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| Drew Magary worked in advertising for ten years. SAD MEN is a series of stories from his time in the industry. |
Casting
a television commercial seems like a relatively straightforward
process. You bring in actors. You have them read a script. You choose
the best ones (or the best looking ones), and then we all go from there.
But when I worked in advertising, the casting process almost always
ended with the client being supremely pissed off. One time, I presented a
casting tape to a client. The actor on screen was a bald Latino dude
with a beard. He was our first choice to play the role of Guy Who Walks
Into A Convenience Store. The client saw his face on the screen and
immediately blew up.
CLIENT: What the hell are you trying to do to me?
ME: What? What's wrong?
CLIENT: (through gritted teeth) He looks like a goddamn terrorist!
ME: He does? But he's not a terrorist. He's just a guy. He's not even Middle Eastern.
CLIENT: I'm telling you he looks like a terrorist!
Clients always end up getting
pissy over casting. There are two reasons for this. One, they were in
the casting session, and you didn't pick whatever dumbfuck they liked
the most. As an ad person, you're looking for the most memorable actor,
which usually means someone odd-looking. The client wants the precise
opposite of that. They want the blandest, most inoffensive, most
forgettable white person humanly possible selling Heinz beans.
Two, they weren't in the session,
and they resent only being shown two actors for each role. Casting tapes
are inherently underwhelming. They look like shit. They sound like
shit. It's hard to blow away people with 10 seconds of someone reading
off a sheet of paper and looking like they're broadcasting live from an
unfinished basement in Ohio. And since clients pay a great deal of money
for casting agencies to find actors (and for the entire advertising
process in general), they get very mad when the actors you present
aren't topless mermaids giving an Oscar-caliber rendition of Katherine
Hepburn's role from On Golden Pond.
Clients have expectations: they
have vague notions of what they want an actor to look like, but no
precise image of that actor. Thus, it's very easy to subvert their
expectations when you present them with actual casting selects. Clients
don't like having their expectations subverted. It really pisses them
off. One time, we were presenting actors for a boxed chocolate
commercial to a client. It was a Valentine's Day spot, and in the
storyboard, a couple was kissing on the couch. And so we presented these
selects where the lead actors were kissing on a couch. The client was
revolted.
CLIENT: They're sucking face!
US: Well, they were kissing in the storyboard. We probably wouldn't have them kiss that much in the actual spot.
CLIENT: They're practically having sex! Can't you find anyone else?!
And it's not just an actor's looks
that can throw a client for a loop. It probably wouldn't surprise you
to learn that most actors are fucking horrible, and that good actors are
often more expensive than their anonymous counterparts. One time, I was
working as an account exec on a commercial for Luden's Cough Drops. In
the ad, a bunch of women are in a department store fitting room (of
course we set the ad there) when they get freaked out because this
really husky, raspy voice is asking for some help with her zipper. The
joke is that it's a very attractive woman who happens to be hoarse from a
cold and needs a cough drop, but she sounds like some creep who's
infiltrated the dressing room. So for the voice, the creatives wanted to
cast Harvey Fierstein. You wouldn't even see Harvey in the ad. You
would just hear his inimitable voice ("I just want to be loved, is that
so wrong?!").
The problem was that Fierstein
charged double scale for voice work — twice the regular union rate. That
wasn't in our original production budget, and so we had to figure out
how to delicately break the news to the client that the guy we wanted
cost more money. Inside an ad agency, shit like this is treated with the
deathly seriousness of telling someone their loved one has been mauled
to death by a fucking bear. We planned. We strategized. We had a series
of meetings before the meeting to figure out what would be said in the
meeting to ensure it was a good meeting.
I was a pissant account exec, so
all I wanted was to not get yelled at. I had been yelled at during the
casting process before. I didn't enjoy it. I wanted client approval so
that I could leave work and go get shitfaced.
We scheduled a big meeting in New
York to present a rough cut of the ad to the client, and we brought in
our big swinging dick creative director so that the client knew we
thought their cough drop ad was crazy important. The only problem is
that our creative director, Bob (not his real name), hadn't been with us
during the strategic meetings for this particular meeting. He was
coming in cold.
So the client arrived and it was
them, me, my boss, my boss' boss, the creatives, the producer, and Bob.
We showed them the rough cut and they liked it. Then we explained that
the husky voice in the spot was none other than Harvey Fierstein.
"We like it!" said the client.
"Great," said my boss. "Now, before we go ahead and book Harvey, there is something we should tell you about him."
"He's not quite like other actors," I said.
"He's special," my boss' boss said. "Sometimes, in order to get the right fit for an ad, we have to make certain sacrifices."
"Harvey's just so right for this, you know?" I said. "It's just he's... well, he's..."
Then Bob, the creative director, decided to chime in.
"WHAT THEY'RE TRYING TO TELL YOU IS THAT HE'S GAY."
Silence. Dead fucking silence. The
conference room had a floor-to-ceiling windows on one side, and at that
moment I wanted to run through the glass and fall the six stories down
to my death so that I could get away from the awkwardness. Our clients
were a relatively conservative lot, so I half expected them to go
storming out of the house burning a sack full of dildos in effigy.
"Actually Bob," my boss said, "we weren't terribly concerned about that. It's just that Harvey's double scale."
"Oh," Bob said. Then he turned to the client. "Like we said, he's very special."
So I sat there, waiting for the
client to shit all over us because we dared to charge double for an
actor who had the audacity to be homosexual, when the client shrugged
his shoulders and said, "Okay. He's great. Let's do it." As if anyone
could be surprised by the idea of Harvey Fierstein being gay. Meeting
over. Battle won. Thank fucking Christ.
We got Harvey, and we ended up making a perfectly respectable cough drop ad that I can't show you because it's apparently behind some kind of Spanish paywall. But for you aspiring sad men out there, take heed. You never know
what'll set a client off when it comes to acting talent, be it gayness
or price or kissing or terrorist beards or weird glasses or some other
goddamn thing. Casting is bizarre.
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