Joe's View

The fame of David Ogilvy was eventually eclipsed by flashier advertising men in the 1960s and 1970s, but Kenneth Roman’s new book “The King of Madison Avenue” (Palgrave Macmillan) shows how Ogilvy’s revolutionary campaigns for Hathaway shirts and Schweppes sparkling waters changed the whole business of selling in this country.
The book gives us great insight into the workings of Madison Avenue ad agencies in the long-ago era of three-martini lunches and secretary-chasing chronicled in the popular AMC series “Mad Men.”
Ogilvy was born in Scotland, went to work for the London ad agency Mathew & Crowther in 1935, and moved to the United States to seek his fortune in the burgeoning business of selling products (and ideas) in the mass-circulation magazines that dominated the culture in the years before and after World War II.
Ogilvy’s first triumph came in 1951 when the C.F. Hathaway shirt company in Maine wanted to begin competing with giants like Arrow but only had $30,000 to spend.
Ogilvy was still an agency research director at the the time, but he cooked up the idea of putting an eye-patch on model George Wrangel during the photo shoot.
There was nothing wrong with the model’s eye.
“The patch was there to imbue the advertisement with what Ogily called, ‘story appeal,’” Roman writes. “The reader wonders how the arrogant aristocrat lost his eye.”
The first ad in The New Yorker only cost Hathaway a little more than $3,000, but within a week “every Hathaway shirt in stock was sold out. The advertisement caused such a stir that it was reprinted alongside articles in Life, Time, and Fortune. It was imitated around the world.”
“Story appeal” rather than a factual accounting of the virtues of a product would soon become a central element of advertising. Flash forward 40 or 50 years and you’ve got those Bruce Weber campaigns for Abercrombie + Fitch (above) in which it’s hard to spot the “products” being sold in the middle of all that “story appeal.”
Ogilvy eventually became a critic of ads meant to “entertain” rather than sell, and he never really fell in love with TV advertising, so he was viewed as a bit of a dinosaur when sizzle replaced the steak in the slick and elliptical landmark ad campaigns for VW and Alka-Seltzer in the 1960s and ’70s.
Roman points out that Ogilvy was highly prescient in his firm belief in direct marketing campaigns, however. The sort of research-driven, targeted-market ad that Ogilvy believed was the most effective form of salesmanship is now, of course, the foundation of advertising and marketing on the Internet.

Another dramatic illustration of the impact of the current economic crisis arrived in today’s mail — the pared-down March issue of Vanity Fair which for the first time in 14 years has abandoned its “Hollywood” cover theme tied in with the Oscar telecast on Feb. 22.
President Barack Obama is on the cover in place of the usual glossy fold-out cover featuring an Annie Leibovitz group shot of rising stars or established stars.
Launched in 1995 with a cover collection of actresses it called “The Class of 2000” — the “class” members included Nicole Kidman, Gwyneth Paltrow and Julianne Moore — the “Hollywood” issue got fatter each year and was beginning to rival the September issue of Vogue as Conde Nast’s biggest magazine of the year.
Who knows how many thousands of dollars were spent on assembling those stars and their hair dressers and make-up people before they went in front of Leibovitz’s camera over the past 14 years?
The magazine did spin off a beautiful coffee table book that included many of the “Hollywood” issue photos and just a few weeks ago Penguin published an excellent collection of behind-the-scenes stories from the special issues.
In the mid-1990s, Vanity Fair also became a major player on the Oscar night social scene, putting on an annual post-Academy Awards bash that filled the void left by the death of super-agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar who used to host a star-packed party at Spago on Oscar night.
The current March cover does have a teaser — “Hollywood 2009!” — at the bottom of the Obama portrait, but what is inside is a dim echo of the movie issues of past years.
There are a couple of pieces in the issue that touch on the impact of the economic crisis on movies (and advertising) but nobody mentions the most obvious sign of the times — the end of Vanity Fair’s humongous “Hollywood” special.
Save that 2008 issue (above) if you still have it in a pile somewhere — it might become a collector’s item.

A few days after Christian Bale’s on-set meltdown hit the Internet last week, The Daily Beast posted a much more amusing fracas caught during the filming of David O. Russell’s “I Heart Huckabees” (2004).
Lily Tomlin pitched a fit while a car sequence was being shot and sitting next to her on the front seat were co-stars Dustin Hoffman and Isabelle Huppert.
The real fun in the clip for me is watching Huppert, who is in the driver’s seat and who sits through the tirade with an amusingly detached smile on her face. Every so often she looks into the camera — presumably at her director — and her Cheshire cat grin is priceless.
Famous for her intensely dramatic performances — often as psychologically unhinged women — the French star has one of the slyest senses of humor in contemporary movies. Even in something as disturbing as the Ruth Rendell adaptation, “La Ceremonie” (1995), Huppert finds ways to inject off-kilter humor to provide much needed comic relief.
Tonight at 7, as part of the Stratford Library’s annual “Great Movies You Missed” series, it will be my pleasure to introduce Huppert’s droll 2006 vehicle, “Comedy of Power” which was one of her many collaborations with director Claude Chabrol.
“Comedy of Power” taps into the lighter side of Huppert’s brilliant talent in a based-on-fact story about an investigating judge who cracked a French Enron-type case of industrial corruption a few years ago.
Jeanne Charmant-Killman dresses very well — including smart little red gloves that Huppert wears like a second skin. The woman’s “femininity” combined with her slight stature leads a parade of hapless business tycoons to their doom as she circles in for the kill.
Jeanne is a 21st century public servant heroine — smart, sarcastic and incorruptible — who cannot stomach the obscene privileges of businessmen who use the government to their advantage. The three-year-old film feels up-to-the-minute because of the growing disgust in this country with the excesses of American business titans.
“Comedy of Power” deftly balances office scenes in which the magistrate takes her prey apart, with domestic scenes that show the toll the woman’s job takes on her marriage.
Huppert and Chabrol bring out the best in each other. They have been teaming up since the late 1970s; the director and actress love challenging films and characters that unsettle audiences as often as they coddle them.
“I don’t try to sympathise with my characters. I just try to empathise with them. To try to understand,” Huppert once told an interviewer.
“If I sympathised with the characters I would make idealised romantic characters out of them, which I don’t do. I don’t idealise them. I just do normal characters, not very sympathetic, just the way they are. I think I do this in films that are made in the shape of a question, not in the shape of an answer.”
(The free screening of “Comedy of Power” is at 7 p.m. at the Stratford Library, 2203 Main St. For more information, call 385-4164.)

With so many seemingly close races in the Academy Awards race this year, we should have a lot to discuss at the Trumbull Library tonight at 6:30.
The library invited me to talk about the Oscars and then conduct what I hope will be a freewheeling discussion of the awards with the audience.
The Oscars are one of those pop cultural happenings that generate a huge amount of advance interest — and Hollywood PR — but then seem to be forgotten overnight.
Try asking your friends the question, What won the Oscar for best picture last year? and I would bet that many of them would be hard-pressed to come up with “No Country for Old Men.”
When you get into the acting divisions memories get even foggier.
Can you recall last year’s best supporting actress winner?
No? (It was Tilda Swinton for “Michael Clayton”).
We live in such a huge soup of entertainment news now that talking about things that happened a year ago is truly talking about ancient history.
But, as silly and as shallow as the Oscars might be, they do afford movie buffs the chance to dominate public discourse for at least a few weeks. It’s the Super Bowl for people who love to talk movies.
The split between commerce and art in Hollywood has gotten wider in recent years — with commerce ruling the multiplex marketplace most of the time — so it is probably safe to say that if there were no Oscars, movies would be a pretty dismal affair for adults.
It is the hope for the prestige (and boosted box-office) of Oscar gold that results in movies like “Milk” and “Frost/Nixon” and “The Reader” (above) reaching theaters every winter, giving us all a welcome break from teen comedies and mindless action/horror extravaganzas.
Oscars might not mean much in the long-run, but they do encourage the film studios to strive for “quality” once in a while and that is a very good thing indeed.
(The Oscar discussion at the Trumbull Library, 33 Quality St., will start tonight at 6:30 p.m.)

I wasn’t crazy about the plot or the characterization of the new Lions Gate horror movie, “My Bloody Valentine,” to put it mildly, but it was fun to see the 3-D movie with friends on Saturday (one of whom had never seen a 3-D picture before).
I can still remember going to an early 1960s revival showing of “House of Wax” (1953) when I was a kid and being stunned to have objects poking out of the screen at regular intervals.
In that Vincent Price shocker the first big 3-D effect was a shot of a carnival barker hitting one of those paddle balls directly at the screen. In the R-rated “My Bloody Valentine” the first show-offy 3-D moment is a teen’s eyeball being popped right out of his head!
The old 3-D was fun but technically left a lot to be desired. Those cardboard “glasses” with one red and one green cellophane “lens” never quite fit (especially if you already wore glasses).
And the projection of two different images simultaneously would sometimes go out of sync, resulting in headache-inducing focus problems.
The “new” 3-D is projected digitally so there is never a problem with focus and the glasses fit quite easily over whatever prescription glasses you might be wearing. The theater in Manhattan where I saw “My Bloody Valentine” charged an extra $2.50 for the 3-D movie, but it was worth it (the 3-D turned a routine slasher flick into an amusing participatory experience).
Now that the technology has been perfected, it would be terrific to see a really good movie in the format.
We all agreed after the horror flick that the big summer action spectaculars would be a lot more fun to sit through if they were shot in 3-D. Forgettable mediocrities like “The Fast and the Furious” or “Wanted” would be vastly improved by the process.

It might sound a little lunatic to call the 16th novel by a best-selling author a “breakthrough” book, but that was my first thought after finishing the new Lisa Scottoline novel, “Look Again” (St. Martin’s Press), very late last night.
Scottoline has created a huge and loyal readership for the legal thrillers she has written over the past two decades.
Early on in her writing career, People magazine called lawyer-turned-novelist Scottoline “the female John Grisham” but that label seemed facile to me because Scottoline’s work contains so much more humor and humanity than the Grisham books.
Scottoline has always told a good story and taken us deep inside the world of Philadelphia lawyers, but the people come first in novels such as “Everywhere That Mary Went” (the writer’s debut) and “The Vendetta Defense” and the most recent (and wonderful) “Lady Killer.”
I’ve always believed that Scottoline could leave the crime/mystery genre any time she wanted to because of the strong sense of family and community and urban humor in all of her stories.
“Look Again” won’t be officially published until April 14, but St. Martin’s Press was nice enough to send me an Advance Readers’ Edition recently and I devoured the book in two long and very pleasurable sittings.
The novel is a departure for Scottoline on a few levels. The protagonist, Ellen Gleeson, is a journalist rather than a lawyer. The book is as unputdownable — is that a word? — as any of Scottoline’s previous novels, but the power of the human drama at the core of the story should gain the writer new readers who wouldn’t necessarily pick up a “mystery” or a “thriller.”
More than one of the blurb writers on the ARE use the word “emotional” and that is an accurate reflection of Scottoline’s devilishly simple but horrifying premise. In the very first paragraph, Ellen picks up one of those missing children postcards in her junk mail pile and is startled by the resemblance between one of the boys on the card and her own adopted son Will.
It turns out the kid on the card was abducted as a baby in a car-jacking. The picture of the boy is one of those computerized projections of what the baby would probably look like several years later.
Ellen adopted Will (after writing a story on him as an abandoned and very sick infant) and all of her paperwork is in order.
But…
The woman’s instincts as a reporter kick in and she just cannot let go of the notion that Will might be the child on the card and that there was something terribly wrong about the circumstances of that adoption. Ellen calls the lawyer who handled the case and finds out the woman committed suicide.
“Look Again” charts the reporter’s growing fear and paranoia as she wonders what she should do — forget about the white card and go on with her life, or find out if Will might belong to another woman who has been suffering for years.
The novel is about motherhood in all of its various forms. Ellen’s intense love for Will gives her an acute understanding of what it would feel like to lose a child and not know what happened to him.
It would be wrong to divulge any more of Scottoline’s terrific plot — each chapter brings a new development that tightens the screws on Ellen. (And meanwhile, on the job front, the reporter faces a different sort of paranoia — will she be able to hold on to her position at a Philadelphia daily in this era of shrinking newspaper staffs?).
You will not want to miss “Look Again” when it arrives in bookstores two months from now. For those of us who love Scottoline’s books, it’s the literary equivalent of seeing the home team score a touchdown.

An expression used on an episode of “Sex and the City” has been transformed into the “all-star” movie “He’s Just Not That Into You,” opening nationally tomorrow.
The promos and posters tout the fact that the comedy features a host of contemporary stars in multiple plotlines, but advance reviews have been largely negative despite the presence of Scarlett Johansson, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Connelly, and Ben Affleck.
The night after I saw the first TV commercial for “He’s Just Not That Into You” I watched the new Warner Home Video DVD of “The Yellow Rolls-Royce,” a 1964 MGM romantic drama that follows three separate owners of the title car over several decades’ time.
The old picture is a mixed-bag — that’s the nature of what used to be called an “anthology” film — but it features a rather astounding cast that includes Ingrid Bergman, Rex Harrison, George C. Scott, Shirley MacLaine, Jeanne Moreau, Alain Delon and Omar Sharif.
I don’t think of myself as a particularly nostalgic person, but I was brought up short by the contrast between the stars of 45 years ago and the actors who now struggle to earn that title these days.
Imagine Scarlett Johansson going toe to toe with Ingrid Bergman. Or Jennifer Aniston trying to project the intelligence and worldliness of Jeanne Moreau.
The stars of yesteryear had a way of rising above mediocre material — these days most film celebrities seem to be dragged down by the bum scripts they are given.
The three stories told in “The Yellow Rolls-Royce” are nothing special, but the glamour and charisma (and talent) of the genuine stars assembled by director Anthony Asquith is terrific fun to watch. They truly don’t make them like this anymore.
(“The Yellow Rolls-Royce” is part of a new-to-DVD package Warner Home Video released last week — “The All-Star Romance” — that also contains “Far from the Madding Crowd” (1967) with Julie Christie, Peter Finch, Alan Bates and Terence Stamp and the underrated 1969 musical version of “Goodbye Mr. Chips” with Peter O’Toole in peak form and a lovely performance by pop singer Petula Clark.)

Alex Witchel’s 2008 novel “The Spare Wife” has just been reissued in paperback by Plume; it’s a potent social comedy that tracks the romantic and career aspirations of a group of rich and well-connected New Yorkers.
Witchel has been one of the stars of The New York Times feature pages for the past two decades — I still miss the Friday Broadway column she used to write with such high style — and she has made a seamless transition to fiction.
Like Tom Wolfe, Witchel combines acute reportorial skills with a sparkling narrative style.
“The Spare Wife” has a large cast of characters but the story rests on an ex-model Southern transplant named Ponce Morris who is prized by both the men and women in her Park Avenue/Fifth Avenue set. She’s a widow who is every woman’s ideal friend — caring, discrete and with no apparent designs on anyone’s husband.
Indeed, the wives love the fact that Ponce is crazy about sports and is more than willing to go to a game with a friend’s husband (so the wife doesn’t have to).
In the first chapter, Ponce is helping her friend Jacqueline Posner throw a final dinner at a Park Avenue duplex in the wake of Jacqueline’s messy divorce.
Jacqueline is selling the place to a zillionaire from the heartland and sees the party as his introduction to her friends.
Witchel quickly assembles a fantastic cast of characters, ranging from an elderly TV news legend (a Don Hewitt type) to a host of novelists, magazine editors and writers. Trouble arrives in the form of Babette Steele, an ambtious young staffer at an important, Conde Nast-style magazine who turns nasty after her overtures of friendship are rebuffed.
Babette pitches an expose of Ponce’s unique position as “the spare wife” and we are off on a terrific comic romp that seems to combine the best elements of “All About Eve” with “Bonfire of the Vanities.”
Witchel keeps her bauble spinning for 286 pages and then provides a wonderfully satisfying finale back at the duplex where everyone first gathered a year earlier. Think of “The Spare Wife” as a mid-winter beach book of the highest order.