From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [77]
The account man says, ‘Why not?’ He’s obviously very shook about their reaction to the commercial. The account man figures he hit somebody up at the censor’s office who hates war and is trying to downplay violence on the screen.
Not so. The censor said, ‘Well, it’s obvious that the mound of dirt is part of the game.’ The account man said, ‘Mound of dirt? What mound of dirt?’ ‘The mound of dirt the boy is shooting from.’
The account man blinks his eyes and steps back. ‘The mound of dirt is part of the game? How could any kid think that the mound of dirt is part of the game? It’s just a mound of dirt.’
The censor said, ‘Well, the kid will obviously think that it’s part of the game since it’s on the screen for the entire commercial and the kid spends his time on the top of this mound of dirt.’ The censor feels that the kid is going to expect to be given a mound of dirt with every machine gun. The censor told the account guy that Bates had a choice: either give the kids a mound of dirt with every gun sold or they could run a visual on the screen during the commercial saying, ‘The mound of dirt does not come with the gun.’ The account man, who’s a very bright guy, suddenly feels that maybe he’s in 1984 already. ‘What kid,’ he says, ‘is going to believe this?’ The censor had an answer for that one, too. ‘It’s not the five-year-old we’re worried about. It’s the one-and twoyear-olds who might be swayed.’ The account man, just to make sure, said, ‘For the two-year-old kids who can’t read I must flash on the screen ‘This mound of dirt is not part of the game”? The five-year-old, who can read, is going to think we’re crazy anyway.’ The censor said, ‘Yes, if you don’t use a visual, the commercial doesn’t play.’ So it was flashed on the screen for the benefit of the two-year-olds who couldn’t read. Nowhere in all this did anyone say, ‘Gee, do you really think we should have a commercial running which shows a bloodthirsty little kid killing a bunch of kids with a realisticlooking machine gun.’ No, that’s fine. Kids can kill and everything else. The whole thing was the mound of dirt. That’s censorship at its best.
I mentioned before that you just don’t have one censor, sometimes two or three. Miss Cheng is the N.A.B.’s censor. The network censor is usually a woman by the name of McGillicutty or something to that effect, who is over forty, a little heavy, a virgin and a professional virgin – I mean not just a virgin virgin. Her job is to sit and look and read and see as many commercials as possible; that’s the only job she has. The only thing she has to do all day long is to look for filth. If she doesn’t find dirt, she really didn’t earn her salary that day. So her job, day in, day out, is to find dirt. When she gets up in the morning and she’s having her coffee, all she can think of is dirt and garbage and filth. You know, was that a breast I saw yesterday in that commercial? Did I catch a leer on that model or did she smile? Was that guy in the shower showing a little bit of his hip? ‘Run that back, please, I think I saw a little bit of hip.’ That’s the whole day and the life of these people. You can imagine how twisted they are at the end of the day. It’s a crazy job they have. Maybe I’m trying to get something across in a commercial; maybe I’m trying to say sex in a commercial and I’m beating her. And she can’t be beaten, she’s got to find it. It’s a great big game: she’s got to find the little bit of hip, the leer, the eyebrow that went up, the dirt.
Take the Noxzema commercial with the great-looking blonde, the one in which the blonde is sucking her thumb very, very suggestively and she’s saying, ‘Take it off, take it off.’ That commercial is very sexy.
Somewhere along the line an account guy did a beautiful job. He must have taken the commercial in and sat down with an over-forty censor lady and