Commercial Breaks

The revolution started with a kebab.

Sometime in the early 1970s three men met in a Turkish restaurant in London’s Fitzrovia and set in motion a train of events that would change Hollywood forever. David Puttnam, Charles Saatchi and Alan Parker were all former colleagues at the legendary advertising agency Collett, Dickenson Pearce. In the previous decade, they had been key in upending the then moribund world of commercials, transforming it from a dull cultural backwater into a white-hot creative powerhouse.

CDP had produced some of the most memorable print and TV commercials of all time. The long-running Cinzano campaign, in which Leonard Rossiter dumped his drink over Joan Collins with the satisfying regularity of Wile E Coyote falling off a cliff, and Hovis’s sentimental trip down a cobbled northern street to the strains of a brass band were both from CDP. Happiness had become a cigar named Hamlet and Heineken refreshed the parts other beers couldn’t reach, all thanks to their world-beating creative teams.

And now, together with a small group of fellow admen – Ridley & Tony Scott, Hugh Hudson, and Adrian Lyne –  these three CDP alumni were about to take everything they’d learned in Adland and apply it to the movies. The results would be a host of films that would define Hollywood for a decade and beyond. Alien, Flashdance, Top Gun, Midnight Express, The Hunger, Blade Runner, Fatal Attraction, Bugsy Malone, 9 1/2 Weeks, Chariots Of Fire - all would have the creative DNA of these London advertising men wound inextricably through them.

But that was in the future. When Parker sat down at the Kebab and Houmus on Charlotte Street, he was a flourishing commercials director with his own company and had, perhaps, expected nothing more than a pleasant reunion, maybe a rerun of the legendary lunches that CDP had become famous for, boozy epics that often stretched into the evening, occasionally into next week. 

But David Puttnam had grander plans. And he was about to unveil them.“Tell him, David!” Charles Saatchi had gushed as the threesome sat down, before ignoring Puttnam and telling him himself. “We’re going to discover you!”

“Why don’t I discover you,” replied Parker, with a little of his reflexive chippiness.

“Alan, we’re going to change your life. We’re going into the film industry,” Puttnam said. “You’re going to write a script, Charles is going to write a script. I’m going to get the money together.”

“But I’ve never written anything longer than 30 seconds in my life!” Parker objected. 

“That doesn’t matter,” Puttnam said. “We believe in you.”

Parker mulled the offer. He’d fallen into directing pretty much by accident in the first place. He’d been, at heart, a copywriter, a writer of little dramas about frozen burgers or sherry that resonated with mass audiences, that connected, in a way adverts had never done before. Then again, thirty seconds, and an hour and a half . . . what’s the difference?

Maybe this film idea had something to it.

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When David Puttnam had arrived at CDP in 1962 British advertising was a backwater, a home for second-raters, also-rans and misfits, and a career that you didn't boast about having fallen into. “If you had any kind of education you went into the theatre or you went into television or business. Advertising was just rather vulgar,” Parker told the BBC in 2002. “But that’s what led to the revolution. We had very little education, but advertising was incredibly egalitarian.”

“None of us had been to university, we didn't have a degree between us,” said Puttnam. “But we were smart. We understood the world we were living in.”

Back in the fifties and early sixties, advertising was often an afterthought. Space in magazines or on billboards was bought and then filled with not much more than a black-and-white shot of the product, the price and a line of copy that was, at best, the result of half an hour’s light writing over lunch. But led by CDP’s legendary creative director Colin Millward, Puttnam, Parker and Saatchi, brought unprecedented creativity, wit and focus to the industry.

Parker’s ads, which filled the glossy pages of the newly minted Sunday supplements, were bold, funny and talked to the reader in an unprecedented, familiar, friendly way. “The last of the big suspenders,” ran the headline for Pretty Polly hold-up stockings (“and there’s no suspender like no suspender”); “Iced Cream” was his line for Harvey's Bristol Cream sherry accompanying an unthinkably shocking shot of the then resolutely middle-class tipple with a couple of ice cubes plonked in it. “I’ve spent a decade putting this product on a pedestal and now you’re selling it off the back of a barrow,” a delighted Millward told Parker, as sherry sales shot through the roof.

The coming of colour television had galvanised the TV market and Parker’s scripts were as impactful as his print ads. He wrote little domestic dramas, set in recognisably working-class homes (2CKs, as the style became somewhat sniffily known in Adland - two cunts in a kitchen). He mined British class anxieties for Cockburns Port, putting the steerage passengers alongside the officers in a lifeboat and allowing them to bond over the joys of fortified wine. A commercial for Birdseye beefburgers, ‘Starving Artist’, featured a pair of kids with broad Yorkshire accents (“Th’all never be a starvin’ artist will tha?”), depicting a hitherto unimagined frozen burger-consuming world north of Watford. 

But he was increasingly unhappy with the quality of the ads being made from his writing. He asked if he could set up a test studio in CDP’s basement and try out some new stuff.

“The empty, cavernous space was as big as a car park,” he later wrote. “It became our own film studio. It was suggested that, as I had written the scripts, I should be the one who said ‘Action’ and ‘Cut’. Any fool could do that. From that moment on, I was hooked.”

Parker the writer had become Parker the director and his test films, the ‘basement ads’ as they became known at CDP, became increasingly ambitious and finally disruptive to an agency that was hardly unaccustomed to chaos. The crunch came when management came back from lunch to find the entire staff downstairs sporting tuxedos and ballgowns, shooting an epic ballroom scene. They suggested that Parker found his own production company. CDP would seed fund it, and bung work his way.

Meanwhile, Puttnam, the account director who had shepherded many of Parker’s campaigns to their triumphant success, had his eye on bigger fish. “The British film industry was crap," he told journalist Sam Delaney in 2017. "The stuff they were producing was shit and I knew it. But then I saw The Graduate and I thought to myself 'I could do that.' There was nothing in that film that required a budget. It was a makeable film. I knew the talents who I believed could write a film like that.”

And so there was that lunch. And then there was Parker’s feature debut Bugsy Malone in 1976, a pastiche gangster movie that was as far away from the dreary Brit flicks of the era as could be. It had an irrepressible sense of fun, and in its twist - all the main characters were played by kids - an adman’s keen sense for the Unique Selling Point.

It was a hit. And as Parker was bourne shoulder high from a triumphant Cannes screening a Paramount executive named David V. Picker turned to Puttnam. This guy really knew how to shoot, he said. Did David know of any other admen who were as good? David did. A guy with an incredible eye who ran a production shop just along the street from CDP. Name of Ridley Scott.

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Ridley Scott had been watching Parker’s cinematic ascent with mounting dismay. “When Al got Bugsy Malone I didn’t sleep for a week,” he told the BBC. “I literally got insomnia.”

The two were both friends and rivals. “Between Ridley company and ourselves we scooped up most of the good scripts,” said Parker. “If a script opened with, ‘We see a beautiful girl running in slow motion along a golden Caribbean beach’ Ridley would get that. If a script read, ‘We see two overweight ladies talking at a lunch counter in Shepherd’s Bush’ I would get that.” 

Scott had arrived in advertising via the BBC, where he’d worked as a production designer and then director while shooting ads on the side. When that proved to be more lucrative than the day job he jumped ship, founding Ridley Scott Associates in the mid-60s, just as the advertising boom was roaring to life. RSA was an innovation, it pretty much invented the idea of the dedicated commercials director. No longer would ads be made by telly directors slumming it, or film hacks who couldn’t get work. They would be fashioned by mini-auteurs using the most cutting-edge techniques. 

The first call for talent he put in was to his brother, Tony, a fellow art school graduate who was still nursing ambitions to be a fine artist. “Ridley said, ‘Come and make commercials with me and pay Dad back for eight years at art school.’” Tony remembered. It didn’t hurt that his brother suggested that at the end of the year he’d have enough cash to buy a Ferrari.

When clients expressed qualms about getting the junior partner Ridley secretly promised them that if Tony screwed it up, he’d reshoot the whole thing for free himself. He never needed to. Tony was a natural. His ads were polished, gleaming, all hard edges and pumping sound. A spot for Saab (‘Nothing On Earth Compares’) featured the car framed against a looming Harrier jump jet. Shades of things to come.

“I cornered the market in sexy, rock'n'roll stuff," he told Sam Delaney. "From the start, I had a blast. I had a run of 10 years straight making commercials during which I got the chance to fuck my way around the world. I couldn't believe it."

Hugh Hudson, an old Etonian with a taste for the epic that he would later indulge with the disastrous Revolution (1985), was another among the new RSA intake. His cinema spot for Benson and Hedges (‘Iguana’) – a surrealist epic shot in the Arizona desert involving geckos, rattlesnakes and a helicopter transporting a giant pack of fags a la Fellini – was a debacle to shoot, and at over £100,000 the most expensive commercial ever made. The execs at CDP pondered whether he’d gone mad. Stunned cinemagoers, meanwhile, put down their Kia Ora and actually applauded. For British Airways’s ‘Face’ he marshalled hundreds of extras who slowly formed into a face and then the airline’s trademark globe.

With the huge success of RSA, commercials auteurs began to emerge elsewhere. At Jennie & Co. over on Beak St. Adrian Lyne had started out as an inept account exec. “I kept all this foreign currency in my drawer and whenever the door opened it used to fly all over the place,” he told the advertising podcast Stuff From The Loft. Perhaps to protect the company’s finances, he was rapidly promoted, despite never having been behind a camera in his life. But once he called action he revealed himself to be a master of propulsive energy, even if he did occasionally refuse to put a product shot in his masterpieces. 

Wild, impulsive and undoubtedly possessed by genius, Lyne was temperamentally the opposite of the Scott Brothers.  If Ridley did ‘sumptuous’ and Alan did ‘story’ Adrian was the high priest of ‘cool and sexy vibes’. His commercial for Brutus Jeans (‘Jeans On’) is a symphony of denim-clad derrieres, enthusiastic crash-zooms and precision cuts. For his two-and-a-half-minute Levi’s spot ‘Route 66’, a mini road movie following a pair of young women as they hitch cross country (which bears a striking similarity to Thelma & Louise), he revived then terminally unfashionable classic Americana. And, like the rest, he began to look towards the world of film. 

“The dangerous thing about doing commercials was how fast the time had passed,” Scott remembered. “There was a real race between me and my competitors. I could see that RSA guys like Hugh Hudon and Tony were really going places.”

Puttnam’s introduction to Paramount’s David Picker couldn’t, then, have come at a better time. The result, after a couple of projects foundered, was The Duellists which vanished unheralded in 1977, and then Alien in 1979, which didn’t.

His brother Tony and Lyne were, indeed, coming up fast behind. By the early 80s two screenplays, one for a contemporary vampire flick and another for a dance movie set in New York, were knocking around with the pair unsure over who would direct which. “It was a case of beggars can't be choosers,” Tony Scott told Empire.  “Adrian and I compared notes because I got given Flashdance before he did. It really was, ‘Fuck what am I going to do with this?’. Then he got The Hunger and he was, ‘What the fuck am I going to do with this?’ So we swapped scripts. I used a lot of smoke and so on. That was the influence of the commercials. The occasional billowing curtain. Well, a lot of billowing curtain, actually. But it got fucking killed. It took me three more years to get another movie after it."

 

 

By the mid-1980s, the British admen’s invasion of Hollywood was all but complete. Tony Scott had overcome the disappointment of The Hunger to deliver Top Gun in 1986, a hymn to the aesthetics of advertising. Ridley Scott had changed the way we imagined the future in his (appropriately advertising-drenched) Blade Runner in 1982. Adrian Lyne applied his peerless commercial gloss to Fatal Attraction and 9 1/2 Weeks, Alan Parker delivered Midnight Express. What all these movies shared was an incomparable visual style, and a dedication to showing the audience a good time, a Hollywood virtue that had been all but forgotten amidst the previous decade’s angsty, anxious cinema. 

Not everybody was happy with the way things had turned out. For David Puttnam, it represented a kind of betrayal. When he had started out, had looked at The Graduate and thought he could make films that, he hadn’t imagined that the generation of directors whose careers he had in many cases nurtured would decamp to LA and make movies featuring pumping rock soundtracks, jets and bunny-boilers. “I got slaughtered,” Tony Scott remembered. “Top Gun represented everything bad that had ever been done in cinema. David Puttnam said that. He was meant to be my buddy and the fucker sank me!”

But not only had they defined Hollywood in the 1980s, they had forged a path from commercials to the big screen that future generations of directors would now regularly tread. Johnathan Glazer, Michael Mann, David Fincher, Michael Bay, Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze all cut their teeth on commercials. For good or ill, Hollywood had bought what this scrappy band of British admen were selling, wholesale. 

Then again, everybody always did.