Word: nightclubs
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...commercial for Diet Coke are three with a very unusual item on their resumes: they're dead. Their faces are immediately recognizable. But just how Humphrey Bogart, Louis Armstrong and James Cagney were resurrected to shill for a soft drink with living songman Elton John is the story of "Nightclub" -- 60 seconds of inspired flackery that since its first airing two days before Thanksgiving, has become one of the most talked-about TV commercials of the year...
...Nightclub" is the creation of Lintas: New York, the ad agency that has handled the Diet Coke account since the product was introduced in 1982. Ten months ago, Lintas launched an effort to reinvigorate its "Just for the taste of it" campaign, at least partly in response to rival Diet Pepsi's "Uh-huh" ads, which feature the full-throttle voice of Ray Charles declaiming the now familiar slogan. By last spring, creative director Tony DeGregorio and his staff had settled on a new theme for Diet Coke: "There's just one." What they needed was advertising to go with...
DeGregorio's staff sat through more than 100 American films, looking for a few seconds of classic footage that could blend into the new Elton John material. The script for "Nightclub" was fashioned around the final choices: Bogie in All Through the Night (1942), Satchmo in High Society (1956) and Cagney in snippets from Public Enemy (1931) and The Roaring Twenties (1939). Director Steve Horn shot the Elton John nightclub footage with the same lenses used during the classic film period, but with live stand-ins for Cagney and company. The footage was taken to R. Greenberg Associates, who edited...
...seen ordering a Diet Coke. So the editors blew up the image until his height matched that of his co-star. The Golden Age actors were carefully colorized frame by frame to match the hues of the fresh footage. In the stunning final product, Bogart wanders among the nightclub clientele, exchanging greetings with a patron probably not even born when Bogie died in 1957. Louis Armstrong blows away on his trumpet, sharing a knowing glance with Elton John...
...which, as everyone under 10 knows, is just what they are supposed to do. This man-boy with the tight suit, googly eyes and lipsticked mouth was not every parent's cup of tea: add a leer and the little guy could pass for the emcee of a Berlin nightclub, circa 1935. But few had any qualms about their offspring spending time in his company: at the movies (Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Big Top Pee-wee) or watching Pee-wee's Playhouse, the Emmy Award-winning Saturday- morning TV show that has run on CBS since...