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Screen Gems' West 57th Street studio is dead quiet. Three bells have signaled readiness for a take. Everybody in the studio freezes. A writer interrupts himself in midsentence. A propman gently sets down the box he was moving. Overhead lights dim. Kliegs come up, spotlighting the stage. A flashing red light near the exit warns intruders to keep out.

A blonde actress stands center stage, head bowed, eyes shut, ignoring the make-up man dancing around her, and whispering her key line again and again to herself. The director carefully takes his place on the camera mount. After hours of dry runs, he can do no more. He checks the camera, gives the actress one last smile of encouragement and whispers, "Action."

And the actress, drawing on years of Stella Adler training and every ounce of sensitivity she can muster, steps forward, smiles meaningfully at the camera and says:

"Everything's better with Blue Bonnet on it."

This dramatic moment may be reshot as many as three dozen times, until the various "creative" authorities on the set--the film maker himself and perhaps both an art (continued on page 254)Sponsor(continued from page 150) director and a writer from the agency--are either satisfied or exhausted. If only because so many of the people involved are young, there's always at least an attempt at humor in a shooting session; but the first-time visitor to a set is usually struck by the painstaking seriousness with which commercials are produced. Without question, more energy and effort go into the best 60-second spots than into some feature films. The industry is fiercely competitive, too often uptight--and all because the stakes are so high: Over two and a half billion dollars are spent making commercials in this country every year.

During the three and a half hours a day that the average viewer spends in front of the set, he sees some 43 commercials. The point of all the money and all the high-priced talent is to make sure that the viewer really sees and hears the message. If he decides he'd rather switch than fight, he can knock a brilliant campaign--and its creators--into oblivion. He is the ultimate critic whom all the copy writers and art directors and production people are trying to move. Since his most likely move is into the bathroom, they'll go to elaborate lengths to hold his attention.

For instance: Not long ago, a crew of New York advertising people was shooting a commercial for Del Monte vegetables. The concept was based on spoofing the old Tarzan movies: a beautiful Jane, pursued by a lion, running through the jungle, singing the praises of Del Monte. Shooting the sequences with Jane was a breeze. But the lion sequences were a different story.

Edgar turned out to be your typical New York City lion--a real pussycat. No amount of cajoling could induce him to leap, snarling, toward the camera. Finally, after a dozen unsuccessful takes, the copy writer had a brain storm: Why not dangle a live chicken in front of Edgar to call back his lost jungle instincts?

"I'd rather not do that," his trainer said. "I don't know just how he'll react."

"Come on, we can't sit around here all day," the director said.

So they sent one of the studio "go-fers" to a nearby market and on the next take, Edgar was confronted by a squawking chicken. For a full five minutes, he stared at the bird. Then he began to quiver. The director whispered, "Action," and Edgar sprang. Over the chicken. Over the camera. And astride the trainer, whom he proceeded to treat like a lioness in heat.

Several propmen and grips ran to the trainer's aid, but they were stopped by a quavering whisper that came from underneath Edgar: "Don't frighten him, don't frighten him. Let him finish!"

A few minutes later, the trainer--a little wetter but otherwise OK--scrambled sheepishly to safety. And Edgar went back to his perch, refreshed and ready for work.

Several years ago, Lever Brothers gave Doyle Dane Bernbach an unusual assignment--to develop a personality for a new detergent. Name, packaging, advertising--the works. Writer Paula Greene and art director Len Sirowitz (now a partner in one of New York's hottest new agencies) began the project by reviewing what the competition was doing.

"It was obvious that the top cleaners--Mr. Clean, Ajax, Bold--were shooting for a masculine, quasi-sexual image," says Sirowitz. "We decided simply to take that approach to its logical conclusion."

They designed a package that features the imperious head of a Roman gladiator. They named the detergent Hero. And, to top it off, they wrote commercials that featured a Hero box three stories high, sitting majestically on a grassy plain, intoning to 200 wide-eyed housewives as follows:

I, Hero, am here,

I am strong yet gentle.

Friends, housewives, countrywomen,

Bring me your wash.

Selling the idea to Lever Brothers turned out to be surprisingly easy. ("It didn't hurt," says one junior art director, "that the gladiator on the box happened to bear a striking resemblance to one of the top Lever executives.") But producing it was another story. Following are a few excerpts from Len Sirowitz' production diary:

May 16: Flew to shooting location--plain of Agar, Yugoslavia. Hero box 30 feet high, 22 feet wide, 8 feet deep flew with me--in its own plane. First night in Dubrovnik there is an earthquake. Omen?

May 17: Begin searching for 200 Yugoslavian women who look like pretty American housewives. This could be a long casting session.

May 18: Visited location today. Hero box has been erected in middle of plain of Agar, 100 miles from Dubrovnik. Box seems to be causing consternation among local peasantry. Shoot commercial tomorrow.

May 19: Rain.

May 20: Rain.

May 21: Visited location again today. Workmen paddling around Hero box in rowboats. Still raining. Decided Israel might be better place to shoot commercial.

May 27: Hero box now erected on plain of Ephraim, Israel. Visited location today. Israeli crew members making cracks about "the golden calf." Client making cracks about "the commercial version of Cleopatra."

May 28: Casting 200 "American housewives" no less difficult in Israel. One girl who was perfect for commercial resigned when she heard it would be shown in the United States. "My parents think I'm living in Paris," she explained.

May 29: Tried to keep news of shooting away from Procter & Gamble. Security breached--full-page article about Hero in Tel Aviv newspaper. In Hebrew. Israeli production man denied leaking press. Said, "You can't take 200 streetwalkers off Tel Aviv's main drag and have nobody know about it."

May 30: First day of shooting. Interrupted. Turns out we erected Hero box precisely on Jordan-Israel border in direct line of mortar fire. Israeli army guards assigned to location.

May 31: Second day of shooting. Israeli Phantom jets buzzing location. Hero box shaking dangerously.

June 1: Third day of shooting. Raining. Went to nearby Israeli army billet to ask for help in getting our equipment out of mud. They said no. Told them there were 200 Israeli women with us. They said yes.

June 2: Rain.

June 3: Rain.

Somehow, the shooting was completed. And today, housewives in Portland, Oregon, are appropriately startled by the sight of a giant Hero box on their television screens. Of course, they're not half so startled as the Jordanian guerrilla who wandered over to Israeli territory and saw the real thing looming over him.

Why is the business of making commercials so fraught with problems? For one thing, there's the constant pressure to produce fresh ideas. And there's the temperament of the people in the business; they tend not to operate as precisely as C. P. A.s or engineers. But there's a third reason, and this one is gloriously ironic: The very people who have raised the art of communication to its commercial zenith often have trouble communicating among themselves.

Take the typical client-agency relationship. To many creative people, the client symbolizes the square, uptight straight world. To many clients, creative people look like refugees from Hair who are determined to fritter away their advertising budgets on artsy minute movies that may or may not sell their products.

Each faction can give examples to prove its point. Writer Derald Brenamen tells of creating a commercial for the headache remedy Vanquish at Benton & Bowles.

"We came up with a terrific animation spot built around a history of the headache. It opened with a visual of a little cave man center screen while the audio had an announcer intoning, tongue in cheek, 'As man has evolved, so has his headache.' Everybody loved it. Everybody, that is. except one of the board members at Sterling Drug. He's a Mormon, and he doesn't believe in evolution. I fought for the commercial, but it was hopeless. I felt like Clarence Darrow."

Another favorite story of creative types: Not long ago, a major snack company was looking for a television spokesman for its potato chips. It turned out to be like looking for the Grail. The agency that had the account at the time sent pounds of pictures of top comedians off to the client. But every agency recommendation was rejected for one reason or another. Finally, someone in casting had a brain storm: Why not the British comedian Terry-Thomas? "Perfect," all the agency people said, as they rushed off pictures of Terry-Thomas to the corporation headquarters. A few days went by, and then they got a wire from the client:

He'll do stop but must shave mustache and cap front teeth stop

The clients have their stories, too: Recently, the president of Campana summoned Ted Bates advertising creative people to its company headquarters in Batavia, Illinois, for a brainstorming session on Pursettes tampons. It was a meeting of "critical importance," since Pursettes are directly competitive with Tampax and trailing that brand in the market place.

As usual, planes out of New York's Kennedy Airport were delayed, so the rather woolly creative types who had been threatened into making the long trek to Batavia holed up in the terminal bar and nursed their grudges. And when they finally got to Batavia and the president was in conference, they found another bar.

By the time they were ushered into the oak-paneled Campana board room, they were in the mood for almost anything but a discussion of the ins and outs of Pursettes. The meeting gradually came to order. Various corporate underlings made long introductory remarks, complete with charts and graphs. Finally, the president himself rapped impatiently for attention. He waited until the room quieted. Then, holding a tiny blue Pursette up in front of him, he said solemnly, "Gentlemen, it is imperative that we find new uses for this product."

There was a long pause as the visitors stared glassy-eyed at the Pursette. Then one of them slowly rose to his feet and proposed, "Why don't we douse them with kerosene and sell them as torches for dwarfs?"

Of course, the legendary gap between client and agency can be bridged. One top creative executive seemed to be doing extremely well with a particularly important client. Over the years, he had built a good rapport with the old man--almost a father-son relationship. So he wasn't surprised when one day the client invited him and his wife out to his home in East Hampton, Long Island.

The young executive's wife was understandably nervous about meeting the client's socialite wife; but after a few hours with the sweet little lady, she felt accepted and relaxed. The visit went smoothly until the young wife spotted a lovely antique blown-glass inkwell, picked it up to examine it and dropped it--spilling indelible ink all over an irreplaceable antique Oriental rug.

The hostess became hysterical, flailing her arms and screaming, "Get her out of here, get her out of here!"

The young couple could do nothing but leave, the wife crying brokenheartedly, the husband with visions of his client-agency relationship smashed beyond repair.

When they got home that night, his wife had regained her composure. "I know it can't make things right," she said, "but I think we should at least make a gesture to show them how sorry we are."

So the next day, the husband went back to his client's estate bearing two dozen long-stemmed red roses. A maid showed him into the library, then went to find the mistress of the house. For ten minutes or so, the young man waited standing. Then he sat down on a chair--and crushed to death the old lady's sleeping Pekingese. He threw the roses and the Pekingese into a grand piano and ran from the house.

One man who never worries about his relationship with clients is Stan Freberg, the renegade writer who created memorable campaigns for Sunsweet Prunes ("Today the pits, tomorrow the wrinkles") and Jeno's Pizza ("Show me your Jeno's pack"). Freberg began his advertising career 13 years ago, working as a creative consultant to advertising agencies through Freberg Ltd., the great seal of which reads "Ars gratia pecuniae"--Art for money's sake. But recently, he got fed up with consulting and formed his own agency ("Everything J. Walter Thompson is is what I ain't"), complete with a research department and a media-buying arm--Thyme Inc., "A Division of Parsley. Sage, Rosemary and Osborne."

Freberg has little trouble with clients, because clients who come to Freberg Ltd. know what to expect. On those rare occasions when a client forgets whom he hired, Stan has a Frebergesque way of telling him. General Mills once gave him the assignment of increasing sales of Cheerios cereal among adults. Using animation, Freberg created a dialog between a man on a couch and his psychiatrist.

Man (troubled tone): I don't know, doc, but I can't seem to relate to cold cereals that are shaped like things--you know, like Cheerios. I take them out of the box and smash them into flakes.

Psychiatrist (very reasonably): But they're shaped like that for a good reason. It's easier to toast an O.

Man (dubious): How can I be sure of that?

Psychiatrist: Trust me.

Man: I never thought of it like that. I've acted like a bigot, I really have.

"The client loved the commercial," says Freberg, "but the word bigot bothered him. In the meeting, he kept questioning it. I told him it was the right word and, besides, it had never been used in a commercial.

"He went back to Minneapolis and pretty soon, I got a wire: 'Have given matter careful consideration. Change Bigot to some other word.'

"I wired back: 'How about Faggot?'

"Three days go by and then I get another wire from him: 'If that's our choice, Bigot is better.' "

To avoid such difficulties, Freberg has added a clause to his contracts with clients that reads in part: "You agree that the final decision on any such copy changes, including but not limited to the decision as to what is or is not funny, shall rest with us."

After creating an ostensibly successful client-agency relationship, the trickiest aspect of making a commercial is finding the right talent to act in it. The major New York agencies have huge casting departments that are constantly on the lookout for fresh "housewifey" types who can deliver the standard commercial lines without gagging on them ("Marge, why dust when you can Pledge?"). They audition hordes of silver-haired, silver-tongued announcers in the quest for the one who can bring conviction to a stand-up pitch like "Now, more than ever, shouldn't your brand be True?"

But finding talent for a "slice of life" detergent commercial is nothing compared with what the more inventive writers and directors require. Howard Zieff, probably TV's most successful director of commercials and the creator of such classic spots as "Stomachs" for Alka-Seltzer and "Driving School" for American Motors, insists on using "real people"--critics call them "uglies"--in the commercials. "When I cast a balloon seller for a Benson & Hedges spot," Zieff says, "he didn't look like he was from central casting. He looked like he was from Central Park. In fact, we were filming him on the street--cameras, lights, all kinds of equipment around--and passers-by kept walking into the scene, trying to buy balloons from him."

Not long ago, Zieff shot that commercial for Alka-Seltzer about a professional pie eaters' contest. The spot, which includes a sprint to a pie table and a touching scene in the locker room between an old athlete and a rookie, is a brilliant spoof of the mystique of professional athletics.

Zieff, of course, insisted that each actor in the commercial be a 300-pounder. "But I was careful to ask each one how his general health was. I was worried about the sprint to the pie table. These guys weren't exactly built like Rafer Johnson. And I know the most exercise some of them were used to was lifting a fork."

He was right. After about a dozen takes, it looked as if he might lose some of his cast. "I'd yell 'Cut' and the whole dozen of them would flop down on the grass, spread-eagled, gasping for breath. They looked like beached whales. Some of them started to turn blue. Often, I do as many as twenty takes. I made do with a dozen that day."

When a commercial requires a very large cast, it's usually shot overseas, where the actors, all nonprofessionals, can be hired for very little money. "But I wish just one client could spend a day trying to manage a hundred European extras," says Zieff. "Believe me, he'd shoot in the States and damn the expense."

Last spring, Zieff spent weeks in the Po Valley, trying to shoot a spectacular military scene for a Cinzano commercial: Napoleon's troops, thousands of them, lined up as far as the eye could see for his review. "Those guys just couldn't form a straight line. We worked with them for hours. We moved this one or that one, we talked very patiently to them. Finally, we had one of the crew draw a line on the ground to guide them. Would you believe he drew a crooked line? Then we managed to get everything set up to shoot and I noticed a big gaping hole in the line. Emilio and Luigi had wandered off to take a leak."

One key scene in the commercial called for a conscript to ride a horse at full gallop along the line of troops. "I was driving to the location," says Zieff, "and I passed the conscript we had cast--he claimed he was a stunt man--trotting along the side of the road on a horse. He turned to wave to me and fell off the horse. I almost died. We did half a dozen takes with him. Every time, he fell off the horse and ruined the take. Somebody finally had a brain storm. We restaged the whole scene, moved equipment and people so it would make sense for him to fall off the horse. So of course that was the only take all day in which he didn't fall."

Most actors have a love-hate hang-up about doing commercials, which they feel are a comedown from the legitimate stage or the silver screen--but, on the other hand, there's all that money. One small part in an ad that runs nationally can bring an actor as much as $20,000. And a number of actors have been discovered through commercials. Gunilla Knutson, the sexy Scandinavian blonde who purred, "Take it off, take it all off," for Noxzema Shave Cream, is now making feature films. The award-winning Alka-Seltzer commercial built around a massive dumpling and marshmallowed meatballs has led to celebrity for the bride, Alice Playten, and a comedy movie role for the groom, Terry Kiser. And Ali MacGraw was cast as the lead in Goodbye, Columbus after somebody spotted her in a Revlon commercial. Most actors know the success stories and are eager to get in on the action.

"Eager? They're desperate," says David Altschiller, top writer at Carl Ally advertising. "I was once auditioning girls for a Noxzema spot. It called for a particular kind of reading, sort of a zany feeling, so I was careful to give each actress who came into my office very specific direction. Late in the afternoon, this blonde came in. You could tell she was a little on the kookie side. I was right in the middle of saying to her, 'Look, I want something sort of special here'--when I was called out to take a phone call. When I came back, she was sitting on one corner of my desk, studying the script. And her clothes--all of them--were sitting in a nice neat pile on another corner." Altschiller swears she didn't get the part.

Recently, black actors have started to get a break in TV commercials. Civil rights groups and certain agencies, notably Young & Rubicam and Benton & Bowles, have been instrumental in the fight for this particular civil right. And advertising people have begun to realize that integrated commercials are more realistic than the lily-white ones of a few years ago. Sometimes, however, in their zealous efforts to set things right, advertisers go a bit overboard. A few months ago, Fisher-Price Toys had a special man on a shooting. His assignment: to ensure that the little toy black boy who was one of 20 little figures in a toy bus didn't accidentally get assigned a back seat.

Another time, an advertiser wanted to cast two white models and a black model riding on a three-seater bicycle. "But the logistics of it were impossible," says the producer. "We couldn't put the black girl on the front seat--too obvious. We certainly couldn't put her on the back seat. And when we tried her in the middle, she looked like filling for a sandwich."

As rough as the business of making commercials is today, few agency people miss the era of live television. Today, mistakes can be buried on the cutting-room floor. In the old days, they were broadcast to millions of viewers even as they happened. A California used-car dealer was once doing a live commercial of a sale to a black couple. He was making quite a show of it. He painstakingly pointed out the various features of the car they were interested in. He answered each of their questions convincingly. And then he closed the deal, dramatically handing a set of keys over to the black gentleman. Millions of viewers watched as the camera followed the smiling couple leaving the showroom and then zoomed in on the dealer, who, carried away by his salesmanship, smilingly blurted, "Now, there go a pair of happy niggers!"

Used-car advertising had a patent-medicine aspect in those days. One sales technique was to advertise a ridiculously low-priced special that always happened to be "just sold" when customers came in for it. One day, however, a customer mounted a kamikaze attack on one of these specials. Les ("Get off your couch and come on down to Hermosa Beach") Bacon was raving about a particularly good buy to his television audience when a young man rushed onto the lot where the commercial was being telecast, waving a handful of money and screaming, "I'll buy it, I'll buy it!" They had to sell it to him.

Of course, products with possible suggestive overtones were especially prone to disaster on live television. The Beauty-rest Mattress people were once doing a live commercial that featured a well-endowed blonde in a low-cut nightgown. The action called for the camera to dolly in and pan the actress as she snuggled down into the Beautyrest and then to zoom in on her smiling, slumbering face for a long close-up. No one ever got to see that blissfully slumbering face. The cameraman obediently began his move. But when two gently heaving breasts came into his view, he zoomed in and held on them, transfixed, for a full 45 seconds. So did 4,500,000 viewers.

A few clients actually miss the days of live commercials. In that era, agency people didn't dare attempt some of the crazy things they try today. Recently, a fledgling writer at Grey Advertising came up with a brilliant commercial idea for Ivory, a soap women use to wash babies' diapers. Why not build a spot around a stork in flight, a stork bringing to mother not a newborn baby but a box of baby's diaper soap, Ivory Snow?

"Great concept," said the producer. "We'll just get a good animator to draw us a nice stork and--"

"No animated stork," said the writer. An animated stork was much too predictable. Only a live stork in full flight could do justice to the grace and dramatic possibilities of the writer's idea. Having taken a stand, he then took a vacation.

Trouble began at dawn of the shooting day, when the crew tried to prepare the stork, specially shipped from Florida, for his moment of television glory. It seems that a flesh-and-blood stork--unlike the benign likenesses that adorn the sides of diaper-delivery trucks--is a very ill-tempered bird. During the process of luring this one from his shipping crate and taping his beak to a diaper, several crewmen sustained their first stork bites. The stork, furthermore, was filthy from the fight he had put up and in no condition to communicate Ivory Snow's lily-white image.

Eventually, the dirty bird was cleaned and one of the crew members--with diaper, Ivory Snow and thrashing stork in his arms--made the perilous ascent to a launching platform 50 feet above a grassy field in West Chester. He waited for the director's cue. "Roll 'em," whispered the director to his cameraman. "Speed," he commanded his sound engineers. And then he shouted up to the platform, "Release the stork!"

The crewman unhanded the stork and leaped back out of the way. The stork just stood there, looking down over the edge of the platform.

"I said, 'Release the stork!' " shouted the director.

"I did!" the crewman shouted back. "He don't wanna fly!"

No one had considered the fact that this bird had spent his life walking around a coop in Florida. He'd never been in the air in his life. And he wasn't about to hurl himself into space, especially not toting a diaper and a box of soap. The crew on the ground looked at one another and had visions of roughly $25,000 in production costs--if not the stork--going out the window. Finally, the director took the extreme step:

"Kick him off the platform!" No answer from above. "I said, 'Kick him off the platform!' "

The crewman reluctantly planted a well-placed kick. The stork, flapping wildly, shot straight out into space for about 15 feet. And then he plummeted to the ground--the diaper and the Ivory Snow box trailing behind him. The stork barely survived, but the commercial died.

So why do they bother? Why does a Harvard Business School--trained client put himself in the hands of spaced-out copy writers, wild-eyed art directors and jungle beasts? Because usually, after all the mistakes and retakes and recuts, what they give him somehow sells his product. Rosser Reeves, former chairman of the Ted Bates Agency, tells about an Anacin commercial: "It was a 59-second motion picture that cost just $8400 to produce and it made more money for the makers of Anacin in seven years than Gone with the Wind did for MGM in a quarter of a century."

The motives of the creative people are more complicated. For one thing, Madison Avenue is a place where offbeat, even bizarre ideas are sought after instead of sniffed at. For another, it's a place where a person can earn a good living while he's still young enough to enjoy it. Finally, when a writer or art director sees an idea--his idea, which started with a blank piece of paper--moving and making sounds on a screen, he forgets how hard it was to make it happen and looks around for the next one. There's this writer at Young & Rubicam, for example, who has a great idea for an Excedrin commercial: It calls for an albino dwarf riding a hippo on a tightrope over Times Square....