A warning sign on Sunset

A PRETTY ODD coincidence, if you ask me -- 400 miles apart, in L.A. and San Francisco, two billboards suddenly show up in very prominent places, both of them about famous boys supposedly behaving badly.

“Trade Barry!” blared the billboard outside Giants Park, or AT&T; Park, or SBC Park, or whatever it’s called this week. And on the Sunset Strip, there’s dead comedian Chris Farley, his face looking as big as a hot-air balloon, and the phrase “It wasn’t all his fault.” The Barry billboard -- Barry Bonds, the outfielder for the Giants whose breakfast of champions was allegedly steroids -- was just an April Fool’s joke, we’re told.

As for Farley, the hilariously physical actor and comic, he’s neither a good joke nor a new one. He died eight years ago at 33, drugged out and obese -- nearly 300 pounds. And in L.A., being fat and dead and leaving a bad-looking corpse might be the only real obscenity left -- the ultimate poor lifestyle choice.

So what’s Farley doing on the Strip now? Here on this petri dish, this proving ground for all that is new and hip, for almost all our vices and appetites? Here among the iPod ads, the softest-porn Calvin Klein billboards, the pitches for high-end vodka and low-priced beer and men-with-guns movies?

Farley’s billboard isn’t a nonprofit public service campaign, like the American Cancer Society’s TV spot of 20 years ago, when Yul Brynner, dead of lung cancer, spoke virtually from the grave and warned us, “Now that I’m gone, I tell you: Don’t smoke.” And the “Marlboro Man,” 70 feet tall, rode the Sunset Strip for 17 years until his billboard came down in 1999, about the same time the parody billboards were going up, with one cowboy telling the other, “I miss my lung, Bob.”

But the Farley billboard is an ad, flat out. It promotes a treatment for cocaine, speed and liquor addictions, using as its pitchman a comedian who yo-yoed in and out of rehab for years. It’s something new in the ad avalanche -- for Viagra and its offspring, for nonsense-syllables prescription drugs (Isn’t “Levitra” a Harry Potter spell?) -- that sends Americans stampeding to their doctors for prescriptions, and pharmaceutical companies stampeding to the bank with their dough.

The product being pushed in the Farley ad, Prometa, isn’t a pill, it’s a treatment program, and, as Bonds’ baseball records might yet do, it still wears an asterisk. Prometa is “not a cure,” says its website. Its effectiveness is “not yet proven,” and a “success story” from patient Sabrina is “not typical.” Trials are underway -- including a double-blind test at UCLA, the company says. So far the program is offered in only a few places across the country, including, curiously, Celebration, Disney’s neo-nostalgic planned Florida dream town.

From the descriptions, Prometa’s outpatient program appears to be to addiction treatment what a fast-food drive-up window is to Spago’s -- stop-addiction DSL in a dial-up medical world. It’s being cannily marketed by the parent company’s chief executive, Terren S. Peizer, a former junk bond trader who testified against the man who sat at the desk next to him, Michael Milken. Publicists for Peizer’s company, Hythiam, pitched the Prometa story to Barron’s, the financial publication, by noting that “a large percentage” of stockbrokers and money people drink a lot and abuse drugs. Peizer worked there, so I guess he knows.

Peizer is no fool. He paid $25,000 to the Farley estate to use Farley’s face. The Chris Farley Foundation is a small family outfit in Wisconsin that uses humor to keep kids from going down Farley’s fatal road. And $25,000 represents a hefty piece of its budget. It will buy the foundation a few more school presentations and video programs. But it’s already bought Peizer millions in “free media” news coverage for his fledgling product -- on the “Today” show, on Fox News and in newspapers such as this one.

How effective could the “Trade Barry” billboard be? Not very. Some fans will put up with anything but losing. How effective will the Farley campaign be? It’s already done the trick -- for its sponsor. But for those young people who may need treatment? Farley’s been dead eight years, an eternity to the 20-somethings on the Strip. How many of them will look up and think, “Wow, cool”? And how many have family doctors -- or even families -- to turn to?

The real promise, or menace, of the Farley campaign is the dead-celebrity imitator potential. What’s next, using Diana, princess of Wales, to sell a barroom breath-tester? (“She might be alive today if her driver had blown before he drove....”) Or a bulletproof-vest campaign starring John Lennon? (“Don’t give a criminal’s piece a chance.... “)

Barron’s reported that among the company’s early investors were James Gandolfini, the “Sopranos” paterfamilias, and Steven R. Schirripa, the show’s resident fat-man character. Maybe Peizer can talk them into being on the billboards, saying, “If you know what’s good for you.... “ But it’d cost him more than $25,000.

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PATT MORRISON’s e-mail is Patt.Morrison@latimes.com.