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The Case of the Missing Four Seconds 149

doing a comic bit with a ventriloquist dummy in his own likeness (don’t
ask) for a bank client. We recorded Allen’s voice in advance for the
dummy’s lines, and during one of the early takes Allen stepped on his
own line and proceeded to acknowledge the mistake with big eyes to the
camera, in a broad “early live TV” kind of way. The director yelled
“Cut” from off-camera, but Allen kept going, finishing the final lines
and the scene. The camera operator, luckily, kept the film rolling. At the
end of the scene Allen whispered to me, “That’s the take we’ll use.”
The clueless director, trying to nail the script perfectly, went on to
film a half dozen more takes. You can guess the end of the story. We
went with the botched take. It was funnier; it gave Allen the gift of an
accident to create something better than what was asked for; and, above
all else, the commercial was very memorable and helped give a big boost
to the advertiser’s awareness levels. In the end, the only edit required
was eliminating the closed-minded director’s “Cut” from the audio.

THE CASE OF THE MISSING FOUR SECONDS

One of my last TV spots before leaving the ad business may not have
been the most important commercial I ever did, nor was it for the
biggest client, but it did give my art director partner, Holland Henton,
and me the gift of yet another lesson in accidental genius.
This was a 15-second commercial for an ABC network affiliate pro-
moting their Roseanne reruns during the early-fringe 5:00–6:00 P.M.
time slot. It was one of a package of six spots, all starting off with a
freeze-frame of the TV show with comedian Gilbert Gottfried as the
voice-over saying something pithy or totally inane, as the case may be.
Then the tape would roll for about eight seconds in each spot, featur-
ing a clip from a rerun. At the end came a freeze-frame where the
voice-over would return and the station’s logo would appear.
In this particular commercial, the script for the head of the spot
read, “How’d you like to come home to this every night at 5:30,” spo-
ken in Gottfried’s patented sloppy, Brooklyn-accented scream. Then
we were supposed to have a clip from the show showing Roseanne
being the far-from-average average housewife in the title role. The
problem was this: When edited, the chosen clip showing Roseanne
running toward the camera hollering fell four seconds short. It seems
the intern who had selected the initial batch of takes we considered
using for the spot had forgotten to time all of the scenes. Now, if you’re
not in advertising, you may think, what’s four seconds? If you are in