Hail! Hail! Rock’n’Roll [trailer] 1987
Chuck Berry Universal Pictures
Alan: On paper, it made perfect sense for us to do the movie trailer for the Chuck Berry concert documentary, “Hail Hail Rock and Roll,” directed by Taylor Hackford. It was 1987. We were the “music” guys. The “music-with-video” guys. The innovators and experts in establishing a new visual language for communicating with, and marketing to, young audiences. And if there’s anything the film industry wants more than anything, it’s innovation, right?
That’s the problem with match-ups on paper. Sometimes it never looks better than the initial idea. We did the job. It was fine. It wasn’t anything better than fine. It certainly didn’t possess those qualities you’d expect from a Fred/Alan project. And what we learned from it was that the film industry had rules, formats, and standard operating procedures within which everyone must operate that leave very little room for change. They call it the movie industry, and like many industries, its products are made in factories.
There’s a sequence in the film where Berry takes the camera on a tour of his classic cars. He names each one and the price the dealers wanted to give to him to buy them used. As he gets to the final car, he grins devilishly at the camera and says he’ll keep them and later sell them to “you” (he points to the audience through the camera) for $50,000. I wanted that to be the whole trailer, with a small montage at the end. It was seductive. It drew you in. It told another story besides the “here’s what happened” story. I figured that everyone knew the music. This would be an unprecedented look into the mind of the man.
Universal wanted a far more typical montage of interviews and music. Can you guess where we ended up?
If your guess was “a cross between the two,” you’d be right.
The trailer is on YouTube. [And above.] There are remnants of the “look at my cars” scene, interspersed with interviews, rehearsals, and performance footage. Since we just did the off-line edit and Universal finished it up, there’s a typical “movie announcer” guy that we would never have chosen to voice the spot. It’s not compelling in any way.
My most vivid memory of the job was working through the day with our ace editor Jon Kane, then calling the courier to ship the rough edit overnight to LA so the executives could look at it in the morning. They’d call us with notes, and we’d go to work on another version, which would ship out that night for the next morning’s screening. This went on for weeks — daily re-edits, daily courier runs, daily sets of notes and re-edits.
There was no streaming video, no site we could use to upload our work for viewing, no zoom link to review the notes. There were courier pouches, car service deliveries, airplanes, and telephones. It was phenomenally inefficient and ridiculously expensive.
We had other encounters with the movie moguls. Remember the movie “Modern Girls” from 1986 starring Cynthia Gibb, Daphne Zuniga, and Virginia Madsen, about the adventures of three girls who work, go home to sleep a couple hours, then party all night at music clubs? Of course you don’t. Neither does anyone else. But with a soundtrack by Depeche Mode, we got the call to work on the trailer. The studio flew me to LA to screen it, and flew me straight home after it was over. I couldn’t imagine what I could do to help it. The story was not fun. And director Jerry Kramer — primarily a music video and music film producer, not experienced at the time in feature story telling — had shot the entire thing in medium shots, so there was nothing to do with it that would have been visually interesting. Fortunately someone else got the job.
We also did the poster for the Jeff Goldblum Miramax movie, “The Tall Guy.” It was fine. It looked like a movie poster.
I had a similar “we’ll use a piece of this and a piece of that” experience with Hollywood years after Fred/Alan, when I was hired to consult on the launch of the (long gone) network UPN (which later merged with the WB to become The CW). My presentation at Paramount was the same day the UPN execs were seeing presentations from ad agencies. We were all sitting together in the waiting room. I was called in first. “I’m the only person here today who will tell you the truth,” I told them, “because everyone else in that room wants an assignment. My job ends today.” It was a great meeting. They loved my stuff. They kept me an extra hour over my time to discuss it. My branding line was the first thing viewers heard the day the network launched. That was the last time those words were used. The rest was typical ad agency stuff.
Looking back, we never fully succeeded with typical clients in typical fields who wanted us to fit in with their typical methods and solutions. They’d hire us because we were known for coming up with outlandish solutions that were successful, but then they’d tell us how they wanted us to do it. We were almost certainly partially to blame. We were spoiled rotten. We wanted to compete with the big guys. We wanted to play in that league. But in the end we were never enthusiastic about doing that work or working with those people. The people who worked that way were the people who used to serve us when we were clients, the people we went into business to replace. We found that clients willing to roll the dice and trust us were few and far between.
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Hail! Hail! Rock’n’Roll [trailer] 1987 Producer: Alan Goodman Editor: Jon Kane Client: Universal Pictures/David Sameth
The Tall Guy [poster] 1989 Account supervisor: Ed Levine Client: Miramax Pictures