Truth in Advertising Page 0,1

entirely surprising that I ended up in advertising.

AND . . . ACTION

Fade in.

Close-up of a man’s face. Mine.

A little internal voice. Also mine.

“Psst. Hey, Gary. Gary? You suck.” (My name isn’t Gary, but the little internal voice knows I have an unnatural dislike of the name Gary and calls me that to annoy me.) “You suck, Gary. You’re a fraud and a phony and a hack and also did I mention that you suck? You lack soul and depth and intelligence. You’ve gone about it all wrong. You’ve wasted your life. Strong words. Think about them. Oh, except I forgot. You don’t think about words. You use them like you use paper towels. Without thought or care. Can I say something else, now that I have your attention? Can I ask you to think about the fact that you got a three-ninety on your math SATs? Why do you leave the house in the morning?”

Cut to a short film, a reinterpretation of the seminal moment in Sophie’s Choice when Sophie, just off the train at Auschwitz, must choose who lives, her son or her daughter. Except here Sophie is my mother. She must choose between me and . . . nothing. The SS guard shouts at her: “What will it be?!” She looks at me on one side. She looks at nothing on the other. She chooses nothing. The camera moves in for an extreme close-up of my confused little expression as we cut to my mother, who shrugs, as if to say “Sorry.” Pull back to reveal the expression of the SS guard, who also shrugs, something you rarely (ever?) see in the SS in particular and Nazis in general.

Raphael is speaking and has been speaking for some time, though I don’t know what he has said because I haven’t been listening—I’ve been in Auschwitz. But I should have been listening because we are about to roll film. And that means we are spending money, many hundreds of thousands of dollars, as is reflected by the number of people (nine) listening to Raphael, the director of the commercial. Also by the presence of Gwyneth Paltrow.

“So what are we talking about here?” Raphael says to Gwyneth. He then looks to the floor, clearly a man reflecting deeply (albeit about his own question). “We’re talking about life. Yes? I mean, that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about motherhood. Is there anything more precious, more beautiful? You, the giver of life. You made this life, this child.”

Raphael is twenty-nine, with creative facial hair and no deficit of self-love. He is far too intense. Jack Black on coke. Watching him is a group that consists of five client representatives, as well as my art director partner, Ian, our producer, Pam, the director’s producer (or line producer), and me. We stand in the middle of a set that looks exactly like a child’s bedroom on a soundstage in Queens. We are not supposed to be in Queens. We are supposed to be in Pasadena, California, in a lovely Arts and Crafts home that a production company chose after scouting close to seventy-five other homes in and around Pasadena, Santa Monica, and Laguna Beach. The home, per the client’s verbatim direction, should feel “suburban but not too new and not too old and not too far from a city center but by no means urban, i.e., New York City and its general ‘smart-alecky’ sensibility, which often tests poorly in market research.”

We did this in large part because Gwyneth was going to be in Los Angeles on vacation with her family and we wanted to (were forced to) accommodate her. Except it turned out that Gwyneth was no longer going to be in Los Angeles at the time of the shoot. She was going to be in New York for meetings and a partial vacation and could we find a location there, please? At which point the New York office of the production company scouted suburban but not too (see above) homes in Scarsdale, the Upper West Side, and Brooklyn Heights. All of which Gwyneth’s assistant was fine with (“Scarsdale’s not really New York, though, is it? Bit of a drive and we hate driving.”), but all of which the client hated. At which point the New York office of the production company hired the set director from the former Broadway smash hit Mamma Mia! to design a child’s bedroom to the client’s specifications, which was then built by union carpenters, at a cost of