Tuesday, April 6, 2010

The case of the squeaky chair.

Preston Sturges, as regular readers of Ad Aged might have surmised, is my all time favorite movie director. In less than a decade he made about ten movies that rank among the best ever made.

This weekend I watched for the 99th time "Unfaithfully Yours" which starred Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell, Rudy Vallee, Akim Tamiroff (one of the greatest of all character actors) and some of the usual Sturges ensemble, including Edgar Kennedy, Julius Tannen and Alan Bridge.

One of the things Sturges does in this movie is to employ outrageous cartoon sound effects to hilarious effect. A hair is plucked to test the edge of a razor and it sounds like a massive spring being sprung. Reverb.

Where the heck am I going with this?

Well, today this knowledge kept me sane.

I was sequestered in a room with a couple dozen clients for all day on-boarding sessions. What made this excruciating ordeal palatable was the fact the the chairs in the conference room were Warner Bros. cartoon squeaky.

Somehow the juxtaposition of client-agency gravity and Carl Stalling SFX kept the oxygen flowing for me.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What do you do if you're in a room with a client who keeps farting? I've had that problem.