Making a spectacle of himself with a pair of them.

I don’t know how I happened to see at the Regal Cinema, probably in 1950 or 51, Harold Lloyd’s last movie, Mad Wednesday (aka The Sins of Harold Diddlebock). It was a full-length feature made the year India became independent. The one scene I’ve not forgotten from it is a shell-rim spectacled Lloyd, in his usual timid nice-guy character, hanging for dear life from the minute hand of a giant clock on a tower. The pair of spectacles – actually no glasses but mere frames – was his distinguishing trademark, a “positioning” prop. Lloyd’s other distinguishing characteristic was he did impossible-seeming stunts himself. It appears that he kept himself in a fighting fit condition in order to be able to do them without a double. His earlier silent films, I found out, were made without a script. Start with a central idea and go on from there was his favourite formula. He got his movie break – and bug – in San Diego when the Edison Moving Picture Company visited San Diego where he was schooling and attending a drama school as an assistant to Mr Connor in 1914. He went to work as an extra at five dollars a day and got hooked for life. He followed the Edison outfit to Los Angeles and joined the Keystone Company. There he teamed with Hal Roach in the latter’s own company. (Roach later produced Laurel and Hardy comedies.} At that time, the benchmark for a comedian, Lloyd realized, was Charlie “The Little Tramp” Chaplin with his funny baggy attire and a tiny moustache. Not wanting to be a Charlie clone or imitation, he wore tight-fitting clothes and a different kind of moustache and made 150 farcical one-reelers featuring ‘Lonesome Luke’. They – and he – made people laugh and made lots of dough too. But he wasn’t happy with what he was doing. By then, he had started “to make a serious study of comedy” (“a contradiction” to his way of thinking) after he realized that there was no “harder job in the world than to make people laugh”. Around that time, he chanced upon the pair-of-spectacles device and a different type of character, the timid nice guy, who got into doing all kinds of unexpectedly and spectacularly bizarre stunts. “Folks like to be surprised” was the logic of his new style. It worked and Lloyd became a legend in his own right. "Harold Lloyd was not a comedian. But he was the best actor to act the part of a comedian of any person I ever saw." That’s what Hal Roach once said of Lloyd. And, here's what Lloyd said about a comedian: "I feel that to be a comic is as vital and important a mission as being a physician, healing other wounds.” There’s a July 1922 interview of Harold Lloyd (The American Magazine) here: http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/pdf/HAROLD%20LLOYD.pdf.

Hitler’s Cross. Now Shablok’s, too?

Everyone’s cross at Hitler’s Cross. Five mondo honchos of Mumbai’s Pee Three swore they won’t eat there. http://www.cybernoon.com/DisplayArticle.asp?section=fromthepress&subsection=opinions&xfile=August2006_opinions_standard990. They’re all foodies, mind you. Were I Punit Shablok, that would have me really, really worried. His reason for choosing for his new restaurant with a hookah parlour attached the name that’s leaving everyone cross-eyed seems to be a convolutedly thought out positional gambit. “This is one name that will stay in people’s minds,” he told Reuters. “We are not promoting Hitler… we want to tell people we are different in the way he was different.” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14121008/. Careful, dude. You don’t want to be different in the way Hitler was different unless you’re ready to be certified nuts and consigned to the snake pit. If I remember my Ries & Trout, the Hitler’s Cross promo task force seems to have applied the Positioning theory correctly. Only the window of the mind they chose to open is the one everyone would rather keep permanently boarded up. What intrigues me is this, though. Why would the Hitler’s Cross promo task force assume that Hitler would be remembered as ‘different’ (‘remarkable’?) by people, mostly Indians, who live and work in the Kharghar neighbourhood or take a detour to the restaurant on their way to Pune or Mumbai? Young people who chose to eat there seemed to recall Hitler as an evil man but didn’t think that was reason enough to deny the restaurant their patronage. http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2346673. Now, that sounds perfectly rational to me. And, totally non-hypocritical to boot as compared to certain politically correct foodie pronouncements mentioned earlier. The Cross(over?) incidence also reiterates the wisdom of the adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Else, could a new eatery in sleepy Kharghar ever aspire to be the irritant in the world’s eye? One more point about Hitler’s Cross is worth noting. In August 1920, the soon-to-be Füehrer was working as an artist and understood the power of visual symbols. He adopted the reverse Swastika from the Finnish Air Force whose military symbol it had been since 1918 and tilted it. “The effect was as if we had dropped a bomb,” he wrote. Shablok could vouch for that, I reckon.

In search of the Holy Grail.

In Clarion-McCann, one of the first products I started working on was Forhan’s Toothpaste. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/whose-wife-was-she-anyway_27.html. Just below the brand name on the toothpaste tube and the outer carton, they used to print quite prominently the legend ‘For The Gums’. Though I didn’t know it then (because I was dumb and nobody told me in so many words), Forhan’s was lucky enough to have a clear ‘positioning’ as well as a ‘Unique Selling Proposition’ (what we soon started flinging at one another as ‘USP’). Rosser Reeves and Reality in Advertising had already happened in the US of A, in 1961. That was four years before my first confrontation with Forhans. Only I became aware of it a little later when I bought my copy of the book from, if memory serves, Super Book House at Flora Fountain, run by my friend, Shoiab Ranalvi. (This was the same shop where I once saw Acharya Rajanish, in his pre-Osho, pre-Pune avatar, shopping for a whole pile of books.) Fairfax Cone said this about Reality in Advertising: “Bates advertising is built upon what Mr. Reeves calls the Unique Selling Proposition, and he believes in delivering this without subtlety and without concern for anyone's gentler feelings. He also proves that such advertising works. That it may annoy a great many people, he dismisses as being beside the point.” http://www.ciadvertising.org/student_account/spring_01/adv382j/ootvas/paper2/reality.htm. If you’ve read Reeves’ book, you’ll recall how viciously he attacked Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders. In the eyes of Reeves, Packard’s cardinal sin was to claim that advertisers were playing on unconscious motivations of their prospects. If people spent millions of dollars and millions of hours on the analyst’s couch trying to fathom the deeper depths of their own minds, where was the question of a humble copywriter doing so? Reeves’ other target was John Kenneth Galbraith’s thesis that advertising's “central function is to create desires – to bring into being wants that previously did not exist”. Reeves’ retort was: " … if the product does not meet some existing desire or need of the consumer, the advertising will ultimately fail". He cited Pat Steel: “People don't really need art, music, literature, newspapers, historians, wheels, calendars, philosophy…All that people really need is a cave, a piece of meat, and possibly, a fire.” The final irony about Reeves is the fact that he was contemptuous of fine writing (he had half-jokingly threatened to fire Bates’ writers if they won awards) and yet he was inducted into the Copywriters’ Hall of Fame. His attitude to copy is summed up thus: “Let's say you have $1,000,000 tied up in your little company and suddenly your advertising isn't working and sales are going down. And everything depends on it. Your future depends on it, your family depends on it…Now, what do you want from me? Fine writing? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve stop moving down and start moving up?” I’ve a sneaking suspicion that Reeves would have wholeheartedly approved of the copy of Forhan’s advertising. Unfortunately, it could not propel Forhan's anywhere close to its formidable rival, Colgate