From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [78]
Most of the time, though, you can’t fake a censor out so easily. Smith/Greenland, a very good agency, was doing a commercial for Fresh, which is a deodorant. Why is it such clean products have such big troubles? Anyhow, they got past Miss Cheng, I mean they showed Miss Cheng what they wanted to do and she said, ‘Terrific.’
They wanted to picture a belly dancer at her work, showing that she leads a strenuous, active life. Of course this belly dancer is terrific to smell all the time because she uses Fresh, which, hell, I don’t know, doesn’t wear off even if you want to spend a night belly dancing. They cut the commercial at a great deal of money, and when Miss Cheng saw the cut she said swell.
They figured they were in. What they didn’t figure on was the NBC censor, who takes one look at the commercial and says, ‘That’s a belly button. My God, you can’t show a belly button.’ The theory was that kids might be watching and would see the belly button. Of course the NBC censor didn’t realize that when kids go into their tub every night they look down and they see their belly buttons. But no belly buttons on the air. Not good. Forget that every kid has a belly button. Forget that.
All of a sudden Smith/Greenland has got this expensive commercial and no place to go with it. The censor at NBC absolutely cut the commercial to ribbons. There was a great deal of bitterness on both sides. The people at Fresh don’t need these kinds of problems and here’s an agency that has spent a lot of money and has no place to run it. Smith/Greenland had shown the commercial in storyboards to a censor. Who knows? Maybe the artist didn’t draw a belly button, or if he did, maybe it wasn’t a real, live, pulsating belly button, which would have caused them to stop the commercial at that stage. Smith/Greenland lost the account and it must have been billing more than a million dollars. What’s so sad about this story is that you really can’t win, you don’t stand a chance.
The answer is, no censorship at all. The answer is, if you do something that’s really tasteless, you’ll be off the air – I mean you’ll be off the air because people will stop buying your product. Sure, there’s a lot of bad stuff on the air. The guy with the hammers in his head. The guy with the transparent sinuses. Terrible. It dies, it will die, but let it die under its own power. Who am I to say that that stuff is tasteless? I happen to think that quite a few agencies in this city put out a lot of tasteless garbage. But I don’t have the right to tell them, No, you can’t do this or you can’t do that. My feelings on censorship are very simple: I haven’t got the right to censor somebody else.
Sometimes the client steps in and tells the agency the commercial is no good. But that’s censorship by the guy who’s paying the bills. A lot of clients don’t want to see their products portrayed in a certain way. Lots of clients don’t even want to be on the borderline of bad taste. But it’s different when the client tells you to tone it down than when some third party censors you. Miss Cheng says navels are all right, the Mrs. McGillicutty-type lady said that navels are out. Meanwhile, thousands of dollars are going down the drain. Miss Cheng is not worried about money. She has no stake in it at all. As I told her on the phone the other day, ‘If I could say feminine once in the commercial, whom do I offend by saying it three times?’ But in her little world, three times is too many times to say feminine. Once is all that she can allow me. And I lose again.
There’s a classic Lenny Bruce bit. He’s doing a father talking to his son while they