jay/day

Made perfect sense to me. But then again, I'm crazy too.

Legendary. Funny thing is, everyone has got a Sundland story. Mine has to do with my first day at C/D, rewriting Bob's copy, and loaded guns.

on reflection: most suicidal peeps allegedly aren't actually ready to shuffle off.

so 97% chance of shuffling just doesn't compute.

50/50 feels like absolutely worst acceptable case to me ;)

even the deerhunter (83% chance of survival) was kinda sweaty....

cheers,
nigel

i think nigel was right on the bet... even money not 36 to 1.

sundland wrote the spot for US Life that began:

"I'm not an actor. I'm a 72 year old retired businessman in some financial difficulty...

and ended in classic sundland:

"I'm glad US Life hired me to do this commercial....I needed the money."

another of my favourites was a :15 spot he and marvin did for BART announcing saturday train service.

rabbi disembarks from train, shrugs, and says:

"So BART now has a saturday service. Big deal.... we've had one for over 5,000 years."

It won an IBA gold...only american one that year.

Bob passed away many years ago. Of course, my memory is gone as well.

Patty Kanan (Yablonka) Kanan

Four, count 'em four, Sundland stories:

#1
My first encounter with Sundland was in the 70's at DDB/LA, where I was Copy Chief at the time. Agency head Ted Factor had hired Sundland--I suspect sight unseen and unheard--after a particularly good showing at the Belding Awards. The thing that amazed me about Bob at the time was that, in complete disregard for the time-honored tradition of not writing body copy until the client had approved the friggin' concept, Bob wrote his immediately. One of the first ads he showed me was for a Jack-in-the-Box breakfast omelette. Twenty minutes after I approved it, he waltzed in with the copy. I was aghast, and feared for the future of copywriting as we knew it. The copy was good, but exhibited one of Sundland's weaknesses: spelling. I called him on his spelling of "omolet," and he graciously, for him, changed it. Bemused I'm sure by the fact that the word would have such a non-intuitive spelling.

#2
On to the Chiat/Day years. Sundland was also very much into South African Krugerrands at the time. He bought as many as he could get his hands on, positive that gold would be the only thing worth anything when "they" (probably the anarchists) took over.

#3
I was away at an offsite Yamaha Motorcycle confab in Ojai when I got a phone call from a somewhat high-strung young copywriter. He informed me with barely suppressed hysteria, that he and Sundland had come to blows. Not only that, but Monty McKinney--one of the most gentlemanly and venerated veterans in L.A. advertising history, whom Jay had hired about a minute and a half after he retired from DDB/LA--had had to break them up. Apparently, the copywriter had been listening to music on his Walkman in the cubicle next to Sundland's, and Sundland had come into his office and asked him to turn the sound down because it was bothering him. The copywriter naturally pointed out, "But I'm WEARING HEADPHONES!" To which Sundland replied, "But I can hear it and it's bothering me."

#4
Sundland really was a terrific writer, and very tenacious if he was asked to change a word. One of the accounts he worked on with Marv Rich was Mitsubishi big screen projection TV. He had come up with a description of what the competition's projection TV picture looked like compared to the Mitsubishi: "Technicolor oatmeal." Which, in reality, was...well...an overstatement of a mildly descernible difference between the two pictures. The client said as much. But Sundland would not be moved. He would not be the one to change it, if indeed it had to be changed. So I changed it. To what, I can't imagine.