A MEMORY TRIGGER

Larry, a friend whom I’ve known for over 20 years, but whom I’ve seldom met face-to-face, recently tagged me in a post on Facebook.  It was a link to an obit in the New York Times for Carlos Sanchez, the longtime face of Juan Valdez, a fictional character who represented the Coffee Growers of Colombia on television.  The Juan Valdez campaign began in the early 60s, and there are few TV watchers who haven’t seen a Colombian coffee commercial at one time or another.

The advertising campaign was quite successful.  For quite a while in the 60s and 70s coffee roasters proudly boasted Colombian content in their blends, and numerous 100% Colombian brands were launched.  There are still many coffee drinkers who look for Colombian, which has somehow developed a reputation for luxury. Good Colombian coffee, properly roasted and brewed is very smooth with a fine, delicate flavor.  Nowadays, it is not so much in favor.  The dark, “robust” flavor of Starbucks has ascended in popularity (I find that most Starbucks blends have a vaguely burnt flavor), and the slightly milder flavor of Dunkin Donuts has also captured a part of the always-changing market for coffee.

The Juan Valdez campaign was the product of Doyle, Dane, Bernbach, an advertising agency that “revolutionized” the business in the j50s and 60s by creating unusual ads, noted for the creativity of their approach and eye-catching captivating graphic elements.

My friend Larry probably posted the obit for Carlos Sanchez and tagged me because he knew that I worked on the Colombian coffee commercials in the early 60s.  I guess he didn’t know that my work came before Carlos Sanchez became Juan Valdez.  I worked on a series of commercials 1960-1962 when an actor named Jose Duval occupied the role of Juan Valdez. I never met Jose, although I stared at his face every day for nearly three years.

Doyle, Dane, Bernbach had designed a project for the Coffee Growers of Colombia that they called “Nine Spots”.  It was to be a series of commercials with interconnecting themes all based on the growing, picking and sorting of the coffee beans.  Ross Lowell, who has since become a world-renowned cinematographer and inventor, already had a reputation as a first-class location cameraman.  He was hired to shoot the footage that would be used in the spots.  He, Jose Duval, and a small crew went to Colombia for six weeks and – for a proposed nine minutes of television – filmed miles of Eastmancolor negative.  Color film had only recently come into use for TV. Most broadcast TV was still B & W at the time, and the creation of commercials for color TV was a relatively recent phenomenon.

Looking back, I still find it hard to believe that Ross Lowell filmed most of the material hand-held in the Colombian mountains.  35mm movie cameras were clumsy enough, but Lowell was able, incredibly, to pan and tilt as smoothly as on a tripod.  There were a few interiors lit so naturally by this young master that they appeared to have been shot in available light.  Some of the most memorable footage was produced for a spot called “Rain”, which was designed to highlight the nourishing rainfall that helps produce the remarkable coffee beans.  Beautiful as it was, the DDB producer feared that the rainy day would not reproduce well on TV, and that the drab, muted look of heavy rain would be too gloomy on the home screen. The spot was never completed for release.

My friend Leon, who was then a freelance film editor, got the editing contract from Rene Oulmann, an independent producer who had contracted for the work with Doyle Dane. I was unemployed, having quit my job at Arts, Inc. over differences with my boss, Basil Vlavianos, when I ran across Leon in Times Square.  We hadn’t seen each other since we both dropped out of City College six years prior, but we reconnected immediately, and Leon offered me a job as his assistant on the Juan Valdez project.  The editing process was planned for nine weeks, but it continued for more than two years.  Eventually I took over the editing work when Leon moved on to a major New York film production house.

Not long after we started logging the material for the spots we learned that the crew had been sent to Colombia for six weeks out of season!  They had to create berry-bearing coffee trees out of loose branches which they collected here and there.  Some of the spots featured other members of Juan Valdez’s family.  Locals were hired to fill these roles, and because no prior casting had been done, duplicate footage was shot for many of the scenes so that the art director could later select which ones would work.

In one spot – “Sorting” – the family was seen sorting the beans (so that only the best beans would be marketed under the Colombian coffee label) in an overhead shot.  There were two “grandmas”.  The art director preferred the older, grayer grandma, but in the overhead close-up you could see the age spots that mottled her skin. Worried about the blotchy appearance, he actually asked us if the spots could be painted out. He evidently didn’t know the difference between still and motion photography – but he was clearly ahead of his time, since such doctoring of images fits into today’s digital toolbox.

The voiceover sessions introduced me to Norman Rose, one of the top off-camera voices of the day.  I have never encountered a voice before or since so simultaneously warm and authoritative.  He needed no rehearsal time, and could read off a script in exactly 58 seconds (standard TV commercials ran for a minute at that time), and do it again if needed.  Although he worked for decades voicing commercials and movies, even appearing in a few films, he is best remembered to this day for his voiceover creation of Juan Valdez.

You might ask how the editing of nine one-minute commercials could occupy more than two years of work.  Actually, all the spots had babies:  30-second versions, 20-second versions, 10-second versions, versions with different "tag" endings advertising specific brands that marketed 100% Colombian coffee.

And then there was the challenge of creating spots for foreign markets.  The Swedes wanted a 1:45 version to play in "Husmorsfilm", a kind of infomercial program run in the movie theatres during the afternoon for "housewives".  German TV ran film on TV at 25 frames per second, rather than the common theatrical 24 fps used on American TV.  I had to add material to each commercial so that they would run in the prescribed time.

I have no idea if anybody would find these reminiscences interesting, or why they might be, but it turns out that a single Facebook tag, actually unrelated to anything in my life, brought on such a flood of memory that I could not turn away; and, as you see, I somehow felt compelled to try writing it down.

Like many people in my generation, I often look at the obituaries, which increasingly carry news of the passing of people known to us, either personally, or because in some way they contributed to our experience of the times. The past is no more real than the future, just a construct that we attempt to build out of our experiences, but the weight of memory is undeniable.  Day to day memory shapes our perceptions, and when the memory is no longer recent it seems to take on a life of its own.

After all these years I remain amazed at how a single trigger can jump me out of the observed present into a daydream I call “back then”.