Doug Pray’s Art & Copy is the latest entry in a
burgeoning new subgenre of documentary film: the Artsy Homage, in which
a subject of the sort typically taken up by Canadian public-television
programs or “Annals of…” New Yorker essays is given the
full-length-documentary treatment. As their name implies, Artsy Homages
are almost exclusively loving portraits, flattering by design: Gary
Hustwit’s Helvetica, one of the standard bearers of the
subgenre, is billed as “a love letter to a font.” The resulting films
are elevated above the products of Canadian television and into the
realm of New Yorker essays by the work of the filmmakers, who
attack their subjects with exhaustive gusto and craft their loving
portraits with an artist’s eye.
Art & Copy‘s essay-worthy subject is the American
advertising industry, with Pray weaving interviews with history-making
major players of the ad world—the minds behind “I Want My MTV!”
“Got Milk?” and Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign
ad—with footage of the legendary ads themselves. Few if any art
forms receive such intense second-to-second attention from their
creators as the television commercial, and showcasing classics of the
form on the big screen does plenty to highlight their artistry.
Background and insight are provided by talking heads, who sometimes
seem baffled by the power of their own blockbuster creations. (Did the
man who wrote “Where’s the Beef?” know he was composing a generational
slogan? No, he did not.)
As with other Artsy Homages—specifically, Hustwit’s
industrial-design pageant Objectified—Art &
Copy‘s focus on triumph gets a little one-note; both films could’ve
been paired with supplementary features devoted entirely to the
failures, rough drafts, and ideas that fizzled in their respective
fields. Still, Pray’s ad-world victory lap is perfectly enjoyable in
its own right, and anyone interested in mass communication should see
it. 
so any idea when/where this will be showing in seattle? the stranger’s site doesn’t seem to have anything, nor a few other places i’ve checked online…i’d assume either NWFF or a landmark cinema would be playing it, but can’t find a shred of info…got some information to share?
nevermind just found an email from NWFF with all the details i need.
Great review, and I’m glad for the final paragraph as well. There is little about “Failure” in the film, though that’s a subtext to keep working hard to succeed. I wish they’d given some examples. It seemed one-sided that way; and someone I saw it with (from another country) thought it was overt American corporate propaganda.