I was watching an old episode of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century last weekend and the navigator on the starship looked familiar, so I looked the episode up on IMDb. Oh, hey, it’s Dennis Haysbert.
Hail to the Chief ran for 7 episodes back in 1985, with Patty Duke as President Julia Mansfield. The IMDb description does say that she is the first female president, but I don’t know how much the show revolved around that.
Kind of sounds like that was the essential point. Interesting find though!
What a great experience for you and your daughter. Congratulations. I hope she was old enough to remember it. I brought mine to a couple shoots to watch, but she has zero recollection.
Yes, you’re 100% correct, in reality if the agency varied from what was agreed to and the actor was still willing too do it, it would be a straight up negotiation. “Dressing up in the pink tutu was not agreed to in our contract, but Mr. McConaughey is willing to do so for and additional $1million. He’ll be in his trailer until you decide.”
I was thinking more along the lines of the specific example @SlackerInc was asking about.
I was fortunate, we had a large international agency that did lots of TV and had their shit together. They had specialists who only worked on TV productions, so the shoots were well planned and generally went smoothly.
I think you tend to get the delays and cost overruns when you have smaller “jack of all trades” agencies that don’t do many TV ads so they don’t know how to plan them.
In my experience, agencies will never tell you they can’t do something (TV, websites, radio, social media etc). They don’t want to risk you going to another agency and potentially losing you forever. They’d much rather commit to a project and make mistakes and learn on your dime, all the while assuring you they do know what they’re doing.
The delays I experienced were often when we shot food products. They’re never the real food, but other things made to looks like the real thing. (There’s lots of good info on this at Youtube etc). We’d spend hours reshooting the plate of food because the colouring didn’t look correct i.e.: the bananas looked fake, the cherries were the wrong shade of red etc. There was food artist on set who’d take the items and airbrush new colours. We’d keep reshooting until the director and agency and client (me) were all happy.
I remember that blonde lady on GOT told the producers no more nude scenes. But by that time, she had the clout to do so.
Not a POTUS, but the president in the Battlestar Galactica reboot was a woman, and her gender was not a big deal.
But what’s the tomato’s motivation?
Lynda Carter also played the Governor of Vermont in the Super Troopers movies, so I’m glad to see her political career is on the rise!
It really wants to direct.
I would say this is only partly true. (Mild spoiler-adjacent comments follow.) Characters on the show didn’t explicitly talk about her being “the first woman president” of the Colonies or anything–it’s unclear whether or not that is the case. But in the pilot of the miniseries, the president is a very traditional alpha white male, and Roslin is the Secretary of Education, whom he treats rather dismissively. When she first learns, in a sort of Designated Survivor type situation, that she is president, she appears to feel overwhelmed.
The military*, in the first couple seasons, acts very skeptical of her (again, talking dismissively about her as “that teacher”), and Adama is always on the edge of just ignoring her and declaring martial law. The fact that she ultimately becomes kind of a hardass is, I think, intended to be implicitly about her surprising everyone around her by defying gender norms.
*Which is also portrayed as pretty dominated by men, especially in the top brass, in the first couple seasons–although they retconned in a female admiral later on (who was also a formidable character, notably more of a “hardass” than anyone else among the ostensible “good guys”).
They explicitly stated that Roslin was 43rd in line for the Presidency. Her gender didn’t matter anywhere near as much as the fact that she was woefully unqualified for any sort of executive role.
That’s how I took it. She was waaaaaaay down the line of succession.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, the Allstate “Good hands” guy, with the voice like a warm cinnamon roll, uttered that immortal line, “I say fuck you, Jobu. I do it myself”?
Mind. Blown.
Yes, but this is part of the gender dynamic at play. Again, in those early seasons the society looked pretty patriarchal at the top. The president was a man, the top two military officers on the Galactica were men. The “teacher” they scoffed at was 43rd in line, but she was also the Secretary of Education, a very female-gendered field. We were never given any indication at that point that Colonial women were in positions higher than hers.
I thought that the food product being advertised had to itself be the real deal, but that anything that was not part of what was being sold could be fake. Like, in the picture on the front of a cereal box, the cereal is real cereal, but the “milk” might be glue (it’s a “serving suggestion”, and they’re free to “suggest” that you eat your cereal with glue, even though nobody would ever actually take that suggestion).
Of course, no real Burger King franchise will ever actually select the best leaf of lettuce and the best slice of tomato and artistically arrange them on the bun and choose the optimal camera angle to show off all of the ingredients, but I thought it still had to be real lettuce and tomato and so on, such as might be used on a real Whopper.
And of course, if the food is just in a commercial to drip onto someone’s shirt, because it’s a commercial for laundry detergent, then all bets are off about the “food”.
Yes indeed, same actor!
A friend of ours was married to a food photographer, and there are extensive rules about what you are allowed to do to make the food look better. IIRC, marbles in the soup make it look thicker, for example. And I think you are right about supporting food being allowed to be more spruced up than the product.
It’s my impression that nearly all food is faked. Ice cream, for example, is impossible to work with with hot lighting, so ice cream photos are usually done with mashed potatoes.
I’m no expert, though. I found this article:
On the regulatory side, Federal Trade Commission spokeswoman Betsy Lordan told CNBC by email that truth in advertising laws do apply to restaurant menu items displayed in ads. The commission examines both what’s implied by and stated in an ad to determine whether it’s deceptive.
“There are no specific FTC regulations governing food photos used in advertising, and the FTC has not pursued any cases alleging that food ads are deceptive based only on the photos,” she wrote.
If, for example, customers see that McDonald’s fries look different in person than in an ad, that would not cause the same regulatory concern as a false claim that a product has special properties, like reducing the risk of illness.
“Consumers frequently purchase food, it’s relatively inexpensive, and it’s fairly easy for a consumer—without any specialized training—to evaluate whether the food they get looks enough like the food in the picture to justify purchasing it again,” she said.
In my experience that was never the case in Canada, (at least 20 years ago when I was doing commercials). Food had to be a realistic and accurate representation of the actual food, but I don’t recall ever hearing it must be the actual food itself. I don’t know if you could ever use the actual real food if you could only use the actual real food. You’d spend most of your time swapping it out for better looking food as it wilts or browns etc.
We used ceramics and plastics a lot combined with real foods. The issue with real foods was as @Voyager noted, they don’t survive an 18 hour shoot under hot studio lights.
The other big issue is the actual food often doesn’t represent colour accurately under bright studio lights. The ever-present food stylist would know what worked and what didn’t in a hot studio.
I recall doing multiple test shots at the start of a shoot: “the tomato’s shade of red is wrong” - the food stylist would remove the apple and then airbrush a different red and we’d try again. “Now the lettuce is too pale” same thing. Then the director would change the angle of the lights (maybe to highlight the actor differently) and you’d start all over again with the food. Hours of this, soooo boring. 
Imo, one of the most “demeaning of celebrity” commercial was when Katherine Heigl was on the outs in Hollywood and did a NyQuil commercial where she wasn’t a spokesperson, didn’t have any lines, and you might even miss it was her if you weren’t looking closely. CLEARLY not chosen for “Hey, we got Katherine Heigl!” reasons.
It shows her humility.
That’s pretty wild. But if they didn’t want to trade on her celebrity, couldn’t they have gotten someone cheaper? I can’t imagine her star had fallen so far she worked for scale.