Art & Copy (2009)

A PROSE POEM TO A POTATO CHIP An ad man explains how to sell in Art & Copy

An entertaining but also oddly naive documentary about American advertising. Director Doug Pray interviews many of the ad-agency visionaries who, starting in the '60s, saw that the time had come to make commercials hip — that is, to cut through consumers' bull detectors by inviting them to feel in on the pitch (which was really a more subtle form of pitch). Yet Art & Copy buys into the specious notion that when advertising is great, that's because it's true. These mad men are brilliant, all right — they pitched Pray on their hidden ''morality,'' and they sold him. B

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