Moguls, Monsters and Madmen, page 5
For one commercial, I had originally intended to cast actor Ken Welsh, whom I continue to book even today. At the last minute, I cast the brother-in-law of the girl I was dating instead. He was trying to get a start as an actor. My engineer complained, “Who is this guy? He’s terrible!” After a few takes, I sent him home and called in Ken. I had learned my lesson: No more using the job to get dates. Work only with talent.
I had been attracted to Borden’s mainly by their theatre accounts, but I also worked for some of their corporate clients. They had Towers Department Stores, which was okay, and smaller clients like Bausch + Lomb contact-lens solution, which I’d sooner kill myself than work on again.
It was great moment for me when I brought in an expanding fast food chain, Lick’s Hamburgers. After tasting one of their hamburgers at their Beaches location, I contacted Denise Meehan, who had started the business. I told her, “I don’t know your advertising plans, but this is the greatest hamburger, and you really need to tell the world.”
She said, “We’re opening a new restaurant downtown. You can come in and talk to me, but I should let you know, Jerry Goodis is pitching us, so why would we go with you instead of him?”
Jerry Goodis was an ad legend and the well-known agency for Harvey’s, another hamburger chain. They claimed to have written the familiar jingle, “Harvey’s makes your hamburger a beautiful thing!”
I replied, “Because I love your hamburgers.”
I bought two hundred cases of Hamburger Helper, put Lick’s labels on every box, then shipped them to Denise with a note, “You need only one Hamburger Helper and it’s me.”
She called me back. “You’ve got the business.”
Another client was memorable because of the way he introduced himself. A guy walked into our office, opened his briefcase and showed us the $100,000 in cash he had inside. He said, “I’m distributing a drill-bit sharpener. I want it available for Father’s Day, but the only way the stores will take it is if it’s backed by a television campaign. Can you produce a television commercial and a media plan for us?” What the hell is a drill-bit sharpener? Does anyone sharpen drill bits?
Wait . . . did you say $100,000 in cash?
The guy had a ready-made commercial from Germany that needed a new voice-over. To save money, I said I’d do it, but I didn’t realize until I was in the studio how much copy I had to read. It was like “The Minute Waltz,” faster and faster, click click click, then came the list of stores in which it could be purchased click click click, like maybe eight thousand of them. I’m not sure how this worked out for the guy with his warehouse full of drill-bit sharpeners, but I’ve been incapable of uttering the words “drill-bit sharpener” ever since.
Ken also had a client who imported cheap kitchen products from Asia, for which we did the packaging and ran ads. For the food shoots, I hired the finest food photographer, bought incredible filet mignons, the freshest of red peppers—nothing but the best—and then styled them as lovingly as my father used to present the fashions he sold. I enjoyed that challenge for three years.
I also won a new account run by a couple of Portuguese brothers who had a shoe business. They wanted me to do packaging design and the usual, predictable marketing elements. But then they said, “There’s a shoe convention in Los Angeles. We’d like you to design our booth.”
Los Angeles! Hollywood! In my most solicitous voice, I said, “If you’re going to Los Angeles, this isn’t shoe business, it’s show business.”
I challenged a designer to create a booth so complicated that only I could set it up. He came up with an art deco marquee, flashing lights, a popcorn machine and a look based on the legendary Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. I broke the news to the brothers. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m going to have to go to Los Angeles to set up the booth and to take it down at the end of the week.”
They were cool with that. “We’ll pay your air fare,” they said, “and pick up the hotel tab.”
Yes!
I flew into L.A. the day before the convention. I set up the booth—slot and slide, A into B, just like my father’s garment racks. After that, I had Los Angeles to myself for a week. I hadn’t realized how spread out the city was, and ours was a downtown hotel. I took the bus to Grauman’s on Hollywood Boulevard. It was jampacked with domestic servants en route to Beverly Hills. The mass of hot, sweaty humanity nearly suffocated me with their fragrant packed lunches on what seemed like an endless journey, so I rented a car. I booked a table at Spago’s where I saw Fred Astaire and Jack Lemmon, whom I would meet a couple of years later in Toronto. I went to Beverly Hills—named for our receptionist at Borden’s—and walked along Rodeo Drive, otherwise known as the Golden Mile.
In the neighbourhood around Hollywood Boulevard, I came across a bunch of stores selling vintage movie posters. I filled a suitcase with what I bought there. Then, walking along Melrose Avenue, just breathing the air, I came across a gallery that had a Herb Snitzer photograph of Louis Armstrong wearing a Star of David. When I asked the proprietor, Bill Goldberg, about it, he told me that Armstrong, who’d grown up in an orphanage, was close to a Jewish family, the Karnofskys. He wore the Star of David because he too had experienced discrimination. He knew everything there was to know about collecting photographs and shared that knowledge generously. Bill’s still a close friend.
I had the greatest week of my life. I never went back to the shoe booth except to take it down. When I returned to Borden’s, I said to myself, If the closest I can get to show business is the shoe business, then I’m leaving this agency.
I loved Ken. I received a magnificent education at his firm, but I knew it was time to leave. Ken had three children. Not one was interested in the business and he had no succession plan. I had become like a son to him and I was afraid one day he would say, “Time for me to leave. Now, you run the business.” I wasn’t ready to build a business, and certainly not this one. We’d moved several times since the strip plaza where I had first found him. We were now in a proper office building, but it was in another suburb, Don Mills, far from downtown. Along the way, I had asked for, and received, regular raises, but my salary of $27,000 was still ridiculously low for what I was doing.
Ken sensed that I was getting restless. One day he took me for lunch at Carrera’s, one of his favourite Italian restaurants. Across the street was a Ford Topaz, tied with a big yellow ribbon. He handed me the keys. I gasped. But it wasn’t excitement that took my breath away. I wanted something flashier than a conventional family sedan. Both my car and I had to be bigger than that. I couldn’t expect Ken to know that.
The climax of my career at Borden’s came while I was working on a campaign to promote the Canadian premiere of Les Misérables, a huge musical for the Royal Alex. I could see that Ed Mirvish was slowing down and ready to give the reins to his son David, and since Gino was Ed’s guy, the writing was on the wall for Gino too. Since I was Gino’s guy, it was obvious that I needed to run.
From time to time, I’d been taking meetings with Len Gill, who ran an entertainment ad agency called Echo, with star clients like Garth Drabinsky, founder of Cineplex Odeon, and Michael Cohl, the world’s biggest concert producer. Our meetings hadn’t gone well. Every time Gill had asked with whom I wanted to work, I always said the same thing, “Garth Drabinsky.” His reply was always the same. “The only guy who works with Garth is me. Do you want to work on the First Choice pay-TV account?”
“No.”
“Do you want to work on the Coca-Cola Entertainment account?”
“No. I want to work with Garth Drabinsky.”
Deadlock.
This was no passing whim on my part. I’d been tracking Garth Drabinsky’s career ever since I’d arrived in Toronto. I’d met him in person on two occasions.
Famous Players owned half of the Imperial Six, a downtown movie theatre with six screens. They leased the other half from an elderly woman in Michigan. When they played hardball with her to lower the rent on her half, she offered the lease to their rival, Cineplex Odeon. As Cineplex’s cofounder, Drabinsky picked it up in a heartbeat. Without the lease, the only access Famous Players had to their half of the theatre was through a narrow passageway, now controlled by Drabinsky. At the crack of dawn on the day the deal was finalized, he led a procession of vehicles—bearing security guards, German shepherds, locksmiths, workmen and drywall—through Toronto’s core. Within twenty minutes, the entrance to Famous Players’ half of the theatre was boarded up, making their property useless to them.
Drabinsky bought the rest of the Imperial Six, which he restored to what it had once been, a single-screen auditorium called Pantages Cinema. He opened the new theatre in 1987 with the feature film Wall Street. I was there, of course, and I recognized Drabinsky sitting on the marble steps leading to the stage. He was listening for imperfections in the newly installed Dolby sound system. I introduced myself, complimented him on the theatre’s stunning renovation and we chatted amiably.
Wall Street opened to the tune of “Fly Me to the Moon,” a favourite of mine. I’ve used the song in some of my own films.
The second time I met Drabinsky I was having dinner at Fred’s Not Here in Toronto with Jeff Sackman, a friend from Montreal with whom I had made a couple of films. Drabinsky walked in with Lynda Friendly, his head of communications. Since Jeff worked for him at Cineplex, he came over to our table. I noticed for the first time that he limped, a legacy of childhood polio.
Drabinsky was once again spending millions of dollars to painstakingly restore the Imperial Six/Pantages Cinema, this time to its full 1920s glory as the 2,200-seat Pantages Theatre. This was partly in preparation for the Canadian premiere of The Phantom of the Opera.
We chatted briefly and then Drabinsky surprised us by asking, “Would you like to see my new theatre?”
Garth was warm and charming on our private tour. He showed us the grand staircase, the murals, the faux-marble walls, the gold-leaf plasterwork and stained glass. We saw the orchestra pit, the technologically reconfigured stage with its 190 trap doors and the big chandelier, which played such a dramatic role in Phantom. It was awe-inspiring.
In September 1989, Garth Drabinksy opened Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera at the Pantages Theatre, with a world-record box-office advance of $23.8 million. Everything about the production was as dazzling as its gorgeously restored theatre.
Two months later, Drabinsky was unceremoniously dumped from Cineplex Odeon by his partners. The reason? Over-expansion had caused Drabinsky to sell 50 per cent of his company for $150 million to MCA Universal, chaired by Lew Wasserman, the most powerful person in the entertainment industry. Drabinsky had then taken on other partners, leaving him with only 7 per cent ownership and an enormous escalating debt. This was bothering MCA and they wanted him out. With little control left, Garth tried a fast move to force MCA out through a leveraged buyout with his partners, the Montreal-based Bronfmans who had backed him nearly fifteen years earlier. He lost the battle and was shown the door. On his departure, Garth paid $88 million for a package that included the company’s live entertainment division (Livent, Inc.), the Pantages Theatre and the rights to Phantom. As soon as the deal became public, Len Gill initiated another meeting with me. I knew that Drabinsky was a major client and that this change would impact Gill’s agency. I also knew that Gill had little interest in live theatre.
I told him upfront that my script had not changed. “I want to work with Garth Drabinsky.”
This time Gill replied, “You want Garth? You’ve got him.”
I pushed my advantage, “Okay, but I have to come in as an account director, and I have to make forty-two thousand dollars a year.”
“Done. You can start at the first of the year.”
It remained for me to break this news to Ken Borden. We met, as so often before, at Giorgio’s, over the Italian food that he loved. I told him as gently as I could, “It’s time for me to leave, Ken.”
It was the saddest breakup you could imagine. I was never disappointed in Ken. He was—and is—a really lovely man, a sweetheart. He wept at the same time as he understood.
Birds gotta fly.
Chapter Six
GARTH DRABINSKY:
CURTAIN RISING
When I arrived at Echo in January 1990, I was greeted with about as much enthusiasm as when I had arrived at Borden’s four and a half years earlier. I’d had some furniture and personal items shipped to the Echo offices while I took a holiday between jobs. Now I found it sitting in the hall.
I introduced myself to Darlene, the receptionist. “Hi, I’m starting here today. Where’s my office?”
She pointed to a cubicle.
I went to see Len Gill. He was sitting in his office, behind a smokescreen created by what looked like a dozen cigarettes burning at once.
“What’s with the cubicle? It’s awfully cramped in there.”
He exploded. “You want my space? Only two people at Echo have offices, that’s me and my partner.”
Whoa!
As I was leaving, Len shouted once more. “What did we agree on for your salary?”
“Fifty thousand dollars.”
He nodded. “Okay.”
The $8,000 raise on my first day encouraged me to swallow the insult.
My cubicle was stuffed with files left by the person who’d been fired before me. I told myself that this was going to be my new life in a big agency. Even on my first day, with my grandfather’s Persian rug still tied up in the hallway, I could feel Echo humming.
I went to meet Garth in his now-humble little Livent office in an office block on Yonge Street, across from the shiny headquarters of Cineplex Odeon, which he had once ruled. At the top of our agenda was The Phantom of the Opera’s Canadian tour to Montreal, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver. Garth listed every theatre on the tour, its seating capacity and ticket prices section by section, mentally calculating the gross for every city.
Given my math-challenged brain, I could only stare.
“Avrich,” he informed me, “all it takes is focus.”
Since I was now Livent’s account director, it was up to me to plan the ad campaign for all their shows. I attended Phantom every night, filming hours of Colm Wilkinson singing the lead. I cut twelve commercials from the footage, then had actor Graeme Campbell intone, “At the stroke of dawn, The Phantom of the Op-er-ah!” Graeme had starred in Les Misérables, which had been produced by David Mirvish, Livent’s main theatre rival. Mirvish was incensed when he discovered we had poached him.
I showed the commercials to Garth. He said, “We’ll run them.”
As I would learn, that was Garth-speak for, “They’re great.”
On the set of The Music Man TV commercial
from the personal collection
Garth was brilliant at marketing. He could sell emotion more inventively than anyone I’ve ever met. At night, giant billboards featuring the iconic Phantom mask and broken-glass lettering glowed eerily all over Toronto. A year earlier, on a chilly January evening, in a campaign called Midnight Madness, Garth put Phantom tickets on sale at the stroke of midnight. He partnered with CBC-TV to produce an hour-long documentary, Behind the Mask, timed for opening night. A Canadian cast album sold close to 700,000 units.
Garth was a genius at finding ways to maximize sales. With Cineplex Odeon, he had championed two-dollar Tuesdays and putting real butter on popcorn. To keep Phantom running, he sold tens of thousands of tickets for The Phantom Express, a bus package to Toronto from London, Ontario, and from a variety of cities in the United States, including Syracuse, Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Rochester. Every junket allowed visitors plenty of time in the gift shop, where they could purchase papier-mâché masks, gummy masks, chandelier earrings, musical dolls, pop-up books and black mugs painted in heat-sensitive ink so that the Phantom mask appeared when filled with coffee.
Livent’s Phantom production—a fascinating, somewhat garish and hugely theatrical affair—hung around in Toronto for a decade, becoming the highest-grossing theatre production in the world for a continuous run. Then, thanks to the success of our Canadian tour, Livent acquired the rights for productions in Honolulu, Anchorage, Singapore and Hong Kong.
I spent as much time as I could with Garth. I wanted to learn as much as I could from him. That had a downside.
Garth was a control freak with a savage temper. His marketing meetings began every Tuesday morning at eight and ran for hours. He employed three competing agencies to create print advertising and pitted them against each other in a publicly humiliating way.
One agency was from Toronto and led by a pretentious and sour graphic designer. The other firm, located in New York, was run by a flamboyant character with a Napoleon complex. He would attend the meetings in tight red pants and so much black hair dye that I was afraid if the sprinkler system went off we would drown in the Black Sea.
If someone made a mistake, or failed to answer a question, Garth took that person down ruthlessly, not just for that one error, but for every stumble and misdeed in his victim’s employment history, not just at Livent but anywhere. Then, for the rest of the meeting, he would upbraid that person again and again.
Anyone employed by Garth was supposed to assume the position and take it. We would ask each other, “Who’s going to get it today?” On the other hand, if Garth was wrong about something, you had to go for his throat. Then he respected you. I never took his viciousness personally, so he never wounded me, but some people left Garth’s employ damaged for life.
In order to establish a close relationship with Garth, I made myself available on Sundays. That’s when I showed him the commercials for our productions—Phantom in Honolulu, Phantom in Hong Kong, and so on—and we went over the footage. He was never effusive in his praise. He never said, “Fantastic work!” But once he had approved them on Sunday, he dismissed any criticism that was levelled against them at the Tuesday meetings. Whenever circumstances forced me to bring a commercial to the marketing session that Garth hadn’t approved, thirty suffering employees, who’d been yelled at and beaten, would attack it as ferociously as Garth had ever done, just to show they had opinions too.
