* * *
What’s not really known outside of France is that the wine industry isn’t doing so well. Today you can go online and buy a vineyard and château for a song. They’re so cheap, they’ve become the new yacht, meaning they’re affordable at the beginning, expensive to maintain, and usually purchased by Russians. Somebody told me once, “John, if you want to buy a vineyard, you better have the money to buy five vineyards.”
Bordeaux and Burgundy wines no longer have the cachet they used to worldwide, and because of that, the company that contacted me, OVS (Opera Vins et Spiriteux) was looking to copy the success of the Australians, of all people; their goal, to make the ultimate oxymoron, a French Yellowtail.
They called it Chamarée, and their business plan of throwing together vin de pays (wine produced from a variety of different vineyards), slapping an animal on the bottle, and figuring out a catchy slogan to sell it by the caseload at American point-of-purchase displays was so cynical, it couldn’t possibly fail.
OVS was the first French wine company to be floated on the French stock exchange. They’d raised more than €7.2m in capital, but the fact they were coming to me, someone with no real experience either in advertising or in wine, should have been the first indicator that they had fundamental problems.
Sure, it’s not unheard of for outsiders brought in from different professions to offer “a new set of eyes” for a campaign or a marketing launch or an event. To OVS, my American eye was more important than my “book” (something advertising people have and I didn’t), and when I simply said, “Je m’appelle John” with my American accent at our introductory meeting, it was clear from their faces that they thought I was their man for the job.
At first, I assumed OVS wanted me to help create a new name for their wine, only because the one they had, Chamarée, sucked so bad. To me it was a name created in a Eurotrash lab. It couldn’t have been more obnoxious if it tried. Just pronouncing it sounded like a pretentious American trying to sound French; the kind I see on occasion in boulangeries who go out of their way to pronounce croissant, krois-sans, without the t, and in such an exaggerated way, it makes them look even more ridiculous than had they said kroy-zant. These are the same people who refuse to pronounce Cannes like Anne with a C (the correct way) and instead always blurt out Kahn, as in Wrath of (the wrong way).
I had done my research and compiled a list of other wines in the Chamarée range that had found success with distinctive names that had humor built in: Fat Bastard, Red Truck, Goats do Roam, all of them brilliant. For that reason, I felt OVS’s wine had to go the self-mocking route, because, in my nonadvertising, nonwine, non-industry–experience opinion, it would be really funny for a French company to harken back to its heritage while poking fun at itself. I even thought of going all the way and calling it French Snob. “Because let’s be honest,” I told them at our introductory meeting, “how awesome would it be for a dinner conversation to start with ‘This French Snob tastes delish.’”
Unfortunately, the room didn’t feel the same. For them, Chamarée had that (and I love using this expression because the Americans say it more than the French) je ne sais quoi. It sounded French, refined, and super forgetful. And if you didn’t already find it boring, there was a snooze-inducing multicolored butterfly (a copy of the Yellow Tail kangaroo) on the label to make sure you did.
“John, you’re American,” said one of the marketers at our second meeting. “How do you think we can launch this butterfly and gain ground on American market share, so that Chamarée can battle Yellow Tail, Red Truck, and Fat Bastard?”
He said this in all seriousness and with a French accent so that Bastard sounded like “BasTARD,” which made me squeal with delight only because it felt as if I was in an Austin Powers scene and the enemies had just been named.
“Well,” I said in the Don Draper voice I brought for the occasion, “from my experience” (which almost made me laugh), and then I shared with them the epiphany I’d written the week earlier. “You have to give them a Coke/Pepsi choice. And for me that would be the following—Don’t be a wino, be a why yes. Drink Chamarée.”
The phrase brought everything together in one fluid stroke. It would not only be a call to arms for drinking responsibly (Americans love that shit even though they never follow it), it could be the Grey Poupon line for millennials. Instead of the infamous “but of course” sendoff, Chamarée ads would feature a man offering a woman a glass in some fancy hotel, always with the catch line “Chamarée, Madame?” To which she’d respond, “Why yes.”
I finished the presentation expecting applause but found a stern-looking crowd of French people exchanging confused looks. I knew I’d flopped when the first question posed was: “Wait. What’s a wino?” My wino/why yes campaign was DOA. I was paid for my time, and the company decided to go with some watered-down time-honored faux creative idea centered on “The Butterfly Effect”—that notion that a small action ripples out to create bigger, more dramatic outcomes because, of course, drinking a gulp of Chamarée could be a catalyst for world peace. I won’t go into more detail about the campaign. It’s just too sad. But what my Chamarée experience encapsulated for me (which would repeat itself on several other occasions, not just with advertising but with magazine articles and TV writing as well) was the constant refrain of watching a disruptive idea get watered down before I even passed Go. In OVS’s case, they were brazen enough to hire an American to adapt an American campaign based on what he thought would be American funny, only to settle on an approach they were more familiar with. Time after time, a lot of the French I’ve come across want to channel an American style of hip, but can’t begin to grasp just how depraved and horrible we actually are.
OVS eventually filed for bankruptcy and was liquidated. And no, not one American has ever heard of Chamarée. Anaïs still has a pair of those American Apparel short shorts I made for the presentation, which I explained could be shamelessly sold in tandem with multiple cases of Chamarée. And when I see her walking in them with a why yes and a wino on each cheek, I’m reminded of what gloriously could have been.
* * *
During my first few years here, I watched a lot of French TV. I told Anaïs it was a way for me to improve my comprehension, but in reality I had a morbid fascination with the whole thing. I was tantalized by reality shows that showed people actually fucking in Jacuzzis and by French talk shows that weren’t scripted and ended sometimes with the guest telling the host to “get a real job.” Presidential debates had the candidates facing each other but seated like opposing counsels in a conference room. All the weathermen were weatherwomen, and each was cast the same way: svelte, in a skirt and high heels, and always more than fifty-eight years old. There were awards shows that were poorly scripted and never predictable. A drunken Gerard Depardieu assured us of that. And then there were the American reruns, but fifteen years late, which allowed you to catch up on series like MacGyver or Charmed and remind yourself why you didn’t watch them in the first place.
At its core, there’s a pejorative line of thinking that festers inside French TV. It’s that the audience, for whatever reason, is moronic. French TV never had its Honeymooners, M*A*S*H, Seinfeld heyday. Its writers never came from the Harvard Lampoon. TV was for les masses, and it was the French producer who knew better than the audience what we would like. TV is used to move soap, I was told. And because of this approach, there’s not the same quality control.
I’d love to tell you my sheer comedic talent got me hired as a writer for an SNL-type show, but in reality, it was because I was American. The premise and format of the show was not unlike Garry Shandling’s The Larry Sanders Show or 30 Rock, a show within a show. A fairly well-known actress in real life (we’ll call her Aurélie) was getting her own series on Canal+ (the HBO of France). My fictional character was to be her manager/agent, guiding her through the intricacies of TV production, advising her based on all my experience
back in the States. To the French, I was Ari Gold from Entourage but not so sleazy (I think).
Oh, I should also probably mention that I’d never acted in my life. But that was okay, apparently. Just as with advertising, the only thing that mattered was that I was American and spoke French with an accent. And no, Anaïs wasn’t jealous. French TV has such a bad reputation with her crowd, a role on a comedy show is looked upon like a gig on the Home Shopping Network. When the producers told me I’d been hired, I was so excited, I doubled down and told them, “Look, if you really want it to be American, you better have an American writing for you guys as well.” They were intrigued, I could tell, and when they asked if I’d written for TV before, my response was (because I was holding the same spiral notebook I used for the Chamarée campaign), “Why yes.”
My Ari Gold role as Aurélie’s producer/agent was scrapped after the pilot. They found it/me too negative and difficult to understand. “Who is he again? Her gay friend? Why is he angry all the time?” Luckily, I’d managed to weasel my way into a desk on the set, and since the studio didn’t want to change the team, my role instead morphed into journalist. Super, I thought. It fit more with what I do in real life anyway. The idea this time was I’d report the nightly news like SNL’s “Weekend Update,” but since my character was American, I wouldn’t have much command of the French language and therefore I’d be forced to act out the news instead of reporting it. For example, if there was violence in the Middle East, instead of describing which factions were fighting, I’d simulate a machine gun firing and jump around on one leg. I’d also scream a lot. They wanted lots of screaming. Since the other writers had seen Fox News a couple of times, they assumed that’s how Americans reported the news. And they weren’t completely wrong.
As a writer, I was tasked with delivering a series of sketches each week. Since they were in French, I was more worried that the show runners would notice my grammatical errors than whether my jokes or sketches landed comically. I even went so far as to hire, with my own money, a translator to make sure each page was perfect. But this proved more difficult than I thought, seeing she didn’t understand the context of the jokes sometimes.
“We open in the show’s office, where the team has started a game called Butt Rodeo where there’s a rider, a bull, and a clown,” I’d explain to the translator, as if this all made sense. “In the scene, the rider (Aurélie) clamps onto the butt of the bull (George, in this case), and she hangs on to see if she can break the office record.” The translator politely listened. “Once Aurélie’s thrown,” I continued, “the clown (me) runs into the office to divert the obviously angry George.” The translator stared at me. I couldn’t tell if she was judging me for a scene that bordered on sexual assault or if she had something else on her mind entirely. “Is this a circus clown or a street clown?” Apparently, in France, there are two different sorts, and rodeo clown they don’t have a translation for. Our days dragged on like this.
On Monday morning, I’d arrive at our writer meeting with a stapled version of each episode in duplicates of six for everyone to read. I also brought coffee. I’d dreamed of having a TV writing job since I was kid, only because, just once, I wanted to sit around an oval table and “punch up” scripts and throw pencils at the wall and have Harvard guys make my Simpsons draft better. It was like the coronation of being funny. Unfortunately, I found myself often alone on these Monday mornings. The rest of the writers would show up late, having been out partying the night before, and they would eventually arrive hideously hung over. The first hour was spent on “le débrief,” a post-mortem of last night, everyone discussing what had gone down at the Costes Hotel bar. I’d sit and smile through the pain of not having been invited to the Costes Hotel bar party, looking at my pile of scripts sitting there waiting to be read.
When the show runner finished his monologue about being hammered with a semicelebrity and how she was obviously cheating on her star boyfriend, he’d glance through some of my sketches with a straight face, then look up at the others as if something I’d written had triggered an idea. “He liked something!” I’d tell myself. “Maybe we could oval table this?”
“What are we ordering for lunch?” he’d say, putting my scripts to the side. Soon everyone had left the room. My pile of scripts would sit there the entire week, my Butt Rodeo sketch locked inside. And as the weeks grew, so would the pile. Higher and higher it would rise, unread and unopened.
Since the show was a weekly, the writers were asked to write over the weekend, then polish the scripts Monday and Tuesday. We’d shoot the show Wednesday, which was then edited Thursday and Friday for a Sunday night broadcast. In reality, the scripts (that were used) were written by three guys (not me) on Tuesday afternoon after their fifth joint, and at 5:00 p.m., the final drafts were printed and sent to the actors two floors down in the studio where we’d rehearse for tomorrow’s shoot.
When I say three guys I mean the head writer, his best friend, and a guy who typed while they kicked a soccer ball back and forth. The rest of us sat on the couch and contributed nothing but laughter and smiles when needed. Often, I felt this was some type of hazing ritual, but since I was being paid a lot, nobody wanted to hear me complain. The worst part of this experience was that I was an actor as well, so I’d watch, in real time, the scenes that had been written for me unfold, each one more humiliating than the next.
“Let’s have John be Spiderman,” said one writer, high as shit, with me sitting next to him but as if I wasn’t in the room. “And” (he’d then take a longer hit on his joint), “Spiderman doesn’t want to work in France or doesn’t get the French.” He’d then start laughing hysterically at this premise and I’d nervously laugh with him. We all would.
“Oui,” the head writer would jump in. “And he descends from a string into the office each morning and fucks everything up!” (another long toke). “Because he doesn’t want to work here!”
“Ha, yeah!!” The room would erupt.
Thank God I wasn’t smoking with them, because I might have assumed this skit was a subtle dig at me personally. The guy who drops into the office and fucks it all up? The guy who doesn’t want to work here? The next day, not only was I dressed up in a fake muscled Spiderman outfit, but I had French lines I needed to memorize in a few hours. And I was hanging by a cable upside down, because “Spiderman doesn’t just enter by the door, John.”
This was a year of my life. Ironically, my Spiderman episode turned out to be the highlight of the season. In the months that followed, as the ratings dropped, I’d find myself on the bad side of Aurélie, who felt my Weekend Update was stealing her thunder. Since my sketches were not read, the executive producers assumed I was lazy. Aurélie, feeling the scripts were not up to snuff, brought in another band of writers she trusted. The staff writers, the ones who didn’t write until Tuesday afternoon, said she wasn’t being professional and began writing bad lines for her on purpose. (At least I hope they were on purpose.) Soon, nobody was talking and the environment was toxic. But since the network had already invested too much money, they couldn’t admit their error and pull the plug. The press soon savaged the show, the worst article coming from a magazine whose featured headline was “Is This a Joke?” And guess who was on the cover in a Spiderman outfit smiling like an idiot.
Following Christmas break, the network decided our show would not be renewed, which is normal for TV. What was bizarre was that they wanted us to continue to produce the rest of the season, until June anyway. Six long months ensued. Aurélie did her bare minimum, acting in three sketches per week, and since everyone wanted to protect their careers, John would assume the majority of the sketches. I was a Belgian secret agent who is bumbling and dangerous because “He’s Belgian, you see?” I was a coked-up producer at the Cannes Film Festival pitching Steven Seagal a new series. I was a radical far-right protester who bullied bearded Muslims. I was a lot of things.
Even Otto and Bibi, who
were two and six at the time, could see the show and the roles written for me sucked, which stung. The excitement of watching their father on TV waned with each passing week. Now, all they said as we watched the episode together on Sunday night was “Dad, you screamed a lot,” or, “Dad, is that actress being mean to you?” Following the last taping, there was a wrap party, and one of the writers (on his third joint by then) had the chutzpah to claim, “We were too ahead of our time. France wasn’t ready for a show like this.” I smiled and agreed and asked him if I could have my scripts back. I also asked for the Spiderman outfit, which I kept for Halloween.
* * *
Following my brief stint on TV, I wanted out of show business and back into the friendly confines of magazine writing. “Paris’s Top Ten Vegan Restaurants” and “Shoes to Wear at a Summer Wedding” articles no longer seemed painful compared to the humiliation I’d just experienced. What I learned, though, was that you can’t run from your past. Soon enough, I was being offered lucrative side work doing voice-overs in English.
Doing English voice-over work in France is probably no different from doing voice-overs in the United States, except that there are fewer Anglophone actors to compete with here in France. Often, I was providing an English voice for a French commercial that was trying to win an award at Cannes or making what the industry calls a maquette (mock-up), which is a film the ad agency pitches to their client to convince them to invest in the real film with better music, 3D effects, and, of course, a better voice actor. I also dubbed a lot of documentaries for the American or British TV market, or, on rare occasions, dubbed a French film into English. What always struck me as comical was that budgets for these things aren’t small. The director, the actors, and the postproduction all cost a lot, and yet much of the product’s success rests on a guy whose voice was chosen because he played Spiderman on an unwatched series.
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