It's showtime. Almost.

This is going to seem hard to believe, but unlike fairy tales and stories about unicorns, leprechauns, insightful account planners and consumer engagement, this one is absolutely true.

Once upon a time, people used to go to movie theaters and, not including movie trailers, there were no commercials or advertising before the movie. None. Zilch.

Then, someone at the L.A. Times had an idea about how the paper could get into the movie business. They decided they’d give a discount on media placement for theater listings to the theater chains if they’d run an L.A. Times commercial before the movies started.

It was a great deal for the Times. Captive audience, big screen and a theater extortion plan they knew the chains would go for.

When these commercials started appearing years ago, it didn’t matter if you were seeing a movie at the Village in Westwood or the Gardena Cinema. They were unanimously and loudly booed. People threw popcorn at the screen. The audience could get commercials at home on their televisions. It wasn’t what they were coming to the movies for. They hated it and they weren't going to sit for it.

Except that they have.

Fast forward to today. Since no one looks in the newspaper for show times anymore, the L.A. Times commercials are a quaint memory (and the paper might soon be as well). But what’s taken its place are theater owners who’ve co-opted the idea to generate revenue for themselves.

You know those pre-show, pre-packaged group of ads, shorts, trailers and interviews you see before movies? The ones that are usually bundled as First Look or The Twenty (short for the 20 minutes prior to showtime)? Yes it's paid advertising. But it's the theaters themselves who are bringing it to you.

The three major chains - Regal, AMC and Cinemark - have together formed National CineMedia(NCM) to show preshow ads in their theaters. Here's an idea how much they're making off it:

And you thought all their profit was coming from $4.75 cups of Coke.

It's actually amazing they manage to have the ad sales they do. Here's the pitch from their website:

If by fully engaged audience they mean a theater full of people talking, checking their phones, texting, playing games, looking for seats, at the concession stand buying $5.75 buckets of popcorn, then yes, they're fully engaged.

Fully engaged isn't the only promise they make that they aren't keeping.

Did you see it? It's the part at the end about loving the brand? I'm pretty sure being shown commercials in a theater has just the opposite effect. It's one thing when you see a bad commercial on television. But when you see one (or the same one) on a 60-ft. screen in 70mm with Dolby sound, the badness just scales up. So does the resentment. Even if it's a good spot, it's holding you captive before your movie.

There are two problems here. First, as always, is the money. Like the fees the airlines charge for what once was free, the theaters are making way too much from these commercials to get rid of them. And second is a passive audience who has just come to accept the first fact.

I usually like a theater as quiet as possible.

But I do miss the booing I used to hear the minute the commercial started playing.

Drive she said

I wouldn’t go so far as calling myself a Disneyphile (although it would be one of the nicer things I’ve been called). But I did grow up in L.A., and probably spent an equal amout of time between school and Disneyland (well, maybe a little more at DLand).

I’m a California boy, and I do love Disneyland.

As a card-carrying Deluxe annual pass holder, I’ve done the math to figure out I have to go there at least 6 times during the year to make it pay for itself. No problem: between DLand, its sister park California Adventure, and summer it'll be a cinch.

The beauty of it is I can go anytime I want (except for a few blocked days) and pretty much forget the outside world and have a good time. Until I have to pay real-world money for food in the park (seriously, would it kill them to include a few meals in the annual pass fee).

But I recover quickly.

Anyway, last Saturday night it was time for my daughter and me to renew our annual passes. Instead of doing it online, which wouldn’t have given us any excuse to go into the park, we made the 15-minute drive to Anaheim and did it in person at a Disneyland ticket booth.

Disney cast member Linda from Laguna Niguel - who may or may not have been an audio-animatronic robot - efficiently and pleasantly helped us.

Afterwards, we thought we’d take the new annual passes for a spin. So we went into Calfiornia Adventure, got the passes scanned, and visited the newest land: Cars Land.

When Disney decides to wow you, no one does it better. Radiator Springs is the spittin' image of the fictional cars town in the movie come to life. It is incredible. Visually rich and detailed, stunning in its vibrancy, it actually is the only Disney "land" that feels like you're in another world entirely.

We waited an hour to get on the Radiator Springs Racers, the roller coaster ride that simulates the race in the movie. It leisurely takes you through the town of Radiator Springs, then suddenly you're at a starting line with another car full of people.

You get the green light, and you're off. It's not nearly a long enough or fast enough race, but it is fun. It has just enough of what I call "Disney Danger" on the curves to make you want to immediately go on it again. If the line wasn't a two hour wait when we got off we would have.

We went on a couple more rides, and then headed home. No need to do it all in one night.

We have all year.

Don't ask: Moving

You have to look closely to see it. This is a picture of me helping you move.

I know what you’re thinking: it looks like a couple on a tropical beach, enjoying a few beers and some special time together, far removed from all their cares. And yours.

Yes. What I said. Me helping you move.

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but at a certain age - maybe around 40 - I made the decision there were just certain things I wasn’t going to do anymore. Like help you move. In fact I decided I don’t have any friend I like well enough to help move.

So don't take it personally.

Sure, there was a time when renting a van or borrowing a friends pickup, dragging your stuff down the flight of stairs from your old place up the flight of stairs to your new place, and being rewarded with cheap pizza and beer at the end of it all sounded like a good time.

But that time has come and gone. Now it just sounds like lousy pizza, warm beer and a bad back.

I'll be happy for you and your new place, and I'd absolutely love to come over and see what you've done with it once you're moved in. Which actually should be pretty easy since there are over 25,000 moving companies in the United States.

It's just that now, I'm not one of them.

This is what advertising is like

So many metaphors, so little time.

Not too long ago, 20 people boarded the Windseeker ride at California's other amusement park, Knott's Berry Farm. It takes riders up 300 feet, spins them around, takes their breath away and then lowers them safely back to the ground. All in about three minutes start to finish.

I have a big appreciation for things that take 3 minutes start to finish.

Anyway, that particular day was a little different than every other day because the riders got stuck at the top for over three hours until ride mechanics rescued them.

This is exactly what advertising is like.

At first you're whisked away to dizzying heights, and what with big production budgets, location shoots, vendor lunches, comp subscriptions and days at a time out of the office, the view is spectacular. In fact, you can't see another job you'd want for miles and miles.

You start to think it'll be like that every time, but then one day you get stuck. Fighting for the work. Fighting for the budgets to execute the work you've been fighting for. Fighting the client to get them down to one thought instead of ten in a :30 second spot.

The bad news is no one's coming to rescue you. You have to do that yourself.

It often involves getting off one ride and hopping on another. And another. And another.

It's an odd way to manage a career (pause for laughs for using the word "career"), yet it's just standard operating procedure.

Besides, when it comes to amusement, you can't beat it.

What took so long

I’ve written about the death penalty several times before: here, here, here, here, here and here. So I won’t make this a long post.

It’ll be just long enough to ask why Richard Ramirez, the infamous Night Stalker serial killer, was given the death penalty then allowed to live another 24 years until he died yesterday of natural causes (and I thought there wouldn’t be any good news yesterday).

He'd been sentenced following his conviction for 13 murders, 5 attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults and 14 burglaries. During the entire 24 years after his conviction, while taxpayers were footing the bill to house, feed, clothe, educate, exercise, medicate, marry (yes, he got married in prison to a woman with very questionable taste in men) and fight appeals for this monster, ironically all 13 people he murdered remained dead.

Their due didn’t come until yesterday. And even at that it only came in the form of circumstance, not the justice they and their families waited for and were promised.

Ramirez, and people like him – Scott Peterson, the Menendez brothers – fade out of the headlines once their trials are over. It's easy to forget they continue to enjoy breathing the air for decades, while appeal after appeal slog through the overburdened court system. And their victims families have to live with the injury of the loss, and the insult that their tax dollars are supporting the killer years after they’ve been sentenced.

I've mentioned it in other posts, but it seems worth mentioning here again. The argument that somehow putting him to death as a punishment for his crime, and the murders he committed have some kind of moral equivalency is ridiculous by any civilized method of reasoning. It simply isn't the truth.

Richard Ramirez didn’t deserve to die of natural causes. He deserved to die shortly after his conviction, in a chamber filled with gas or with a needle in his arm and the families of his victims as witnesses.

He deserved to die younger than he ever thought he would, and terrified beyond words.

Just like his victims did.

Rat-tastic!

I once read a review for the remake of Willard, the movie about a guy who had a legion of rats at his command. The review called the movie “rat-tastic!” I thought it was a pretty funny way of putting it.

Much funnier than the made up words used daily by ad agencies on commercials.

In my mind’s eye, I imagine an agency dungeon where copywriters are chained to their chairs, their overlords whipping them mercilessly until they find a way to merge two words that have absolutely no business being made into one. The lingual equivalent of a square peg in a round hole.

It’s bad enough no one in real life talks the way people do in commercials. But at least they’re speaking words from the dictionary (most of the time).

When was the last time you described a strong, soft toilet paper as stroft? When was the last time you described toilet paper at all?

Hampton Inn now offers us Hamptonality!, a cross between the name and hospitality - in case you didn’t know what business hotels were in.

Hyundai has told us in the past that their finely crafted Korean automobiles are made with pure Powercision.

There are also what I like to call the fallback suffixes: -licious, -tastic, -esque, -able, -apolooza, -centric. Just add a word in front of them, and presto! You have a vocabalicious new word.

The unfortunate part is this practice has spilled over into other areas as well. Dog breeders were among the first to pick up on the trend. If you can't decide between a labrador and a poodle, you can pick up a Labradoodle. If the kids want something more their size, get them a cross between a cocker spaniel and a poodle. You know, a Cockapoo.

No matter what industry it shows up in, it just means the people perpetrating this assault on the language couldn't come up with anything better.

Which if you ask me is all just a cross between a bulldog and a shihtzu.

Word

Like a lot of writers living in Southern California, I’ve worked on many car accounts. From top end $90,000 luxury vehicles to $14,000 coffee-grinders, I’ve written it all.

Commercials, collateral, radio spots, print ads, online banners, interactive content, Twitter posts, Facebook posts, outdoor, customer kits, dealer kits, CPO kits, sale kits, employee bonus kits, warranty kits.

Oddly enough, no matter the price or quality of the car, they all have something in common. The words used to describe them.

Pick a car, any car. I bet it’s exhilarating. It’s probably also a leader in innovation. No doubt it’s been engineered to maximize your driving experience, and designed to turn heads as well as corners.

Let’s not forget the fact it’s also loaded with state-of-the-art technology, as well as class-leading aerodynamics whose job it is to keep you connected to the road. How else could you get a car that makes setting the standard, standard.

But there's no point to any of it unless you're around to enjoy it. That's why the car you're thinking about is loaded with the latest active and passive safety features.

The cars come with airbags. The agencies come with windbags.

Differentiating parody products - different brands with the exact same features - has always been a problem in advertising. Often the only thing that does it is the quality of the creative idea, the consistency of the execution and the personality it establishes for the brand.

I bet you know what BMW builds. But I'm fairly sure you aren't nearly as familiar with the tagline Toyota - which builds awesome cars for all income levels - just spent millions to introduce.

Unless there's a real product difference, almost every category from athletic shoes to cars to fast food use the same words to describe their product. Which makes it even harder to tell them apart.

Sort of like ad agencies.