My Career Went to the Dogs

My movie marketing career had very little to do with animals, dogs or otherwise. I did some work on the advertising for the Benji movies, but nothing of consequence.

Very early in my career, I was with an ad agency involved with the advertising for MGM’s Saturday matinee re-release of The Yearling. My client had, it’s fair to say, a rather bizarre devotion to the series of family films that MGM was running as matinees, and The Yearling was the first.

The ad that we were working with was a shot of the boy carrying the fawn, but it was larger than we had space for. My solution to making the ad smaller, I proudly announced, was to “crop the dog,” thereby not showing the animal’s entire body. Suffice it to say that the client was not too pleased that I thought the fawn in his precious movie was a dog.

The only other connection to anything with animals in my marketing career was on a film called The Bear. It was a pickup for our company, which meant that it was produced independently, and then we bought it for distribution.

The Bear was an interesting movie made by a talented director named Jean-Jacques Annaud. Two bears were on the screen for virtually the entire movie, and as I recall, the only humans were two hunters, who were shown only briefly and who spoke almost no dialogue.

Six executives, including me, flew to Paris on the Concorde to get our first look at the movie we had bought. We huddled in a small room with Mr. Annaud, and he presented a three-hour version of the film on a Moviola. For those too young to know what that was, it was a machine that ran the film and had a very small screen on which it could be watched. Directors used it to experiment, splicing film together in the editing process. Very, very pre-digital.

So there we were in a small room in Paris, standing in front of this little machine, when Annaud announced that the sound was not ready, so we would be watching the film without sound. But not to worry, he said, because since most of the sound in the final film would be bear noises, he would stand next to the Moviola and mimic bear sounds himself, to give us a flavor of what the finished product would be like.

So for three hours we watched footage on this little screen in Paris, with a Frenchman making bear noises. I remember looking at Jeff Sagansky, the president of production for our company, and I knew that he was thinking, as I was, how surreal and ridiculous the situation was.

Three months later, we had a screening of a rough cut of the movie in Paramus, New Jersey. We had invited an audience in, and as was standard procedure, we would hand them comment cards, soliciting their opinions when the film was concluded.

Jeff and I were standing in the back of the theater when two things of note happened. First, we both realized that the bear noises were exactly the same as in Paris. To this day I believe that every bear noise in the finished film actually consists of the director mimicking bear noises. He would deny it, and I certainly could never prove it, but I think it’s true.

Second, a woman stormed out of her seat and walked out. She saw Jeff and me as she was leaving, and somehow she knew that we were executives with the company that owned the movie.

There had been a brief scene that showed one bear humping the other, probably because that’s what bears do. But she was outraged, claiming that she was told that the film was appropriate for family viewing. Yet in her eyes it was nothing more than bear porno! With full frontal bear nudity!

It was a weird night at the movies.

It wasn’t until I was writing TV movies that I was turning into a real-life dog lunatic, and I decided to put a golden retriever in one of my movies. It was called Deadly Isolation, and was the story of a woman who lived with her senior golden on the coast of Maine.

There is no reason to bore you with all the details of the plot. I’ll just say that a man comes to the house, pretending to be something and someone he is not. His goal, in order to pull off a nefarious scheme, includes getting the woman to fall for him.

One scene in the script had the woman, the bad guy, and the golden go out on the ocean in her boat. When she is not looking, he throws the dog into the water. Then he jumps in to heroically save the dog, earning the woman’s gratitude and adoration in the process.

Brilliant stuff.

Unfortunately, the film was a very low-budget production, and there was apparently not enough money to have the scene shot out on the ocean. So instead they shot it in what was little more than a viaduct, about as wide as a half-dozen bowling alleys.

For some reason, they used a Bernese mountain dog instead of a golden, which was fine. But when the guy throws the dog into the placid body of water, the dog starts swimming happily along, and it’s all the guy can do to catch up to it.

Not my finest creative moment.

When I started writing Andy Carpenter novels, I gave Andy a dog named Tara. (Where would I have gotten that name?) Andy is also into dog rescue and runs the Tara Foundation. As you can probably tell, this was not exactly a huge stretch for me.

And the books were doing reasonably well. People seemed to like them, and they got a bunch of award nominations. Bury the Lead was even chosen by Janet Evanovich as a Today Show Book of the Month, and we went on the show together, where Janet was incredibly complimentary and gracious.

I had decided that I wanted to try other things, and since the books were selling only moderately well, the sixth in the series, Play Dead, was going to be the last one.

That book more directly involved a dog in the plot, and the publisher decided to put a golden retriever on the cover. And sales went through the roof, or at least my version of a sales roof.

People would e-mail me with the same message: they loved the book, but were embarrassed to say that they bought it only because of the dog on the cover. That was fine with me; I wouldn’t have cared if they’d bought it because the Devil made them do it, as long as they bought it and liked it.

Pleased with the spike in sales, the publisher prevailed upon me to write another “Andy,” though persuading me was not exactly a tough hill to climb. I love working on those books; when I start a new one, writing the ensemble cast makes me feel like I’m reconnecting with old friends. As long as people keep reading them, I’ll keep writing them.

A couple of weeks later, the publisher sent me a mock-up of the book jacket for the next one, even before I had come up with a plot concept.

It had two dogs on the cover.

A Bernese and a golden.

So I wrote the book, New Tricks, to the jacket. I’ve got a hunch Hemingway never worked like that. But I didn’t care; people were buying the books.

It will come as no surprise that every “Andy” since then has had a dog on the cover, and I’d be very surprised if any of the future ones do not.

I am crazy about dogs, but I’m not above using them to make a profit.

You know the old saying “You only exploit the ones you love.”