From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [6]
This rumored playing around is so exaggerated. The average model is, first of all, so dumb that nobody even wants to approach her. And neurotic! This is the most neurotic group of people that you could ever want to be with. The average model is so uptight that she’s impossible. You have to remember one thing about models: they live on their looks, and their only job is to look beautiful. Yet, five times a day, they go to an agency like Ted Bates or J. Walter Thompson and sit around in a room with fifteen other girls who look just as beautiful. It’s like a meat market. The art director stands there and says, ‘O.K., girls, stand up. Turn around. Say “Duz does it,” with a French accent.’ So the girls walk around, mumble ‘Duz does it’ with a French accent – or without a French accent, it doesn’t matter – and at the end of the session the art director says, ‘O.K.You, over there, you can stay. Thanks for coming by, everybody.’
I once interviewed fifteen models for a feminine-hygiene spray which we handle, and one model got the job. Fourteen were rejected. Those models go from our rejection to another rejection to another rejection to a point where they’re going out of their skulls. How many times can you be rejected a day?
So the average model is so crazy that most guys wouldn’t want to go near her. Besides, the only person in an agency who comes in contact with models is the art director, or maybe the account executive. The models are really not concerned with the art directors anyway, because it’s a one-shot job and there just can’t be a casting-couch situation. The art director hires the model for one commercial and he may never see her again.
The only people who wind up sleeping with models are photographers. And photographers are monkeys. I mean, they’re really monkeys. You know, most photographers are very short and have very long arms. I guess the long arms come from carrying those bags around – that’s a lot of equipment they haul around. Some photographers’ arms scrape the ground, they’re so long. The funny bit is that they make out as far as models are concerned. I may be projecting now, which is what my fireman friend is doing. The fireman’s decided that I’m making it with every model in town and I’ve decided that the photographers are the ones who are really making it with the models.
If there’s little glamour in advertising with adult models, there’s even less for kid models. You ought to see kid models. Kid models practically eat the rug, they’re so crazy. They’re out of their minds. And the mothers are insane, too.
When I was working at the Daniel & Charles agency, we had to do a commercial for a children’s toy called Colorforms. Because we couldn’t afford to go and do the commercial on location, we had to settle for Central Park in the dead of winter. We got the kids into polo shirts and short pants and went out to the park. It must have been like maybe ten or fifteen degrees above zero and there was snow all over the place. We managed to shovel off one patch where the kids were going to play with the toy. The kids were turning blue and screaming; the mothers were screaming at the kids because they didn’t want the kids to blow the job. It was terrible.
Once an agency was shooting a commercial on Fire Island, and there was the usual pack of people at the shooting – the kid model, the kid model’s mother who was hanging on to the agency producer’s ear, the director, the assistant director, prop men, grips, cameramen, script people,