Once More – with FEELING!
1996
Yours truly was a humble editor of low-budget TV commercials at a low-power TV station in a low-ranking market. It was an interesting enough line of work, trying to find new and different ways to show used-car salesmen waving at the camera and bleating a hearty “come on down!�
There weren’t that many new and different ways to do this, mind you. And of course, our lovely account reps expected all of it to be done 15 minutes after they handed in the paperwork — regardless of whether or not the actual shoot for the commercial was scheduled for three days later. “Are you working on my spot yet?â€? they’d ask, poking their head into the somewhat cluttered production office repeatedly. And we laughed, oh, how we laughed. Until we realized they were dead serious. At that point, it became readily apparent that there weren’t nearly enough tape boxes and other heavy objects in the room to throw at them.
And into this arena stepped our youngest and most inexperienced salesperson, who had been tapped by someone to whom I will refer only as Agency Lady to produce a commercial for her newest client, a high-class restaurant in a city we’ll just call Fayetteville, Arkansas (to protect the innocent).
Agency Lady was essentially a one-woman advertising agency, or at least she liked to think so. She had no production facilities of her own, no one else working for her — just her trusty cell phone and an office on wheels. At best, she’s a broker; at worst, an overpaid consultant.
Agency Lady wanted us to come and meet her and her client to discuss a very fancy commercial. And after many a hearty “come on down,� I have to admit that the very prospect was intriguing. What we weren’t expecting was a group of people to whom I’ll refer, for the purposes of this article, as The Committee Of Clueless Individuals Who Should Never Have Had A Say In The Damn Thing. (Or TCOCIWSNHHASITDT for short.)
The Committee was comprised of the following Clueless Individuals.
- Agency Lady.
- The Chef, also part-owner of the new restaurant, who had an alarming and most disturbing habit of twisting the filters off of filtered cigarettes and chain-smoking them. As a result, the teeth of this man, who — by default, since he’s presumably preparing many meals a night — one would presume might wish to at least appear sanitary, were black as night.
- The Chef’s Agent. (We don’t know why he’d need one either.)
Together, these Clueless Individuals were mapping out a grand plan for the newly opened restaurant, including an elaborate commercial beyond the usual expectations for this area. We didn’t mind that. What we did mind, however, was the fact that none of the three members of TCOCIWSNHHASITDT could agree on what, exactly, the commercial in question should be like.
For example, some think that doing the entire spot in black & white would be a powerful and classy statement. Other discussions center on whether there should be a spokesperson on screen, or simply a voice-over. And so on.
We go back a week later to shoot the spot. We spend all day there. Instead of The Chef feeding us some of his fine and likely nicotine-stained cuisine, we have to go foot our own bill for burgers. So much for gratitude.
Then we return home to edit the spot. Lots of dissolves and moody lighting – in color, I might add – and The Chef even graces our production studio to provide the voice-over himself. Everything looks good. Everyone likes it. Everyone seems to agree that this is one of the better productions we’ve turned in.
And then the Committee swings into action.
They decide it needs to be different somehow, with Agency Lady, The Chef and The Chef’s Agent all issuing completely different directives as to how to “improveâ€? the spot which, only a week ago, everyone thought was grand. The Chef’s Agent thinks it should be redone in black & white with spot color on things like candles and flames from the grill. Agency Lady wants it reshot on film. (Few TV stations, if any, use film anymore. Even the top market stations don’t bother — and why should they, when they can rent the equipment?)
And so on. In all, at least a dozen revisions are made and handed in. The Chef’s voice-over is replaced, the spot goes from black and white to color and back again (and again), the music is changed nearly every time, and people keep making suggestions.
And then the damn place goes out of business while revisions are still being made.
Maybe it was the fact that they couldn’t agree on the bloody TV commercial and never got around to putting it on the air more than once or twice.
The saga ends with Agency Lady contacting the station’s sales manager, blaming we, the production guys, for the whole folly, and demanding that the production — which went far above and beyond the typical “come on down!â€? spot — should be pro bono since it was such a fiasco. Numerous 80-mile trips between Fort Smith and Fayetteville, several long days on the clock, and countless hours of post production…and she doesn’t want us to bill her for it.
That incident made me decide to leave commercial production and focus more on promotions, something which always intrigued me anyway. I had, by this point, done numerous promos and found them interesting and entertaining to work on. And if I was entertained, there was a good chance that the viewers would be too. Plus…no Committee of Clueless Individuals. With promos, you’re working directly for the station.
Never again, I said. I started looking for a promo job and eventually got one. It was fun beyond my wildest dreams. And at long last, I forgot about Agency Lady and the TV commercial from hell that had driven me out of the lucrative field of TV commercial production.
Bliss.
2002
Having been to Green Bay and back, I’m now working news promotions at Fort Smith’s ABC station. Not quite as much fun, and very frequently frustrating, but also very challenging. I’ve been here for two and a half years now.
In June, a project from hell slowly begins to coalesce in our Fayetteville office, a project which will bring me back in contact with one of my arch-nemeses from the Committee. They’re still out there – and they’re secretly plotting my destruction. Or perhaps just trying to drive me insane.
The project is an awards presentation video for a homebuilders’ association, and the account rep contacted at our station is assured that this will be a quick edit, only about five minutes long, nothing to it. But there is something to it, something dark and sinister. For our account rep has been contacted by Agency Lady, still doing her one-woman show posing as an advertising agency. The plot thickens.
By the time the sales department contacts my boss in creative services, he already has misgivings about doing a presentation video. This is usually the sort of thing that the commercial production department does. The first time I catch a whiff of Agency Lady’s name in connection with this, I voice misgivings, and remind everyone of her involvement with the Chef’s doomed restaurant. Nobody listens.
(It’s worth a mention here that just once in my life, I’ve always wanted to stage-whisper the words “I tried to warn them…but they didn’t listen.� I just always expected those words to coincide with a tragic blimp accident or something similarly momentous, not a TV project.)
The project keeps getting pushed back because Agency Lady is having a hard time getting her crap together. Once there has been a great gathering of crap, in sufficient amounts to fuel the presentation video on pure fertilizer power alone, Agency Lady will appear and issue instructions. At least this is what they tell me will happen. The crap collection procedure continues until the Friday afternoon before the Wednesday night awards dinner.
Agency Lady arrives, waving a newspaper special supplement recently published to promote the event. In this supplement are no fewer than 44 houses which need to be included, one by one, in this video presentation. Each of these houses is represented not by a photo, but by a very fine-line architectural side-elevation drawing. The kind of very fine-line architectural side-elevation drawing which, when knocked down to TV resolution, results in eye-boggling moire patterns. There are also nearly two dozen sponsors, and at one point Agency Lady asks if the entire newspaper supplement page, which must measure all of 10 x 12 inches in irritatingly tiny type, can be compressed onto the screen.
I respond, truthfully, by telling her that it would look very, very bad — and would be completely illegible. To this, she replies, “Okay, never mind about putting the page on the screen then.â€?
This is a very important thing, as you’ll see later.
That night, after my other duties are finished (around 7:30pm), I set about the extremely arduous tack of copying down, from the newspaper circular, the address and builder of each house/subdivision. All 44 of these things are clustered six to a page in the circular, again in very small type, and I don’t even get all of these things typed up that night. Oh, and once the voice track for the presentation was edited and timed out, it was not five minutes. It was closer to twenty.
Over the weekend, I spend 24 hours getting the project to a point where it’s about 85% completed. I made it look as good as possible, and aside from all the moire patterns on those blasted line-art renderings, it almost did look presentable.
On Monday morning, the client — i.e. Agency Lady — wants to see the project, finished or not. She wants to see it now. Now, keeping in mind that this is Monday and we have our routine duties to perform once again, Agency Lady is politely told that she’ll be able to see it Monday night or Tuesday morning, because we won’t be able to get around to dubbing it off until then. The project is dubbed off that afternoon, and is prepared to be sent up to the Fayetteville office via our microwave link that night at around 7pm.
Tuesday morning I walk in, and discover that I’m being accused of gross incompetence. Apparently Agency Lady wanted all of the houses’ visuals to be nothing more than the newspaper pages. She wanted everything to be exactly as seen in the newspaper circular, in fact. She wanted the newspaper circular’s pages transferred to television in whole chunks.
But did she ever explicitly tell me this? No. Guess my gross incompetence is in the area of telepathy.
By Tuesday afternoon, the project has been taken away from our station, and the station has lost its sponsorship of the awards dinner (for which the presentation video was to be our contribution, in lieu of money). Given that I clocked in over 24 hours of time-and-a-half, I’m sure that in a few days accounting will be lamenting the fact that the sponsorship wasn’t just bought outright. Having me at the station all weekend on the clock will almost certainly prove to be more expensive.
And the capper to the situation? Agency Lady, in a huff, tells us that she’ll be going to a video production house in Fayetteville to get the presentation done right.
So let’s check the score at halfway through the fourth quarter here, shall we?
It took me over 24 hours — spread out over three days — to put together the now-rejected presentation. At the time Agency Lady called to tell us we were being dumped and she was going to “start from scratch,â€? about 27 hours remained before the awards dinner began.
And I learned later in the day that, being a busy production house, the place she had chosen to redo the entire presentation could only allot four hours of prep and edit time. It would’ve taken me about 90 minutes to bring the presentation, as I had edited it, to a state of completion — but she had now burned that bridge with the station’s management.
In short, she had four hours to replicate a project I had taken well over a full day to do.
I’m not a vengeful man, nor do I pride myself on such. Sometimes, however, I do get a little bit of satisfaction from a perfectly natural come-uppance in which I had to take no action.
As I put the finishing touches on this piece, I look at the clock and note that the awards dinner began about an hour ago, and so too, presumably, did the video. If, in fact, Agency Lady, my arch nemesis, got one done. I almost wish I could see what it looked like.
Bliss.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.