Revisiting the Velvet Bowels of Advertising Part 7: Oregon Lottery Poet and Chuck

So here are parts 2 and 3 of a Oregon Lottery Campaign. Again I now marvel at the writing. Well I marveled then but "then" I didn't much to compare it to. Pretty much everything was of a similar caliber of shall we call it "genius."

Come on, a grease monkey taking his lottery winnings and building a time machine to visit Lewis and Clark... and Chuck? A "Hotdog on a Stick" girl writes a poem about her trip to France in a Dodge? These days most things are so beat up by the process that the good ideas have been hunted down and strung by their petards long before they get to me. Whatever spark is left is yanked out by it's roots either at the preproduction meeting, on the shoot, in the edit or the dreaded post post nether-world where the wife of the brother in law of the secretary of the brand manager from the Andorran district office gets to say that they don't like the left eyebrow of the extra who 50 feet behind the talent and is on scene for 3 frames... and thanks to the lack of balls, hutzpah, guts, fear of not getting paid, call it what you will, the agency and the production company will honor their opinion, the shot will be yanked and/or 6 thousand dollars worth of flame work will be done to "fix" the offending eye brow. I learned long ago to do my cut just shut up. It's process of erosion. Good stuff gets killed. Bad stuff gets through. Why does this happen? Is it just human nature? Oh well... there was a time when good was good and bad was bad and stupid was stupid. I offer a big thank you to those that let me be part of those times.