• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

He didn’t hesitate. “Because I like to shoot,” he said. “And I think this can be anything but familiar.”

Now all we had to do was tell the client and the managing partner that we had miraculously stepped in one beautifully composed, 35-millimeter pile of shit.

First we went to the managing partner and told him that, to our great surprise and pleasure, we had found an extraordinary director who actually wanted to work on the spot. “It’s a real opportunity to give some juice to an otherwise-forgettable group of vignettes,” I said.

“What’s he ever done?”

“Ummm, only every major motion picture with the name Spielberg attached to it since 1993.”

“For instance?”

I was ready. I held up a bunch of classic and soon-to-be-classic DVDs. “You wanna start with the Academy Award winner?”

“But doesn’t he have a commercial reel? And he doesn’t sound American to me. And has he done packaged goods before?”

The producer and I looked at each other. I got up to leave.

“Hey,” the managing partner called after me. Maybe he’s come to his senses, I thought. I turned around only to be asked, “How’s it going with the shit-shrinking cat food rewrite?”

How did I end up here?

For twenty years I made ads. One led to another. Some took me to other jobs, and some took me to places I’d never been, and some allowed me to meet some of the most interesting people in the world. Sometimes the ads would teach me something I didn’t know and fill me with pride and joy. Other times they would frustrate and disappoint me and make me wish that I had chosen a more admirable profession, or that a more admirable profession had chosen me. It was not uncommon back then, near the end of my career, for younger people who had just started in the business to ask how much advertising had changed since I began. Typically, I would roll my eyes and say it had changed a lot. And typically, I believed it.

But more and more I was beginning to realize that maybe I was wrong. As I left the managing partner’s office, I realized that it wasn’t advertising that had changed so much.

It was me.

Later that afternoon I went back into the managing partner’s office and closed the door. I told him that I was extremely disappointed with his reaction to our director. I told him the spot was shit and needed something different, and that by rejecting my recommendation, he was, in effect, rejecting my instincts, my sensibility, my career, and me.

We awarded the job to Janusz Kaminski that night. During the next week we had dozens of meetings and dozens of contentious discussions about the demo and the vignettes and how we were going to make the most American deodorant commercial in the history of television.

One afternoon a junior account person came into my office with a notebook full of questions and suggested changes in the shooting board. She’d been sent by her boss, the managing partner. While we were speaking, the phone rang. It was my literary agent. He’d sent my novel out a few days earlier, and I had been trying my hardest not to think about it. He told me that in the last twenty-four hours, he already had three offers on the table.

I looked at the close-up drawing of a sweat-stained armpit on my desk, then at the account person, who was barely halfway through her punch list. I cupped my hand over the phone’s mouthpiece and said to the young woman, “Would you please give me a minute?”

I was dialing before she’d even closed my door. When my wife answered, I told her the news, and we both began to cry.

A week later I was in the Chinatown district of Vancouver, Canada, drinking Irish Breakfast tea and eating a crafts-service burrito made by a Moroccan chef while doing a reshoot of a Russian deodorant commercial with a Polish director who also happened to be prepping for a film set in Germany about a bunch of Israelis and Palestinians. If that’s not the stuff of a quintessentially American ad, my last, I don’t know what is.

* Perhaps the lowest point