They’re All-Stars at Play : The Mood Is Light; The Product Is Lite; Results Are Heavy

We interrupt your reading pleasure to bring you a message from Miller Lite.

Dick (Tastes Great) Williams is in one corner of the Woodland Hills Country Club clubhouse, standing in front of a giant cue card, trying to do a 10-second spot. It is taking him 10 minutes. “I’ll get this son of a bitch right yet,” he growls. Yes, Williams actually growls.

When he finally does get it right, the rest of the Lite All-Stars in the room dutifully applaud.

Once, when Mickey (Less Filling) Spillane was doing a similar spot, Bob Uecker stood behind him and poured cold beer--Lite, of course--down his back. Spillane, a pro, never missed a beat. He’s used to distractions, of course, working as he has these past 10 years with Lee (Mickey’s Doll) Meredith.

What hijinks.

It’s that time of year again when the 28 Lite All-Stars get together to tickle your funny bone and to make another reunion commercial. You may remember some of the past ones--the board meeting, the camping trip, the softball game, the bowling tournament.

This one, filmed last week at Woodland Hills, features a golf outing. Let’s go directly to the set. Shhh. Ready . . . action.

Bubba Smith and Dick Butkus are standing on the tee. Smith pulls out a wood and hits a mighty drive. Butkus rushes to his side to say:

“Bubba, I think you got a birdie!”

Now, what do you think happens next?

a) Bubba gets a birdie-3 on a par-4 hole;

b) Birdie Tebbetts keels over;

c) feathers fall from the sky.

If you answered “c,” you could be an agency ad writer. They have this guy positioned on a boom, high above the action, to drop feathers. The problem is that the feathers usually fall either too far to the right or too far to the left.

When the director asks him what’s going on, he says, “It’s windy up here.”

The All-Stars answer: “Awww.”

Another problem. The gallery is told to “oooh” when Smith hits the ball and “aaah” when the feathers fall. On the first take, half the gallery gets it backward.

Meanwhile, John (Less Filling) Madden is helping--sort of--director Bob Giraldi. He’s lining up the camera angle, and when the commercial is done, Madden gives his view.

“I can live with that,” he says. “I like it. I don’t love it, but I like it.”

It’s the 100th Lite beer commercial in a series that stands among the most successful in TV advertising history. It features, of course, ex-athletes and other macho types. Also, Rodney Dangerfield.

The idea was to show that low-calorie beer appeals to a man’s kind of man, and Miller, since the commercials began in 1973, has moved from the No. 7 brewery in the country to No. 2 behind Anheiser-Busch.

The idea of this story is to show that the making of these commercials is sometimes as funny as the commercials themselves. In fact, for the past two years, they’ve done a movie about the making the commercial.

You decide:

Reads great?

Less filling?

If nothing else, the commercial is a boon for ex-athletes. If you watch television at all, you’ve seen them: Bubba and Butkus, Madden, Billy Martin, L.C. Greenwood and Bert Jones, Uecker, Marv Throneberry. The list goes on. So do the commercials.

“I’ve done the Carson show 80 times,” says Uecker, an ex-baseball-playing funnyman, who has made a career out of putting down his mediocre baseball career. “But that doesn’t compare to the recognition you get from these commercials.

“A lot of these guys are in the Hall of Fame. But even for them, a few years after retirement, you can walk down the street and most people don’t know who you are. But this commercial keeps you in the public eye.”

It’s true. “I can’t walk through an airport without being recognized,” Marv Throneberry says.

You remember Marvelous Marv. He was the bumbling first baseman for the 1962 Mets and one of Lite’s early All-Stars. He did the commercial about trading 43 Marv Throneberry baseball cards for one Carl Furillo. Remember that commercial: “If I do for Lite beer what I did for baseball . . . “

It’s been great for Marv, though. He was installing glass in Memphis, Tenn., when he got a call at 11 p.m.--”I thought it was a joke, somebody in a bar,” he says--offering him an audition. He works for Lite pretty much full time now, doing commercials and making appearances. He can make perhaps $70,000 a year that way. A regular commercial pays around $35,000. For the reunion, the All-Stars get two banquets, rooms at the Westwood Marquis, 6 a.m. bus rides and about $15,000.

Bubba Smith and Dick Butkus--”I sure hope those horses know how to swim”--have taken their fame a step further. The Brew Brothers will probably be starring in a network situation comedy next season.

“The recognition is amazing,” says Uecker, who lists his greatest moment in baseball as walking with the bases loaded to win the opening intra-squad game in spring training of 1963. “I go to the ballpark and I see people at the top of the stands and they’ll have signs saying, ‘Must be in the front row.’ ”

It is a true reunion, a once-a-year gathering of the Lite All-Stars. Most of these guys look forward to seeing each other, look forward to the gags.

“It’s a lot of laughs,” Butkus says.

It’s a lot of sitting around, it’s a lot of takes, it’s a lot of running gags, it’s a lot of early buses, and it’s a lot of laughs.

First day is picture day. “It’s like training camp,” says Sports Illustrated’s Frank Deford, who is one of the All-Stars. “First day pictures, the next day you’re in pads.” Maybe the funniest thing about the first day was the lack of Lite at the country club bar. The Miller people had some brought in right away.

Also on the first day, there is the beginning of the annual running gag. The ringleaders--Uecker, Butkus, Billy Martin, Madden, Tommy Heinsohn--get it going. It seems that the year before when the film about the filming of the commercial began, there was a $1 rider on the contract to account for the extra filming.

This year, there was no dollar.

At a staged meeting for the assembled media, Butkus, the union rep, addresses the All-Stars.

“How many of you guys signed your contracts in the dark again?” he asks.

A show of hands.

“That’s what they were counting on, so you wouldn’t notice that our dollar from last year is missing. . . . I’d like to think this can be cleared up, but if it can’t, then I say we walk.”

It goes on from there. The All-Stars pledge that if they can get their dollar and if the agent will reduce his cut on the dollar to 5 cents that they will each donate their remaining 95 cents to Ethiopian relief.

That night, at the banquet, Uecker is looking for volunteers to man the early morning picket line. Pipes up Billy Martin: “I’ll be coming in at 5 a.m., so it shouldn’t be any problem for me.”

The next day, at the shooting, there is a placard that reads: “It’s not the money, it’s the principle.”

Of course, some guys don’t get the joke. The following day, Butkus tells Uecker that D.D. Lewis, a rookie All-Star, kept asking him what the grievance was and were they really going to strike.

Back on the set. Pool player Steve Mizerak, whose ever-increasing weight is another running gag, is supposed to sink the 8-ball into the golf hole. He keeps missing.

“Trust me,” he says.

“Trust you?” says director Giraldi. “You’re costing me a fortune.”

Giraldi suggests that somebody put a bet on it. The betting starts at $5 and Mizerak owes $160, going double or nothing, before he finally makes the shot.

His famous trick shot took 180 takes.

Elsewhere, at the water hole, there is a pneumatic arm swinging a golf club from under the water and a golf ball comes flying out. All you see otherwise are lilypads, a duck and an orange hat. Under the orange hat is supposed to be Uecker, who walks out of the water in a wetsuit.

Mickey Spillane is at the water-side mike, describing the action, and Lee Meredith is by his side.

She squeals. She looks like the dumb blonde she portrays. Actually, she is a New Jersey housewife and mother of three who’s blessed with an incredible body.

“I’m just one of the guys,” Lee says, punctuated by a dumb-blonde giggle. “I do a lot of work for Miller. Of course, everyone thinks I’m dumb. But they pay me to act that way.”

She then tells about this jacket she likes to wear with a big “Tastes Great” on the back. “You ought to see the stares I get walking down Hollywood Boulevard,” she says.

On another hole, Bert Jones’ ball is behind a tree. His partner, L.C. Greenwood, tells him not to worry and lifts the tree from the hole. “My motivation,” Greenwood says, “is to find a small tree and look mean.” When Greenwood lifts the fake tree, someone in the gallery shouts, “Oh, my God.” The assistant director tells the man, “Watch the ‘Oh, my Gods.’ ”

The director, Giraldi, is a master at the short take. He is the man who directed the Michael Jackson Pepsi commercial. He has done about half the Miller commercials and says, “The commercials’ place in history is secure.”

Giraldi, bearded and of middle years, looks the part of director. He is wearing a safari jacket and pants with pockets in the oddest places. Is there a director’s store that sells these clothes? An aide confides that Giraldi gets them from Giorgio Armani for about $800.

Anyway, it’s funny to watch the director at work. He gives orders to the assistant director who gives orders to the actor, who is only about 10 feet away from the director in the first place. There are more assistant directors than there are cameras and more cameras than actors. It’s show biz.

The star, of course, is Dangerfield. If most of the All-Stars genuinely like each other, few of them care for Rodney.

“He’s not a team player,” one All-Star says.

Others say worse.

Last year at the banquet when Dangerfield got up to do a few jokes, about half the All-Stars walked out. They don’t like the guy.

On picture day, it’s raining, and Uecker is joking about not knowing the shoot was in Panama when Dangerfield arrives in a limo with the driver holding an umbrella over Rodney’s head. Everyone else, of course, had come by bus.

The limo fit in perfectly with the commercial. Rodney arrives at the tee in a pink limo golf cart, complete with a telephone, television, horn, flowers on the hood, and a beautiful woman at each side. As he climbs from the cart, he tells the women to hold his calls. Then, when he hits the ball, it hits a windmill, it rolls into the gutter, it rolls down a pipe, it goes into the hole for a hole-in-one.

He’s very funny doing it, especially when he’s swinging the golf club. In about 20 takes, he hits the ball once.

Show biz.

When he finally hits the ball, there are laughs all around.

Giraldi says his fondest memory of these commercials is when he says, “That’s a wrap.”

Most of the All-Stars say the funniest take was at the board of directors reunion shoot. That was when they were voting for chairman of the board, and Smith crumpled up the rest of the ballots and read that the winner was, of course, Bubba.

When they were shooting the commercial, Smith got through the “and the winner is . . . “ part, but then forgot the next line.

The next line was his name.

“When he tried it next, we put up cue cards saying, ‘Bubba Smith,’ ” says John Madden. “Everyone cracked up. It took about three hours before we got the shot completed.”

But Bubba is a star now. And so is Madden. And so are many of the other All-Stars.

The commercial, it’s laughs and it’s more.

And this story, it’s everything you always wanted--and less.