Before clicking on this link to this article (and even now as you read) they are around you. On the screen. In your room. Your apartment. House. Everywhere.
Advertising. Every day we respond to it, whether we know or not. Consider the amount of people that’ve told you they watch the Super Bowl “for the commercials.” For the ads. Consider Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the ads he drew up for the Can-Can clubs in Paris during the late 1800s. Director Doug Pray (Surfwise, Scratch) considers it, and how what were once advertisements for scandalous dance clubs now hang in rich people’s Manhattan lofts as art.
“Great copy can be art” is the message here. Be it Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan and it’s life-changing impact on thousands upon thousands of people all over the world or “Got Milk?” and the countless number of non-copyrighted imitators it’s spawned, advertising is pop culture, and good advertising transforms it.
Pray starts with a short montage of natural surroundings: trees, insects and the like. It’s beautiful, vibrant and organic. And then voices begin to tell us about advertising, about “painting on caves” and, somehow, it all makes sense.
Advertising has always been around it seems, since the beginning of man. The “messenger” has always lived, and today the messages are everywhere, covering most walls, buildings, etc.
Be they “rotaters,” (the union workers who stick up copy all over their respective cities’ billboards) or the copy writers/art directors working in the office buildings thinking up the sell points, Pray finds a place for all “messengers” in this 85-minute observation of ad culture.
“What is advertising?” art director George Lois recalls being asked. “Advertising is poison gas,” he responds. “Advertising should tear you up, it should choke you, you should get the chills and maybe you should pass out when you watch it.”
Over the course of the documentary, Lois is revealed to be everything Mad Men‘s Don Draper strives to be as an art director: a creative mind that can alter the thinking of a corporate world.
Much like advertising itself, Art & Copy is both plainly informative (Pray interviews ad pioneer Phyllis K. Robinson about the origins of Doyle Dane Bernbach, the biggest advertising agency in the world, and Mary Wells, founder of Wells Rich Greene) and creatively framed (slick editing, smart elevator music, well-timed cutaway shots, etc.). Thankfully, the subject is more than interesting enough to make up for straightforward recollections and listings of facts. In this way the doc is very similar to Pray’s 2007 Surfwise, which explored the origins and psychology of the Paskowitz family, or “Surfing’s First Family.” The story on screen was too good not to fall in love with, despite occasionally lull pacing and bland historical background.
Pray keeps it simple, so anyone can watch and understand what is going on, and keeps the ads on screen very prevalent (Volkswagen’s “Lemon” campaign from the ’60s, Ridley Scott’s Apple “1984” commercial, etc.) so anyone watching will remember at least half of the copy being talked about.
“Fact montages,” which occur every half hour or so, are brief and intriguing, presenting general statistics that feel more mind-blowing than they probably are (ex.”over $32 billion was spent on advertising last year” or “car companies spend more than $15 billion”) thanks to their devil-may-care presentation within the context of the doc.
The cynical tone crescendos as the film pushes forward through time, suggesting that perhaps advertising has become the corporate machine it was always thought to be; that the “art” of “copy” is near dead. Lois voices an opinion similar to this and the doc slows for dramatic effect.
But the hope remains, though it lingers more and more loosely towards the climax.
Pray is essentially creating an advertisment himself – one built on the back of the advertisement industry. He’s selling advertising as a necessary evil(?) with the potential to serve the greater good, provided the risk and ambition is invested by those who make the art and write the copy.
Will you buy it?
Have you seen this film? Do you want to?