Bill Weems.
I never met Bill. I talked to him once on the phone. Otherwise I only knew him by reputation. But he comes to mind frequently, most recently during last week’s 12-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Bill was a commercial producer who was among the victims of hijacked United Airlines flight 175 which crashed into the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. He lost his life at the age of 46.
Bill was en route from Boston to Los Angeles for the posting of a campaign for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star products directed by Danny Ducovny for advertising agency Mullen. Bill freelanced for both ad agencies and production houses.
Professionally, he was highly regarded. Personally even more so as a dedicated husband and father.
Bill and so many and so much more needs to be remembered–not just one day a year. A perspective that inspires and haunts me is what I naively thought in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
I thought, for example, that we’d come together more than ever before as a country. I thought that serious journalism would make a major comeback. How could it not in light of what had just happened?
Fast forward to today and polarization rather than thoughtful, civil debate seems to be the norm in the court of public opinion.
As for the Fourth Estate, tabloid journalism has become mainstream.
By no coincidence, polarization and tabloid nonsense share a common bond–they’re generators of profit, with little or no regard for what the cost is to society at large.
That’s why BBDO New York’s campaign–print, media, outdoor, digital and video advertising–for The National September 11 Memorial & Museum struck a responsive chord for me.
In BBDO’s public service television spot produced by Brand New School and titled “Day To Remember,” which broke last week, a Robert De Niro voiceover relates:
“Take a day to reflect. To explore. To learn. To honor the best in humanity that overcame the worst. To remember compassion, kindness, courage. Take a day to remember the day that changed us forever.”
“Mickey 17” Tops Weekend Box Office, But Profitability Is A Long Way Off
"Parasite" filmmaker Bong Joon Ho's original science fiction film "Mickey 17" opened in first place on the North American box office charts. According to studio estimates Sunday, the Robert Pattinson-led film earned $19.1 million in its first weekend in theaters, which was enough to dethrone "Captain America: Brave New World" after a three-week reign.
Overseas, "Mickey 17" has already made $34.2 million, bringing its worldwide total to $53.3 million. But profitability for the film is a long way off: It cost a reported $118 million to produce, which does not account for millions spent on marketing and promotion.
A week following the Oscars, where "Anora" filmmaker Sean Baker made an impassioned speech about the importance of the theatrical experience – for filmmakers to keep making movies for the big screens, for distributors to focus on theatrical releases and for audiences to keep going – "Mickey 17" is perhaps the perfect representation of this moment in the business, or at least an interesting case study. It's an original film from an Oscar-winning director led by a big star that was afforded a blockbuster budget and given a robust theatrical release by Warner Bros., one of the few major studios remaining. But despite all of that, and reviews that were mostly positive (79% on RottenTomatoes), audiences did not treat it as an event movie, and it may ultimately struggle to break even.
Originally set for release in March 2024, Bong Joon Ho's follow-up to the Oscar-winning "Parasite" faced several delays, which he has attributed to extenuating circumstances around the Hollywood strikes. Based on the novel "Mickey7" by Edward Ashton, Pattinson plays an expendable employee who dies on missions and is re-printed time and time again. Steven... Read More