I bring this up because George Gomes, in addition to being a very nice man, was an extraordinarily talented director, one of the best in the business at the time. He directed many well-known commercials such as the Alka-Seltzer “I Can’t Believe I Ate the Whole Thing.” I had worked with him several times before and wanted him to direct this new commercial that had just been approved by AT&T Long Distance.  Yes, long distance used to be something special. It was “the next best thing to being there.” The commercial was part of a campaign advertising low rates for international calling. They were featuring low rates to three countries, one of which was Israel. It was a plum assignment.

I forget what the other two countries were, but I’ll never forget the one we did for Israel. To me, it is still the best commercial I ever wrote. My partner, Dan Long, and I were dusting off places in our offices for the Clio statues, the One Show pencils, and who knew what other hardware. Alas, there were to be no awards. The commercial never ran on television, because the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League deemed it to be offensive.  And, of course, AT&T had no interest in going against them.

What was so offensive? Well, you be the judge. The commercial was very simple. We had a lovely middle-aged couple having dinner in their Queens apartment.  Between bites, they have a conversation.

WOMAN:            I called Sarah today.

MAN:                        (CALM) How is she?  (SUDDENLY REALIZING) Sarah lives in Tel Aviv! You called Israel?!

WOMAN:            Don’t have a heart attack. I only talked three minutes.

MAN:                        Three minutes to Israel; do you know what that costs?

WOMAN:            Six seventy-five.

MAN:                        Six hundred and seventy-five dollars??!

WOMAN:            Six dollars and seventy-five cents.

MAN:                        For three minutes?

(AS IF NOTHING HAD HAPPENED) So … how is she?

ANNCR:            Long distance is the next best thing to being over there.

AT&T ISRAEL

It was a gentle spot, and everybody at the agency and client loved it. It was perfect for the directorial touch of George Gomes. We were all excited about the possibilities. The casting was brilliant. We got two very well-known actors who had been mainstays in the Yiddish theater in the Catskills, and were perfect.  Their performances were very sweet. They were very, as the phrase goes, New York ethnic. The shoot went flawlessly. As for the editing, it virtually cut itself. If there were acceptance speeches at the Clios, I would have been rehearsing mine.  Then … then we had to cast the voice over for the final announcer line — AT&T … the next best thing to being over there.

As always, we auditioned several voice-over actors, many of them Jewish. One of them was an actor named Herschel Bernardi, another Yiddish theater veteran and a portrayer of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. Like all the other announcers, to read this line, he viewed the whole commercial before reading doing his part. But unlike any of the others, his reaction was — What’s this? Jews concerned about the cost of an international phone call! That’s anti-Semitic stereotyping. I’m going to call the Anti-Defamation League.

Soon, the B’nai B’rith representatives trudged up to the NW Ayer offices, screened the commercial and promptly pronounced themselves offended. I suspect that they came prepared to see something offensive and viewed the commercial in the most sensitized way possible.             AT&T, of course, was in a complete no win situation. I’m sure it didn’t help that neither myself, nor my art director partner, nor the agency creative director, client, nor director were Jewish. The actors were, to be sure. As well as our choice to do the actual voice over reading.  But the damage was done, and it really hurt.  What really hurts is that Herschel Bernardi wouldn’t have gotten the gig anyway; he wasn’t right.

I still think that this is a commercial that respects people and simply touches a human reaction that anybody would have. Did we unconsciously embrace a stereotype? Maybe. But Herschel Bernardi’s holier-than-thou attitude still makes me mad. Especially when I remember that George Gomes wrote him a letter reminding him that he was once the voice of Volkswagen, once, the official car of Nazi Germany.

AT&T did another international calling campaign next year. But the people who worked on it were much smarter than me. They set the commercials on the other end of the call and got a great trip to Europe.

Most of the young soldiers, needless to say, loved being in the commercials. They were making movies! They just had to do what they do: drive tanks, march in formation, fly helicopters, do PT … whatever. That was the situation when we set out to shoot the very first “Be All You Can Be” commercial. It would be the commercial that introduced and established the theme and the tone of the whole campaign. In keeping with the style of the times, it was a :60 spot with a lot of different vignettes of Army life and big anthem of a song:

There’s a hungry kind of feeling

And every day it grows

You know there’s so much more to you

Than anybody knows.

Be all that you can be

Keep on reachin’, keep on growin’

Be all that you can be

‘Cause we need you in the Army.

(Wait a minute. Big song, lots of vignettes … isn’t that what Apple is doing now? But I digress.)

Anyway … we were shooting the commercial at Ft. Lewis outside Tacoma, Washington. For many of the scenes, we were using the Ranger regiment stationed there. We used the Rangers because they were bright, highly skilled, very motivated, and, critical for our needs, they looked fabulous. The Rangers were eager to do whatever we needed. More specifically, their NCOs and officers were eager to have them do whatever we needed.

One of the scenes we wanted was of four Rangers rappelling down from a hovering helicopter. It’s a great action shot that makes being a soldier look very exciting and very cool. The helicopter would hover about 75 feet off the ground and the four Rangers — two on each side — would perch themselves on the exterior struts, and on the director’s signal would jump backwards off the struts and slide down the ropes. The rope was fed through a ring on a harness. Wearing heavy-duty gloves, each Ranger would hold the upper end of the rope in front of him with one hand and hold the lower end of the rope behind him with the other. This was the “belay” hand with which they could control their rate of descent by keeping tension on the rope. We were assured that this was something these Rangers did all the time and were expert at.

What they were not expert at was performing on camera. They were also between 18 and 22 years old and they were making movies. A chance to be a star. Our director was Neil Tardio, a highly regarded talent and commercial veteran. The cinematographer was Andrzej Bartkowiak, a Polish émigré, known, among other things, for his feature film work with Sidney Lumet. So there we are, the production team, the agency, the Army client and the NCO, officer and standby Rangers on the ground and the helicopter hovering above with the four guys outside ready to go.

“And … action!” cried Neil Tardio. All four Rangers jump together. Three slide down together in perfect synch. But one is hot-dogging for the camera and loses control of his belay. He’s coming down fast. His gloves are smoking. And he hits with a thud. His fellow Rangers all rush over to help him. He has broken his ankle. His sergeant is mad, not at us, but at him. They get him out of there and call in another volunteer. And we do another take. And a couple of more, all without incident.

Later that evening, some of us went to visit the injured Ranger in the hospital. He had to get a pin in his ankle. His Ranger career was almost certainly over. And his performance, of course, will not even be in the commercial. Thank you for your service.

As far as I could tell, there was no bitterness or resentment from anybody, least of all the injured Ranger. It was business as usual in a very dangerous occupation. I shot many Army commercials and met many soldiers and officers, and almost without exception, they made me proud to be an American.

In 1974, one of the main sponsors of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ radio broadcasts was the Pittsburgh Brewing Company, makers of Iron City Beer.  I was a young copywriter recently arrived from Philadelphia. The brewery sponsored three innings every game, about 4 commercials a game, 162 games a year. Or about 648 commercial airings a season. To fill all that airtime, they needed about 150 different scripts. As the low man on the totem pole, the job of writing these scripts was assigned to me. It meant writing at least fifteen :60-second scripts a week. They had a very specific structure. The first thirty seconds or so was a conjuring up of some baseball-related action that reminded listeners what it was like to work up a thirst. Then the script would segue into the delicious, refreshing, clean, crisp, thirst-quenching taste of an ice-cold Iron City Beer. They were called “live reads” meant to sound as though this idea of thirst and Iron City beer had just popped into Bob Prince’s head  and he decided to share this with his listeners. Of course, there was nothing “live” about them. They were all pre-recorded at the radio station, KDKA, which was across Gateway Center from the ad agency, Ketchum MacLeod & Grove.

In the mid-70’s, Ketchum in Pittsburgh seemed a fairly magical place for a young copywriter to be. They were the biggest agency in the market and had most of the biggest accounts such as PPG, Heinz, Dow Corning, Westinghouse, Rubbermaid, Iron City Beer, and many others.  The creative department was filled to overflowing with talented people who would go on to found their own agencies, become creative superstars, or become successful commercial directors. Everybody was good; some were truly brilliant. Plus, what I didn’t realize at the time was that the local commercial director, who shot virtually every TV spot for agency, was some big, loud guy named Joe Pytka,, who of course, would go on to become arguably the greatest TV commercial director of all time. But that’s another story.

Back at KDKA, watching Bob Prince ad lib to fill a few seconds, gave me an idea. What would happen, I thought, if I wrote the scripts intentionally short? And how much shorter could I write them before he would notice? Five seconds? Seven? Certainly ten was too obvious.  To camouflage that I was doing this intentionally, I also had to write some scripts that were a second or two long, so when he glanced at his stopwatch, he would have to hurry up in some cases. It was some of the most fun I ever had as a copywriter. The challenge of coming up with all those openings to segue into the copy about the beer, and my little, private game of seeing how he would ad lib. If he ever realized what I was doing, he never said anything.

Bob Prince died in 1985 and was posthumously awarded the Ford C. Frick Award by the Baseball Hall  of Fame in 1986. The next season I got to do television. With Joe Pytka.

“Mountain-grown aroma” is one of the most truly wonderful pieces of advertising balderdash ever conceived. All coffee is mountain-grown. Coffee only grows at elevation. There is no such thing as valley-grown coffee.

When I became Group Creative Director on Folgers Coffee at N.W. Ayer (who acquired Cunningham & Wash in 1986), this campaign, along with it’s famous song, were already well established. And very successful.  So, of course, we tried to change it. Let me just say that while most clients get tired of their advertising long before their audience, Procter & Gamble is not among them. To change a successful campaign, you’d better have something better than a better song.

But we did eventually sell the client a commercial the got us out of the bedroom and the kitchen and took us to the mountains of Costa Rica. The commercial was going to be one of those gorgeously photographed nature spectacles romancing the sun, the clouds, the rain, and the mountains, capturing the very essence of mountain-grown aroma. The director was Peter James, an Australian cinematographer who had just finished shooting Driving Miss Daisy, a lovely and very talented guy.

One of the central visual ideas of the commercial was to find a real mountain that looked just like the mountain on the Folgers can and at the end do a matched dissolve in which the real mountain magically becomes the mountain on the can. Get it? Genius. The production company sent a scout to search Costa Rica and find us our mountain. When the pictures came back, the mountain was so perfect, such an ideal match that everyone failed to notice that it’s name was Vulcan Arenal, an active, but resting, volcano which is to this day a major tourist attraction.

Our time in Costa Rica began ominously. All the camera equipment was impounded in customs for 5 days. So, suddenly our 5-day shoot became a 10-day adventure. So as not to waste the time, we spent the extra days scouting coffee plantations to find the exactly right bush on the exactly right slope.

We finally got shooting, and since the mountain was far from the coffee plantations, that was going to be one of our last shots. We arrived there in the afternoon, and could see the mountain in the distance. While it was still light, we scouted a field from which to get the perfect shot of the sun rising behind the mountain. We were going to shoot time-lapse.

The call the next morning was for 4:00 am. We drove to the field in the darkest dark I have ever been in and trudged through the damp grass encountering the occasional cow and accompanying cow pie. The crew was setting up the camera when all of a sudden we hear an enormous explosion. We look up and an orange ball of flame is spewing out the top of our mountain. We were far enough away not to be in any danger, so we kept filming. Eventually the flames stopped and the sun rose, and we got our shot. But the mountain kept smoking the whole while.

When we got back to New York and looked at the film, our perfect mountain was a major problem.  With the time-lapse photography, it looked like a locomotive. I don’t know how much it cost, but I’m pretty sure we spent a fortune in video post-production taking the smoke out of that sky. I regret to report that that the commercial turned out to be not very good, and I’m not sure whether it ever even aired. But it was one of the most amazing shoots I was ever on.

The next commercial, needless to say, began back in bed.

Let me begin by saying that I did not write the line “Be All You Can Be” for the U.S. Army. It would have made my life a lot easier if I had. I would not have had to explain that while, yes, I did write most of the initial television, radio and print that became that campaign, the actual line and idea belonged to a very talented copywriter in my groupname Earl Carter.

The campaign was created as part of a pre-emptive initiative on the part of the agency a year in advance of the open solicitation of the account by other agencies as was required by law. The Army group had a new Creative Director, Lou Di Joseph, who had just come over from Y&R. He wanted to go to the Army with a new campaign entirely different from anything we had done before. We did a lot research, of course, the germ of which was that young people wanted skill training, preferably high tech.  This was 1980.

One conference room was our “war room” and we had many, many, many theme lines pined up on the wall. We needed three, because we were going to present three alternate campaigns and recommend, well … the one they liked best. The line that became “Be All You Can Be” was initially presented as “Be All You Can Be in Today’s Technical Army.”  In my recollection, Lou Di Joseph pulled the crumpled up piece of paper out of the trash and tore off the second part of that line. Another line that would be presented was “Yes, You Can.” There was a third, but I can’t remember it.

We were ready to go. Now all we had to do was flesh out each of these campaigns with about five TV spots, five radio and six or seven print ads. The only problem was that Earl Carter had written two of the three lines, and could not possibly write all the pieces needed for both campaigns. As his supervisor, I told him that since both lines were his, he could choose which campaign he wanted to flesh out for the presentation.  He opted for “Yes, You Can.”  While certainly nobody knew that “Be All You Can Be” would become what it became, I did feel it was the better idea and I asked him if he was sure that’s what he wanted to do?  He said he was. Which is how I came to write the scripts and ads for the rollout of the “Be All You Can Be” campaign.

Working on the Army account was one of the highlights of my career. I worked with great people on a great product. And with a client who quite literally took the campaign to his grave.