widgetwonder

For advertising folks, the ad movie is a special genre - hopefully biting, sarcastic, insulting, and funny as hell. Well, here’s one perhaps you haven’t seen - Putney Swope.

The film, from 1969, was directed by Robert Downey Sr (Yes, the father of Jr.), and begins with a corrupt and slovenly ad agency board kveching about their business. When the chairman & head of the agency enters, he starts berating the group , stuttering, and as the others begin a game of charades to figure out what he’s trying to say, he has a heart attack and dies, face down on the board table. After rifling through his pockets for his wallet and watch, the board holds an election for the new chair (with the chairman still laying face down, dead, across the table). The majority vote for Putney Swope - the music director and only black guy on the board. The rest of the movie follows the outrageous consequences of changing the name of the agency to Truth and Soul Inc. and replacing all the execs with brothers and sisters from the ‘hood. The film is in B&W but the ads are in COLOR. Outrageous - Black Power account execs, a pot-smoking German midget as President of the US, and they pitch a car account - the Boreman Six. One AE walks around repeating: "Putney says the Boreman Six girl is got to have soul!"

One special aspect of the film is the actor Antonio Fargas, later famous as Starsky & Hutch’s Huggy Bear. Something else that I personally love is that in the movie Cotton Comes to Harlem (itself a classic early blaxploitation story, written by the under-known and under-appreciated noir-writer Chester Himes), as characters Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed (two Harlem police detectives) run across 125th Street, the movie theatre marquis in the back ground is advertising Putney Swope.

But what really blows me away is this: My father came to the US from India in the mid 1950’s, when he was 16. In 1969, his parents and sister came to live in Philadelphia - a big trip for them to bring the whole family and leave India. Having not much money, they lived in a crappy section of South Philadelphia (where my mother grew up) - the part that was going downhill fast from old Rocky-movie Italian, sliding into the crumbling poverty and ruin that most people associate with Philadelphia today. Over the years, we’ve made fun of my aunt and uncle for never wanting to go out - they won’t go to restaurants, or parties, or the movies, or to Atlantic City casinos. They had jobs for years, but would only go to and from work, and then to church and the neighborhood shopping. What is wrong with these people, I wondered?

Recently, though, I was telling my mother about Putney Swope, and she remembered — when my aunt and uncle first came to Philadelphia, my parents took them to see this movie. What? THIS was the first movie they saw in the US? Militant afro advertising agency? Loud soul guitar and psychedelic colors? Pot smoking Nazi US president? Jesus, no wonder they refused to go out for the next 30 years…

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 8th, 2005 at 12:26 pm and is filed under ad blips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.