Word: adman
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This picaresque nightmare of a novel was a best seller in its native Russia, where it appeared under the title Generation P--that's P as in Pepsi. It's the story of Babylen Tatarsky, a miserable adman hired by greedy mobsters to translate American jingles and adapt them for a newly capitalistic Russian marketplace. Tatarsky stands in for a whole generation trapped between a discredited Soviet past and a banal, Westernized future, and the absurdity of the situation sends him hunting through the seamy Muscovite underworld for some meaning at the bottom of it all. That he is coached...
...crashing into disillusionment, that Lemmon's characters described in almost 50 fertile years of films. At his death last week, at 76 from cancer, he was fondly elegized as the mostly decent guy up against the New Morality--which is to say, the No Morality. He was the adman in Days of Wine and Roses, watching alcoholic fumes rise from the wreck of his career and marriage. In The Apartment and many pictures that followed (The Out-of-Towners, Save the Tiger, The China Syndrome, JFK), he played a businessman in danger of being betrayed by his own best instincts...
DIED. HARVEY BALL, 79, commercial artist and adman who invented the now ubiquitous and much parodied Smiley Face in 1963; in Worcester, Mass. The goal of the yellow symbol was to put smiley faces on frowny workers at two newly merged insurance companies. Ball was paid $45 for his design and never trademarked...
...accident is plausible: it involves a hair dryer, a bathtub and an electric shock. The results are improbable: the victim, Gibson's Nick Marshall, an adman confronting a career crisis, is given a magical ability to listen in on womens' thoughts. As comic premises go these days, it is acceptable. One settles back to enjoy the advantages, personal and professional, that accrue to Nick as a result of his unexpected gift...
...accident is plausible: it involves a hair dryer, a bathtub and an electric shock. The results are improbable: the victim, Gibson's Nick Marshall, an adman confronting a career crisis, is given a magical ability to listen in on womens' thoughts. As comic premises go these days, it is acceptable. One settles back to enjoy the advantages, personal and professional, that accrue to Nick as a result of his unexpected gift. There's some good humor in the truths that he overhears, maybe even some sympathetic insights into the inner life of a sex he has exploited...