZMM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGjYa6S2ZyY

An interesting riposte has appeared in response to the negative-viral-letter-from-dude-who-left-the-business-then-passed-away that I posted last week.

The general vibe, one that’s annoying undeniable, is the old ‘why curse the darkness when you can light a candle?’

If things are ‘bad’ (always a subjective position to take) or don’t work as well as they could (more objective) then there’s always something you can do to improve the situation. Lindsay’s lament over the passing of the overnight test, and the circumstances that led to such a terrible occurrence certainly makes some good points, but without a blueprint to improvement at the conclusion, what good does it do?

I think it’s pretty clear that advertising is not as big or fun or respected as it once was, and I’ve certainly detailed many of the possible reasons for that, but there’s still plenty of enjoyment and fulfilment to be had. My own working weeks are consistently gratifying, stimulating and rewarding, and they certainly beat working in call centres or behind the till at McDonalds. Are they as fun as my late nineties days at AMV? That’s a much harder question to answer. As I’ve learned from watching my kids, everything is a bigger deal when you’re younger, so meeting David Abbott at 24 probably hit me harder than meeting Lee Clow for the first time a few years ago. But is it intrinsically a less significant occurrence? Nope. Just as I felt happily privileged to get into the same lift as David Abbott in 1998, I now find myself equally lucky to pass Lee in MAL’s corridors in 2015.

But I digress…

The point is that life is as brilliant as you find it to be. There is as much wonder to be discovered in a brick as there is in a rainbow. Reductions in budgets/salaries and losses of brilliant personnel have definitely diminished the ostensible appeal of advertising, as has the mountain of annoying digi-wank and the steady decline in the average ‘I-wish-I’d-done-that’ level of the work, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be like that forever. It could start on an upward course tomorrow. All it takes it for some brilliant people to make some brilliant work, attracting more brilliant people who will create more brilliant work, allowing us all to ride a virtuous circle all the way to the Champagne Bar at Claridges. Or a Nobel Prize.

Now… who might those brilliant pathfinders be…?

Donald Trump says China a lot (thanks, J):

Solve Jimi Hendrix’s murder in a game where everyone is Jimi Hendrix (thanks, T).

Marvellous art (thanks, T).

Puppetry of the arse (thanks, J).

Kanye x Seinfeld.

The new Apple campus, by drone (thanks, S):

How climate change fucked Syria, which led to the refugees (easy to digest cartoons).

Messing with grammar when you’ve shot a black person.

Here’s an excellent and delightful article.

“There are two ways to get richer: one is to make more money; and the second is to discover that more of the things we could love are already to hand (thanks to the miracles of the Industrial Revolution). We are, astonishingly, already a good deal richer than we are encouraged to think we are.”

Indeed.

For some reason this blog post has been surfacing on social media lately.

It’s a great read if you work in advertising and a great read if you don’t.

I was listening to another Tim Ferris podcast the other day. This time he was interviewing the filmmaker Robert Rodriguez (From Dusk Till Dawn, Sin City etc.), who had some very interesting things to say about creativity:

He keeps a journal of everything he that happens to him, then uploads it so that he can search for certain subjects/words/etc. This allows him, for example, to be a better dad by reliving all his kids’ moments with them in great detail. But it also makes him a better filmmaker, as it gives him the ability to look back at decisions he made in the creation of a project and see if they turned out well or should have been done differently.

He says that in any creative endeavour, the job is 90% the same. So if, like him, you want to write, edit, direct, score and produce your work, you shouldn’t let a lack of experience hold you back (for more on this, check out his interview with Quentin Tarantino, where Quentin explains how he shot his first film, Reservoir Dogs, mainly though his knowledge of acting). When he told one of his teachers that he was planning to be the DOP on his first film, the teacher tried to persuade him against the idea because he thought all his actors would get pissed off watching him set up shots. Rodriguez didn’t listen to him, and it turned out fine. In fact, his many skills meant that he could make his first film for much less money because he could edit as well as direct. This meant he only needed to shoot exactly what he required to make up the final film, rather than cover tonnes of extra footage so that some other editor would have more stuff to work with.

When you stumble you stumble upon things… There’s a big thread of failure=good running through the whole podcast. He also quotes Francis Ford Coppola, who says that failure doesn’t endure, meaning that what seems like a failure inevitably turns into something positive. RR made one quarter of the poorly-rceived anthology film Four Rooms. It flopped, but while making it he watched a sequence with Antonio Banderas and his wife and kids and got the idea for his very successful Spy Kids series.

He made El Mariachi for $7000, which he raised by volunteering for medical experiments (one of them merely required him to be fed and housed for a month while he wrote more screenplays). He then cold-called a Hollywood agent (a new guy with no directors on his books) and asked him to watch the El Mariachi trailer. The agent did so and was very impressed, especially when was told that it only cost $7000. ‘Wow,’ he replied. ‘Most trailers cost $20,000-$30,000.’ When Rodriguez explained that the whole film cost $7000 the guy was of course even more impressed. Within a few days he’d set up a deal at Columbia. Rodriguez didn’t have any other films ready to develop, so he proposed remaking El Mariachi as Desperado. Columbia agreed and the rest is history (guess who cut the trailer and designed the poster):

In his TV series, The Director’s Chair, Rodriguez chats to various great auteurs about their craft. In the episode featuring Robert Zemeckis we discover that he seriously considered cutting the Johnny B. Goode scene from Back To The Future and thought that Forrest Gump was going to be a flop. Rodriguez’s point is that even the biggest experts have very little idea what really works. Remember that when anyone in the room seems utterly certain of an artistic decision, especially one you don’t agree with. Much is fluke:

Rodriguez became the chairman and founder of the El Rey TV network, an english language cable network that creates original programming alongside Robert’s favourite movies. That happened because he realised 20,000 people were vying for every opportunity at Sundance, but very few people wanted to put a TV network together. He said maybe 100 people tried to get the rights to the new network, and maybe five of them had a decent plan of how to do it. Now El Rey is carried on all the major cable providers in the US.

Overall he just wanted to make sure people always think of themselves as creative. I couldn’t agree more. Many times I’ve suggested that a person outside the creative department do something ‘creative’ only to hear the reply ‘But I’m not a creative person’. They’re wrong. We are all creative people. Every thought we have is an act of creation, so we are inherently creative entities.

Some people, like Robert Rodriguez, take that possibility to the nth degree.

In conversation with Quentin Tarantino.

People ask to be roasted on Reddit. Hilarity ensues (thanks, J).

Behind the scenes of A Clockwork Orange (thanks, T).

37 things we learned from Fincher’s Gone Girl commentary (thanks, J2).

Straight Outta Compton, swearing only (thanks, J).

Demotivational quotes.

The art of watermelon carving (thanks, T2).

The most timeless songs of all time (thanks, G).

Dave Chapelle warns people of the dangers of AIDS (thanks, J1):

Robert Rodriguez interviews Tarantino:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPtQKlaFE2s