Ad Parodies a Hit; ‘Crazy People’ Isn’t : Films: Movie premise is advertising based on truth. Most Madison Avenue executives aren’t amused.

“Crazy People,” Hollywood’s most recent attempt to parody the advertising industry, has failed to impress critics or draw huge crowds to the theaters, but the movie’s makers have managed to ruffle a few feathers.

The movie stars Dudley Moore as an advertising executive sent to a mental institution after writing ad campaigns based on the novel idea of telling the truth. A Volvo ad, for example, features the slogan, “Boxy, but good.” An ad for United Airlines carries the tag line, “Most of our passengers get there alive.”

The ads are mistakenly printed and become huge hits, creating a cottage industry for the mental patients who are portrayed as the only people capable of creating truthful ads.

The movie, which opened last week, has gotten a raft of negative reviews.

“Its upside-down ad campaigns wouldn’t rate a smile in a college humor magazine,” said Vincent Canby in the New York Times.

Trade publications have been equally unkind. The movie “is even more trivial than the industry it seeks to tweak,” said Adweek columnist Richard Morgan.

Most positive comments from people who have seen the movie have focused on the ad parodies rather than the plot.

A campaign aimed at attracting tourists to New York boasts that the city “is not as filthy as you think.” An ad produced for Sony claims that “Caucasians are just too damn tall” to produce high-quality electronics.

Ad industry executives laugh off the movie’s premise and deny that advertising is in any way dishonest.

Jonathan Bond of the agency Kirshenbaum & Bond/NY said the movie is insulting to the industry. “They make it seem much less scientific than it really is,” he said. “A great deal of thought goes into what people will believe or won’t believe.”

At Volvo, officials are pleased with the free publicity they have gotten since “Crazy People” was released.

The ad created in the movie “emulates the core value that we’ve been trying to focus on for the past 30 years,” said Michael Guerra, product information manager for Volvo Cars of North America. “We have to remember that our main target audience is the buyer of the family sedan, the value-oriented customer.”

Other companies, however, were less amused by the ad parodies.

A fake ad for Metamucil, for example, warns customers that they could “get cancer and die” if they don’t use the fiber laxative.

The ad drew this carefully worded response from Procter & Gamble Co., which makes Metamucil: “We feel that the advertising claim used in the movie for Metamucil as well as a lot of other products are outlandish, and we think consumers will recognize this. . . . We would be concerned to the extent that consumers take this claim seriously.”

A spokesman for United Airlines offered little comment on the fake ads that boasted of the carrier’s survival rate.

The spokesman did say that the airline neither paid for the “product placement” nor granted permission for the movie producers to use the company’s name.