If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

So the World Gallery posters were pretty darn delightful.

Now we have video captured on an iPhone 6/6+, and it’s just as brilliant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwaV1pIJyZU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P2NgVq9Foo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1KI3pXQaeI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ3zxIX3UAk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iVXyPHDPB4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DOmgey5-4w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub3KngBv0E4

Last week I went to a sort of end of term writers round up of Mad Men.

It was hosted by Matt Groening (yes, the guy who invented The Simpsons) and featured all the Mad Men writers (yes, including the creator, director and exec producer, Matt Weiner, and the incredibly legendary complete and utter motherfucking legend, Robert Towne, of whom more later).

So what did I learn?

1. Matthew Weiner is very nice, witty, urbane, slightly camp and full of great stories.

2. The ideas credit bleeds. Basically, there’s a big room of talented people who contribute all sorts of stuff. The person who writes the first draft gets their name on the episode, then Matt rewrites it, sometimes with the original writer in the room; sometimes alone. For those of you who wrestle with credit (I know I did in my youth, and in another way when I became a CD), this clip sums it all up for the Mad Men guys:

As Matt said, ‘I’ve been Don and Peggy in that scene’. So have I, but less shouty. Of course, these days there are credits on ads, but it’s a team game and we’ve all seen people with no involvement (in fact people who tried very hard to make things worse) get credit for an ad’s brilliance, while the unsung hero who just dropped the magic endline into a chat in a pub gets nothing. It sucks, but with time and experience you can both learn how to make it work and care less when it doesn’t.

Interestingly, the tiny chat I had with Robert Towne involved me asking if he really was one of the writers on Bonnie and Clyde. He told me he was. Is his name on the credits? No. Did he get paid? Yes. Did he get pissed off and cry in the corner? No, he wrote Chinatown. Write Chinatown.

3. When Matt used to write for the Sopranos they’d quite arbitrarily add in more Christopher or use a bit less of Paulie Walnuts. There was no big plan. If they got bored with writing so much of one character they’d pick another and give them a juicy storyline. I thought there was a big, well thought out plan, but no.

I actually got to ask the panel a question that relates to this: if you don’t know how many seasons you’re going to get, how do you construct an overall arc or story for the characters? Matt explained that they put everything into every episode then harvested those things later on. There might have been an old friend or distant relative mentioned in episode 5 who could then appear in episode 25. If you look in season one there’s a point where the head of McCann’s tries to get Don in to work on Coke. At that time the ending hadn’t been planned, but it sort of had. Look at the characters who appear and disappear. A strong and complete backstory gives you all you need to fill up the later episodes of an ongoing series.

4. Here’s the real creative advice: fundamentally you need to trust your intuition. When I watch Mad Men I often wonder ‘Why that sentence?’ ‘Why that twist?’. In the above point it’s clear that the plan (in the case of Mad Men and The Sopranos, two of the four greatest TV series ever made) is not rigid, but overall Matt believes in running with plotlines and conversations that feel right. They might well defy real logic, but there’s an emotional logic that can guide you through decisions that will always be subjective, with no definite right or wrong.

5. Robert Towne. He arrived in a chauffeur driven Bentley, then behaved like he was an old uncle who had been misinvited to the school prom, but not in a bad way. He was a bit grumpy, especially compared to both Matts, but he’s Robert fucking Towne. The Mad Men thing was cool, but once you’ve written Chinatown everything else is always going to be a comedown. One person asked how he ended up writing on the show (here’s a lesson for any of you who ever wonder about taking that chance to make that connection): Robert and Matt were at some dinner. Robert had never heard of Mad Men, but Matt’s wife told him about it (much to Matt’s embarrassment) and suggested he watch an episode. He did so, loved it and offered his services. So don’t be afraid to ask.

A lady then got up and told Robert that Chinatown changed her life. Then she burst into tears and we all applauded.

Robert also quoted Mark Twain: ‘When in doubt, tell the truth”. He also said you could take that however you wanted…

This is the scene that Robert Towne considered the best in the show (plus some background from one of the writers):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1PTqPuqOuI

6. There was an advertising consultant on the panel called Josh Weltman. I hope you don’t mind, but I thanked him on behalf of all of us for absolutely nailing the advertising side of the show. He appreciated that and we chatted about our respective ad careers. He’d also been at BBDO, so we agreed that sooner or later almost all of us end up rolling into Omnicom…

He also told a story about how he and his CD (not at BBDO) had gone to sell some work. They did so, but in the cab back to the office Josh had a better idea. The CD agreed that the new idea was indeed an improvement, so they turned the cab round and went back to the client’s office where they unsold the first idea and sold the new one. I wonder if that ever happens now…

Anyway, it was a really incredible evening, on a par with the Breaking Bad one they did last year.

Top movie state by state (thanks, L).

How dumb are current popular songs? (Thanks, J.)

Louis CK on racism and child molesters (thanks, G):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KctO7S62ZfY

The palettes of great painters (thanks, J2).

Meat on Tinder (thanks, T):

Passport index (thanks, B).

Great interactive promo (thanks, M):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_UhKcAy6xc&feature=youtu.be

And the excellent old Skittles ad that might have inspired it (thanks, M):

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

Here’s a great article about Werner Herzog.

Abandoned by his father at an early age, Herzog survived a WWII bombing that demolished the house next door to his childhood home and was raised by a single mother in near-poverty. He found his calling in filmmaking after reading an encyclopedia entry on the subject as a teenager and took a job as a welder in a steel factory in his late teens to fund his first films.

So that’s pretty amazing.

He believes you should watch crap things and dissect them to see what you would have done differently.

He believes you should do everything yourself. That way all the money can go towards making the movie rather than paying salaries.

He believes you can make a movie for $10,000, and you can get that money by driving a cab for six months.

He believes you should start making a film even if you don’t have the money to finish it.

But he also believes that ‘A project can become a cul-de-sac and your life might slip through your fingers in pursuit of something that can never be realized. Know when to walk away.’

He believes you should just go ahead and make what you want to make, rather than taking a job as a runner or whatever other low-paid position you might consider to be the entry point in a production company.

There’s too much great inspirational stuff there for me to copy it all out. Click on the link, do what he says and acquire ‘true liberty’.

Ooooh! Saucy!

Nice one, Walt.

I imagine the editor is now dead from RSI.

World leaders as hipsters (thanks, B).

Paper airplane throwing at its best:

Bill Murray falls off his chair drunk (thanks, J).

Penis drawing robot (thanks, J).

7-tone fart symphony (thanks, J):

Mad Men Integrated (thanks, S).

Remaster Seinfeld episodes in HD (thanks, J).

Send a fart in a jar (thanks, J).

Delightful street art/graffiti (thanks, T).

And more of that (thanks, B).

That’s a picture I took of Lee Clow giving a talk yesterday to my Media Arts Lab chums.

He dropped so much knowledge he made KRS1 look like Flavor Flav

Here are three things you didn’t know about 1984:

1. It was based on a press ad an unsung copywriter wrote a year earlier. The headline was ‘Why 1984 won’t be like 1984‘. It didn’t sell, but when it came time to make a TV ad Steve Hayden remembered the press ad and used it as the strong inspiration for the greatest TV ad of all time.

Moral 1: there might well be some diamonds buried in your unsold work.

Moral 2: some ideas are ahead of their time.

2. When they first wrote the script it involved a woman watching the Big Brother character on a TV in a small room then smashing the TV with a normal hammer. They soon realised this wasn’t going to be big enough and rewrote it to be the size it is now famous for being.

Moral: go big or go home.

3. Then they showed the script to Ridley Scott and he suggested the downtrodden people should live in mud huts and come out of these huts into the scary room to obey Big Brother. Then they realised it was a bit too much like a concentration camp, so they didn’t go there.

Moral: don’t make ads that remind people of concentration camps.

Then we had lunch and chatted about the version of Think Different with Steve Jobs’s VO:

You probably know this already, but it was touch-and-go whether or not they were going to run this version or the one with the Richard Dreyfus VO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmwXdGm89Tk

At the 11th hour (not literally; it was actually 8am on the day the ad was due to air) Steve called the agency up and said they should go with the Dreyfus version so that the ad would be about Apple rather than Steve.

Lee also insists DDB prevented World War Three, but that’s another story.

You must know by now that The Ad Contrarian blog is one of the best around (far better than this one). Here’s a compendium of the sharpest, sweariest, smartest opinions of the great Bob Hoffman (interest declared: Bob is a friend).

Just have a flick through the pages and you’ll learn many, many things that sit in direct opposition to the mountains of bullshit that dominate the industry today.

(And on the subject of shit, I can attest that each chapter is just long enough for a visit to the lav (two chapters if you’ve been to a dodgy Mexican/Indian restaurant).)

Americans can buy it here. Brits can buy it here.

Kubrick’s early treatment for The Shining.

Excellent song (thanks, J):

If Furious 7’s stunts were real (thanks, M):

Analogue experiments with gravity (thanks, J):

What does 2000 calories get you? (Thanks, G.)

Never give up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjejTQdK5OI

Funny wresting shiz (thanks, A):