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Here is the full story of the ad. After over thirty
years, I still have nearly total recall about the photo shoot. This job was shot in very early 1978. I received a
phone call one day about this job - I can't remember if I was called by the photographer or the ad agency that produced it. But I said I could certainly do the makeup for a job like this, and after we agreed
on a price, I sat down with the agency people, art director and photographer at a production meeting. They told me that they were going to have some "live" people dressed as detectives/crimefighters and that
other images would be "cartooned" into the photo. So far, so good.
We started discussing the individual characters. When
I mentioned that I could create a makeup that could turn a non-Asian into Charlie Chan
(thinking they would be casting à la Came the day of the shoot, and I was ready. When I
arrived at the photographer's studio, though, I found that there had been a bit of miscommunication and not one, but
two Sherlock Holmes models showed
up. And one of them, Jan Leighton, was well-known to me as we had worked together
several times. (In fact, one year later he would go on to play Charlie Chan himself in the Macy's newspaper ads shown below.) After a hurried little conference in a corner of the studio between the "powers that
be" (excluding me, as I was not one of the producers), one of the Sherlocks - the better one, actually - was politely dismissed (he'd get paid anyway), and Jan Leighton got the
job. I quickly put a little makeup on him, as well as the models playing Batman and Robin. One, two, three, and they were done.
Then, the art director brought our Charlie Chan over to the makeup area and introduced him.
They had searched and searched through all the talent and modeling agencies
in the For the next thirty minutes, I took my paints and did a subtle age makeup on my "victim," then
took some loose hair from my kit and proceeded to create the moustache, lower lip fringe and altered eyebrows. The only problem was that all during this rather painstaking makeup application, honorable detective kept
up a non-stop running monologue, absolutely hell-bent on
selling humble makeup artist an insurance policy! (He did not succeed.) Finally, with everyone made up and appropriately costumed, the crime fighters were posed and photographed.
It was all over in less than an hour, and everyone cleaned up and went home.
But they never even sent me a "tear sheet," no pre-publication example of how
it all would look. This was a bit upsetting. Eventually
I found out that Newsweek magazine was going to run the double-page ad, and
that's how I got a copy. But, when I looked at the final version, my jaw dropped.
It had been heavily retouched, and the faces now looked exaggerated, almost
cartoon-like. Batman and Robin looked like spray-painted department store
mannequins, Sherlock's features had a more "drawn-in" quality and Charlie Chan had more obvious
lines added to his face. All in all, it wasn't pretty. Not quite what it all looked like in the photographer's studio. Oh
well, I said to myself, nothing to be done; this is what happens when you're an artist-for-hire. And besides, I rationalized, GE was a major corporation and the ad would look good in my portfolio for that
reason. And that's the story of the ad. Here is the second ad I did involving Charlie Chan. It was a series
for Macy's that ran in the NY Times and the NY Daily News - and that Chan happened to be portrayed by the same actor (Jan Leighton) who was Sherlock Holmes in the GE ad. (No, he didn't gain weight - his face was retouched quite a bit
to make him appear heavier.) These are not the ads from the NY Times (more on those in a
moment). These two 1979 ads ran in the NY Daily News on February
25 and March 1, respectively. They are not the exact same as the versions that ran in the Times. But meanwhile, I thought you'd want to see the ads from the Daily
News. But here's the thing: the ads that ran in the Times were better. There were four Times
ads (as opposed to two Daily News ads), the photos themselves were slightly different and there was an amusing
serialized "story" to them that was not really explored the same way in the Daily News. Also, there were other
people in the Times ads: Number One Son and a suitably frightened-looking heroine. - Jay Pearlman
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