Let’s start with a few tangents, as is my wont on this global communications colossus. I was watching a 1960s bedroom farce called Good Neighbor Sam the other day on a streaming service. Around about 1964 or so, Hollywood started getting randy. That is, American movies finally began portraying people, sexually, in a more realistic fashion. Married couples were sharing a bed and they were sometimes hot for each other. When people were cheating on their spouses, they were having sex, not just meeting for smash-lip kisses (and nothing else) every once in a while.
Good Neighbor Sam starred Jack Lemmon, Dorothy Provine, and the French actor, Romy Schneider. The very presence of Schneider was a tip-off that there’d be friskiness, what with her being Gallic and all that. Born in Austria, she eventually moved to France where her film career skyrocketed and then she came to America for a few movies.
Romy Schneider
Schneider plays Janet, the exotically foreign friend of Min (Provine), who’s married to Lemmon. The screwball conceit is Janet is informed she can inherit $16 million so long as she’s married. Problem is, she’s just divorced her philandering husband. Now, some of Janet’s greedy distant relatives want to get their hands on the dough so they put a private detective on her (she’s told them she’s still married). Min and Sam (Lemmon), helpful, good neighbors, agree to have him, Sam, pose as her husband to throw the gumshoes off. Comedy ensues.
By the way, the movie opens with tight shots of Sam and Min in bed, just waking up, and within a few moments they start getting, shall we say, playful. There’s no real sex, of course, but you just know that they squeeze in a quickie before Sam has to dash off to his job at an ad agency. As for TV at the time, it still was portraying married couples in separate beds, except for The Munsters, which is bizarre. I suppose Hollywood morality held that only monster ghouls would share a bed. America’s puritanism was (is) awfully weird.
Another factoid: the first TV married couple to share a bed was the mom and dad in The Brady Bunch. Want more trivia about the changes in Hollywood in the ’60s and ’70s? Okay, the first time one of the Seven Dirty Words was uttered in a major American film was when Robert Blake as Perry in the 1967 movie, In Cold Blood, said “bullshit.” For that matter, what about the F-bomb? John Schuck, playing Capt. “Painless” Waldowski, lines up against a real NFL player/actor in a game of football in the 1970 movie, M*A*S*H. Schuck explains:
I had to line up opposite Ben Davidson, and (the second unit director) said, “Say something that will make him angry.” So I just said, “Alright, bub, this time you’re fucking head’s coming off!” And that’s the last thing I remember for five minutes.
Of course, things have progressed to the point where, for instance, Robert DeNiro utters the F-bomb every third word.
Anyway, speaking of smut, the movie, natch, was interrupted by commercials, one of which was for 45/47, or, in Pencillistese, Li’l Duce. It was a quick, 15-second spot, and I was blown away. The Once and Present King of America is a goddamned genius when it comes to communicating with his base. Hell, more than his base — as the November election sadly demonstrated, he knows how to talk to almost everybody.
To wit: the little commercial had the simplest of messages. It was too short for me to get the words verbatim but, as close as I can approximate, the voiceover guy said, Prescription drugs cost too much. President Trump will fight to protect you from Big Pharma.
That’s it! Swear to god!
It would be impossible to craft a simpler, more direct, more effective message than that. Those 15 or so words spoke volumes more than a hundred passionate, reasoned, well-researched arguments put forward by the likes of former Rep. Katie Porter, Rep, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, or Sen. Bernie Sanders, all of whom are saying the same thing but with far less punch.
The Democrats, the progressives, the liberals — those, in short, not part of the cult — are comfortable only in presenting scholarly, lawyerly cases. They cite precedent. They defer to experts. They spew data. They mention research papers. They construct lines of reasoning.
And they bore the living shit out of most Americans.
I wish that weren’t so, but I also wish I had a million dollars. Wishes aren’t gonna pay my bills nor are they going to win elections.
If, for example, AOC wants to be president, she’d better start saying, in 15-second commercials, Corporations want to take over our lives. I’m here to fight for you.
Simple. Direct. Effective
And not boring.