Fifties (103 page)

Jones especially liked the freedom offered in the early days of television commercials, when budgets were small and almost everything was done live. There were no rules and no one could tell you what you were not allowed to do. He had done one set of live commercials for a new pop-cap bottle for Pabst Blue Ribbon. It was seemingly simple: a flick of the thumb, and the cap was supposed to come flying off—except that it did not always work. Jones learned how to cut away quickly to something else—the continuation of the program, or another commercial—and then to come back when the cap was off. For the Green Giant vegetables, a major Burnett account, Jones helped create a huge puppet of the Jolly Green Giant. It was about two and a half feet tall, and he thought it was going to charm hundreds of thousands of young children. Jones was very pleased with himself and thought he had taken a giant step forward for the visual arts. But when the puppet Giant premiered, it was an absolute disaster. It lurched at the camera, like a Frankensteinian monster, frightening thousands of children. There were endless phone calls to the studio that day demanding that they get that awful thing off the air. Jones had learned a great deal in his experimental period, and he was confident he knew, as few others did, how to sell a product visually. In particular, he was pleased with a commercial he had done for Campbell’s tomato juice in which he had used time-lapse photography to show the life of a tomato as it grew into one of the lucky vegetables chosen for the honor of being in Campbell’s tomato juice.

Intrigued by the notice in
Ad Age,
Jones responded. The world’s largest account had to be Chevy, he was certain. He was right: It was
Chevy, and it was handled by the Detroit firm of Campbell Ewald. He was called in for an interview, and the Ewald and General Motors people liked what they saw in him. He might be a television man, a relatively unpredictable breed as far as they were concerned, but he was a good son of the Midwest—born in St. Louis, educated at Washington University of St. Louis, and currently working in Chicago at Burnett, which fancied itself a bastion of Midwestern values in a profession dominated by Eastern and Californian elitism and snobbery. As such, he was not a man likely to look down on either cars or Detroit. Jones was thrilled when the job was offered to him; he liked the big budget—around $1 million. It was an amazing figure for the time; it meant that on a given commercial he could spend as much as $70,000 in production costs. In addition, Chevy’s commitment to television advertising was imposing. Jones was soon in charge of spending some $90 million annually, and there were times when Chevy sponsored three major network shows—
My Three Sons
on ABC;
Route 66
on CBS; and
Bonanza
on NBC.

If Jones had thought people were a little slow to pick up on the uses of television at Burnett, that was no longer a problem at Chevy. In addition, he liked the openness and directness of the top professional people at Chevrolet, especially Ed Cole. Ed Cole, he thought, would not dream of telling him how to make a commercial. Instead, Cole’s only marching orders were to make good commercials. Cole thought Chevy was making the best cars in its history, and he thought if the advertising men made commercials that were as good as his cars, the company would sell even more cars.

What Ken Jones wanted to do was use this new medium to tell stories visually and to minimize words. If there was to be storytelling, then let the camera do it. By coincidence, at almost the same time he went to Campbell Ewald, a friend of his named Bob Lawrence, who ran a small production company in New York, sent him some experimental films. They had been made independently by a cinematographer in Los Angeles named Gerry Schnitzer. When Ken Jones saw the films he was stunned: What Schnitzer had been doing on his own, with very little money, was exactly what he was looking for. Schnitzer’s stories were short and arresting, and in some way they reflected the essence of American life. They were the work of an original and very gifted man. One of them showed a mailman making his rounds, coming upon a hopscotch board and, when he thought no one was looking, playing a secret game of hopscotch. In another, Schnitzer had waited by a drawbridge and caught the idle moments of people in their cars as the bridge was up and their lives
were momentarily interrupted. In another film, he had quietly staked out a scene in Los Angeles where an older and obviously quite poor Mexican-American man was trying to sell a cocker spaniel puppy with a rope around its neck. A father, mother, and young daughter drove up and negotiated with the man, but they failed to make a deal and drove off. Then a little while later, obviously in response to the pleas of the child, the family came back and completed the deal. The simplicity of the scene was powerful.

Ken Jones saw those small stories and knew he had found his man—someone who could tell a story with a camera, used no narration, and had a vision of America that reminded Jones of Norman Rockwell’s. He got in touch with Gerry Schnitzer immediately. Schnitzer had grown up in Brooklyn and gone to Dartmouth intending to be a writer, but had found much to his surprise that he liked using a camera better than a typewriter. He had written and directed some of the early
Bowery Boys
films and made some small films about the Canadian fishing and lumber industries for the Canadian Film Board. Eventually, he moved to California and continued making small, highly original films that contained no dialog. Commercial success had largely eluded him, in no small part because he had not actively sought it. Someone had used his films for children in remedial reading and writing classes. Here, children who were nominally loath to express themselves verbally, saw his films and were encouraged, perhaps by the lack of narration, to talk about what they had just seen. At the very least, that was a sign that he was touching an audience normally resistant to most traditional forms of communication. Schnitzer, in those days, was getting by on a very small amount of money, and no one on Madison Avenue seemed to have any interest in his work. Someone had sent him to meet Max Wylie, the creative director at one of the major New York firms, and Wylie, Schnitzer thought, had not only rejected his work but treated him with great contempt. In fact, Wylie had told Schnitzer he knew nothing about storytelling. “They’re very pretty,” Wylie had said, “but they’re not really stories, are they? I mean, where are the words? Where is the story line? I’m afraid we can’t sell tobacco with work like this.” Then Schnitzer got a call from Ken Jones, who proposed they work together.

Schnitzer agreed, but he knew that he was going to be walking a very fine line between his art on one hand and commerce on the other. That meant he had to be very tight in his storytelling. There could be no ambiguities. The theme had to be very sharply focused, and there was to be no doubt when the commercial was over what
the point of it was: to sell cars. Years later, he noted, though, that he and Jones were not selling cars but dreams.

The first commercial Schnitzer shot with Jones was for the 1958 Chevrolet. Jones deferred to Schnitzer’s instinct for the right story. Schnitzer had thought about it. He wanted something that was basic to ordinary American life, something that touched every home and reflected a rite of passage to which Chevy could be connected. In the end he came up with a very simple idea. “How about a family at graduation time?” Schnitzer asked Jones. That was it, they agreed. So the commercial was shot at two minutes in length—then, and now, a lifetime as far as commercials were concerned.

It featured an unbelievably wholesome young blond teenager, a Tab Hunter lookalike, clearly soon to leave high school and go on to college and the right fraternity. It is prom night, and as the commercial begins, he is a little disorganized and running behind time. As he rushes out in his white dinner jacket, his family gathers at the door. They are immediately recognizable: a likeable, wise, and good-natured dad; a pleasant (but somewhat more severe) mom; and a younger sister, with the obvious look of a tomboy. There is a sense that they are sharing a secret, but it is a little hard to tell at first. This is all done deftly in mime, as Schnitzer wanted, with no sales pitch. The music in the background is the Chevy fight song of the period: “See the U.S.A. in Your Chevrolet,” and it is played in a Les Paul/Mary Ford style, to show that Chevy is hip. The boy leaves the house and heads to his jalopy, which is an American classic of the period, painted with folksy teenage mottos:
ENTRANCE
, it says on the front door, and
GO SLOW
on top, clearly an all-American car. As the boy heads toward his car, we see his eyes catch something else—another car parked in front of the house. We see his surprise. It is a brand-new Chevy convertible, with the top down. For the first time, the announcer speaks: “If it’s happened once, it’s happened a thousand times.” The boy stops, looks at the new car, and then turns and looks back at the front door of his house, where the rest of his family is standing. The audience senses that there is a secret between Dad and Sis. Back and forth go the looks—boy to family, boy to new convertible. Finally, Dad smiles and reaches into his pocket for a set of keys. The boy rushes to get them, races to the convertible, and is about to drive off when he realizes he has forgotten something. The corsage is in the old jalopy. He gets the corsage and picks up his girlfriend, one well worthy of the car (the actress Shirley Knight, in one of her first roles). It is all clear: This is a great kid, a great family, a great car. Just to be sure, lest we may not have gotten it, the announcer
says: “What a gal! What a night! What a car! The new Chevrolet!” When Jones and Schnitzer screened it for the first time, Jones knew he had a winner when the advertising manager of Chevy broke into tears and said, “It’s perfect—it makes me think of my oldest son.”

Among other things, the commercial signaled that a new, more affluent era was coming, even for teenagers. The age of the jalopy was over, it seemed to say, the age of tinkering and patching done with it. Dads from now on had better give their sons and daughters something worthwhile,
something brand-new,
when they graduated from high school. A new era was being announced and sold in a very new way.

The next major commercial the two men did together took place in the fall of 1958 and was known as the “Family Shopping Tour.” It was very specifically designed to attack the almost un-American idea of not trading in a new car and instead trying to squeeze an additional year or two out of an old model. The economy had hit a soft patch that year; people were perhaps thinking of keeping their cars a little longer than in the past. The selling theme addressed this problem. It begins with a shot of a father and a son passing a Chevrolet window. Inside the showroom, a salesman is showing a 1959 station wagon to another family. The camera closes to a little girl hanging out the rear window of the new station wagon. She makes a face and sticks her tongue out at the boy, who is watching from the street. The salesman sees her and does a double-take, then smiles. The boy and the father keep looking at the station wagon. The camera picks up the byplay between the boy and the girl. Then the camera picks up the boy’s mother (and the man’s wife) carrying a load of groceries to an old car. She puts the groceries in the front seat and closes the door with considerable difficulty—she has to slam it three times before it catches. Then she casts a disapproving look at her husband’s interest in the auto showroom. He makes things worse by pointing to the new Chevy wagon. She is not pleased. Clearly, they have had arguments about a new car before, and she has held the line against spending. Just then the door of the old car slips open and the groceries tumble out, including a bunch of oranges. The camera closes on one orange as it tumbles down the street, follows it, and by the time the orange finishes its roll, it has turned into the mother, father, and little boy, now inside the showroom, where the salesman is working on them. Mom gets into the station wagon and slams the door. It catches immediately. She smiles. The next shot is of the family on the road, all of them smiling heartily. The announcer says: “Fun to see. Fun to drive. Fun to buy.
The new Chevrolet.” There were others to come—a driverless Chevy going through the streets of Paris as the style-conscious Parisians gape at it; a Chevy on the top of a mountain in southern Utah; and an airline pilot saying “My God, there’s a car on that rock.”

A few years later, after a string of remarkable successes, Jones and Schnitzer found that the Chevrolet management started to interfere, calling for more narration extolling the cars’ virtues. Schnitzer thought it was because the corporate people “understood everything but the dreams.” Some thirty years later, he pondered the reasons for the success of his early Chevy commercials and decided that it had to do with capturing the dreams and ambitions of ordinary families—
always,
he noted,
a family.

As the cars were becoming more powerful all the time, the men running the company were becoming blander and the power of the financial men was growing. Ed Cole was becoming very much the exception. Central headquarters was growing ever more powerful at the expense of the divisions. For many GM people the critical moment came in 1958, when Frederic Donner became president. Donner’s roots were in accounting but, unlike Harlow Curtice, who had also been an accountant, Donner was a man who gave off a sense of being interested only in numbers. When he traveled around the company, he was known to ask of the younger GM employees, “How much are we paying that young man?” His general reputation was for being shy and extremely private. He denied that: “I am not taciturn. I am not shy. I am not afraid of people and I don’t even own a slide rule.” His efforts at public relations, both inside and outside the company, were marginal: When Bob Dietch, the business editor of the Scripps-Howard chain asked for an interview with Donner as part of a series he was doing on the ten most influential businessmen in America, Donner at first refused. Dietch then said he would simply leave Donner off the list, and the latter changed his mind. The interview did not get off to a good start. “It’s very nice of you to give me the time,” Dietch said at the beginning. “Yes, I agree with that,” said Donner, quite deadpan. “I think it’s very nice of me too.”