Transcript
Dead Celebrities
May 19, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: Welcome back to On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Here's one for you: when is death not the final act? Answer: when Madison Avenue runs the show. Bob, you explain it.
BOB GARFIELD:Okay. Lou Gehrig, baseball's great Iron Man amassed more than 5,000 total bases over 17 years before succumbing to the disease that would bear his name. Fatal illness, however, did not end his career for while dead men cannot hit, they can still pitch.
ANNOUNCER: Before you can inspire--
LOU GEHRIG: Today I consider myself--
ANNOUNCER: --before you can touch--
LOU GEHRIG: -- the luckiest man on the face of the earth.
ANNOUNCER: --you must first connect. And the company that connects more of the world is Alcatel.
BOB GARFIELD: This ad for a French telecommunications company is just the latest in a series of resurrections popularized by the confluence of advertising ambition, celebrity obsession and digital technology. In the past few years to name a couple of notable examples we have seen Fred Astaire dancing posthumously with a Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner and John Wayne flogging Coors Light from beyond.
MAN: [SHOUTING] I want to know whose beer this is right now!
JOHN WAYNE: It's my beer, sergeant!
BOB GARFIELD: Let's put aside for a moment the issue of what appeal John Wayne holds for a generation of beer drinkers who mostly hadn't been born by the time the Duke sauntered into eternity. The real question is when, say, Gilbert Gottfried and Bruce Jenner are just a phone call away -- why go grave-robbing?
BILL O'NEILL: In most cases these people have a larger than life persona that we have either grown up with or we've watched for many, many years. They are forever frozen in time.
BOB GARFIELD:Bill O'Neill is vice president for marketing and promotions for CMG, the talent agency specializing in the talent but unbreathing. It was CMG that Alcatel dealt with to license the image of Lou Gehrig who is but one iconic figure on a client roster that reads like Who's Who in Heaven.
MAN: Babe Ruth, Vince Lombardi, Jackie Robinson-- Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, some music figures of Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Frank Zappa --Chuck's still alive, of course.
BOB GARFIELD: As agents, CMG must walk the line between protecting the images of its late clientele and exploiting them.
MAN:Well-- I'm not sure I would use the word "exploit." Market is, is the term that I would use. You know we're very respectful of our clients and their wishes. You know there's a lot of deals that have come our way that we have not done, but ultimate they're our client and, and we have a responsibility to try and generate some business for them.
BOB GARFIELD:Unless as good citizens and guardians of clients' dignity they have a greater responsibility. Gary Ruskin, executive director of the public interest group Commercial Alert believes the invocation of Lou Gehrig for Alcatel is a travesty.
GARY RUSKIN: It's one of the most touching moments in sports, and it's-- really a shame to see it used by commercial hucksters to sell tawdry trinkets.
BOB GARFIELD:To Ruskin this is yet one more example of how we are all sullied by the commercial culture where everything, every human value and now every legend seemingly are for sale. For instance, while Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney and Satchmo might have liked the idea of screen immortality, being channeled into a Diet Coke commercial probably isn't what they had in mind. [MUSIC]
LOUIS ARMSTRONG, "SATCHMO": Now we're getting warm.
MAN: [SINGING] Diet Coke!
BOB GARFIELD: Jingle courtesy of Elton John. Righteous indignation by Gary Ruskin.
GARY RUSKIN: Nothing is sacred to them! There's nothing that they won't tarnish or despoil just to make a buck. We've seen Apple Computers use Albert Einstein in their ads. Apple also used Ghandi. When you take a true hero and you drag him through the commercial muck, it tarnishes the hero just a little bit, and that's not right either.
STUART COOPERIDER: It's the same with, you know, cloning human beings and what not. You start to get into an area that, that people are just a little uncomfortable with.
BOB GARFIELD:Stuart Cooperider is a senior vice president and creative director at the advertising agency Arnold Worldwide, creator of the Lou Gehrig spot and an earlier Alcatel commercial featuring the I Have a Dream speech of Dr. Martin Luther King. That ad ignited a firestorm.
STUART COOPERIDER: You know the, the intention of this thing really wasn't to-- to cause any pain to anybody, certainly. In our own hearts and minds we really felt that we, we, we weren't desecrating him at all; that this was-- you know we were really honoring it. But-- I believe it was really when Matt Lauer decided that he needed to have, have our client on, on national television sitting down with the head of the NAACP, that's kind of when we realized that-- this thing was, was fairly large.
BOB GARFIELD:Lesson learned. Some imagery is sacrosanct. Although it's hard to predict levels of outrage. For what it's worth there was more bad press over Fred Astaire's Dirt Devil pas de deux than from Alcatel's expropriation of the defining moment of America's civil rights movement. Nonetheless the advertiser is certain to tread more lightly from here on in.
STUART COOPERIDER: Religion probably would be an area that we would, we'd want to stay away from. You know I think the Mother Teresa's and, and certainly popes and that sort of thing we would probably want to stay away from - as out of respect.
BOB GARFIELD:But you won't seen any general slowdown in celebrity resurrections because the likes of Lou Gehrig and Louis Armstrong bring with them more than their legends, more than their nostalgia value, more than their iconography. They also bring their lack of police records. Furthermore, Stuart Cooperider points out, formerly living talent is a pleasure to deal with during production. There are many deceased prime donnas but no deceased who are still prime donnas.
STUART COOPERIDER: Somebody comes in and, and screams at you because the limo was the wrong color - that happens regularly. The, the hotel room wasn't what they thought of.
BOB GARFIELD: Anyone dead ever scream at you over the color of the limo?
STUART COOPERIDER: No. [LAUGHS] Fortunately. [LAUGHS]
BOB GARFIELD:So if you happen to be an actor or a pro athlete frustrated by Madison Avenue's indifference to your endorsement potential, take heed of Alcatel's real message: before you can inspire -- before you can touch --first you must, like totally, disconnect.