‘How to Get Ahead in Advertising’: Here’s the Beef

Advertising men have often been portrayed in the movies as shallow manipulators, and the ad business has been lampooned over and over. Never, however, has a movie identified advertising as one of the central horrors of civilization itself.

Bruce Robinson’s “How to Get Ahead in Advertising” is a fantastically scabrous view of the perversion of persuasion, in which an annoying boil on an adman’s neck grows and grows and eventually takes the man over for its own evil purposes. The black comedy with a chilling conclusion opens Friday at the Westside Pavilion in Los Angeles.

Robinson, 43, is possessed with rage at what he calls “the mendacity machine.” At the drop of a hat, the ex-actor (he was the handsome young soldier in Truffaut’s “The Story of Adele H.”) turned writer (“The Killing Fields”) and writer-director (“Withnail and I”) launches a tirade against “the constant stream of disinformation the media and the politicians give us.”

Pacing constantly around his office at Shepperton Studios, running his hands through his unruly hair, talking as intensely as if he thought these might be his last recorded words, Robinson explains the personal background to his film:

“I had the idea in New York in 1979 and wrote it as a story. I was stuck for a week in the Sherry Netherland Hotel because my girlfriend at the time, Lesley Anne Down, was doing some publicity. I began taking photographs of myself reflected off things. One of the things was a picture of a man, so the photo came out as a man with two heads. But that’s been done. I loathe advertising, and I thought, ‘What if he’s in advertising? What if he’s trying to sell pimple cream and the second head is a boil?”’

Robinson later expanded the thought to take account of his alienated view of the world: “Billions of people think what they’re told to think through the media. TV has been infiltrated by politicians, just as the church grabbed the printing press five minutes after it was invented. The ‘news’ on TV consists of advertisements for nuclear weapons, sweetened with the doings of Princess Di. Meanwhile, 400,000 people somewhere are starving.

“This is the kind of anger I feel all the time. All the time. It’s intolerable. The only thing that saves me, that keeps the electrodes off my head, is that, thank God, I’m allowed to make a movie about it.”

Robinson fitted his diatribe into a break between scenes of “How to Get Ahead in Advertising.” On the set, star Richard E. Grant was lying in a hospital bed portraying a man at war with himself--with his boil, that is. Grant, who appeared in Robinson’s “Withnail and I” two years ago, struggled to get help from a nurse while pushing the boil, grown by this point in the film to half-head size, under the bedcovers.

“It’s an arduous movie to make,” says Grant, “but ingenious.” Grant must act the strangest cinematic metamorphosis since “The Fly,” becoming at times a man with two heads. Jeremy Irons did something like it in “Dead Ringer,” but Irons had two bodies as well as two heads.

Robinson’s special-effects men came up with a second head for Grant that differs from his first apparently only by the addition of a malevolent mustache. “I’d no idea there could be so many ingeniously constructed versions of me that talk or blink or spit just like me,” Grant says.

“If the audience sees this as just a movie about a talking boil, you might as well be making a horror movie,” in Grant’s view. “This is not ‘Two-Headed Dronga Returns!’ The boil is only seen by the audience and me, and it has just four minutes of screen time.”

Pre-boil, Grant’s character is an ordinary everyday adman, engaged in the innocent pastime of making people buy things they didn’t know they wanted. All goes well until, faced with the task of devising a campaign to sell another useless pimple cream, he breaks down--much to the consternation of his wife, played by Rachel Ward.

“He starts going sane ,” as Robinson puts it. “To everyone else he seems to be going insane. At the height of the poor man’s period of insanity . . . this filthy lying excrescence re-imposes the winning ticket and re-establishes greed and fascism as the order of the day.”

But this is a comedy, not a polemic. Robinson proved in “Withnail” that he has the light touch. “I don’t believe the cinema can change anything. It’s not a teacher, it’s an entertainer. I enjoy finding a comedic way to exploit my burning rage.”

As for his star, Robinson says, “The voice I write in is one Richard Grant can articulate. I can’t think of anyone who could play this with the range of madness available to him.”

Grant, 31, was born and reared in Swaziland, the son of a British colonial officer. He spent six years in South Africa studying and working in the theater before returning to his parents’ mother country.

“I left South Africa because I was disillusioned that the theater could have any effect when the political drama all around us was a hundred times more powerful. I’d co-founded a very successful theater company in Cape Town, but we were playing to an audience of the converted.

“When I fetched up in London I felt like Dick Whittington. I had two suitcases and blind hope. I had no contacts in the theater here. I worked as a waiter and gradually acting jobs dribbled in.”

“How to” will be Grant’s last film with Robinson for the time being. “Robinson’s already running a risk, going back to the same actor with a fair quota of dementia,” Grant says.

So Robinson must soldier on alone, assaulted on all sides by advertising messages: “I’m hip to what’s being done, but I’m not immune.”

What about the growing legions of remote-controlled ad-zappers? Robinson answers with questions: “Does that zap nuclear weapons? Are people zapping pollution?”

Robinson is one of the few top British directors who didn’t start out directing commercials, as Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Hugh Hudson, Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker and others did.

“The quality of advertising in England is far higher than in America, where it’s geared to a mentally deficient 14-year-old. Americans will buy a style of advertising which would repulse the British. That’s not a compliment to the British public, but to American corporations, which have succeeded in bringing down the quality of thought more quickly than in Britain.”

Robinson could go on and on. He concludes bleakly: “The best I can hope for is that people will go to this movie and laugh.”