The Homelies

FADE IN ON CLOSEUP of worried executive.

Announcer's Voice Off-Screen: Problems? Wondering how to present your product to the consumer? (Executive nods sadly.) Let me introduce you to TV's newest and most popular pitchmen: the Homelies. They come in all misshapes and off-sizes. (CUT TO rapid sequence shots of Homelies' anatomies.) Bulbous noses! Flabby jowls! Weak chins! Retreating hairlines! Bloated waistlines! They've got everything! Everything that it takes to sell merchandise! Why? (Executive mouths words why, why, why.) Because they're real people! They're believable! They're your next-door neighbors, faces on the street, reflections in the bathroom mirror! TV viewers relate to them! They identify! Get it? (Executive nods excitedly, rushes off to find nearest Homely.)

So might run a commercial for HABITS (Homelies Against Beautifuls in Television Spots). Since the dawn of TV, advertisers have crowded the screen with dashingly handsome men and curvaceously lovely women telling the world that Brylcreem's "little dab'll do ya" or "Ban takes the worry out of being close." The implication was that if viewers drained their sinus cavities, mopped their floors and swabbed their armpits with the Beautifuls' products, then they too would somehow be Beautifuls. Ugly notion, says John O'Toole of Foote, Cone & fielding: "The younger generation we have today does not respond to the unreal, the phony. This generation has grown up with advertising, seen it all their lives and has developed an ennui with all the beautiful faces thrown at them." Adds Adman Hooper White, of the Leo Burnett Agency: "Today's TV commercials are an outgrowth of the 'new wave' of French films. They encouraged us to get away from stereotypes and start using nonprofessionals."

Putty Face. And so, ad agencies are raiding Central Casting and even scouring the streets to find talented faces that are, as Talent Agent Bill Cunningham puts it, "not offensively attractive." If an actor is cursed with a pretty face, Cunningham advises him to go to casting calls "looking frumpy." But not even messed-up hair and baggy clothes can disguise a Beautiful, and more likely than not the job will go to someone like Douglas Paul, a copywriter-turned-actor who has fat, freckles and a grandiose nose. Among Paul's starring roles: an Arrow Shirt commercial in which he stands stripped to the waist in a Laundromat, takes his wash 'n' wear shirt out of the dryer, nonchalantly puts it on and swaggers out the door through a crowd of oohing, aahing housewives.

In honor of such memorable performances, this year, for the first time, the American TV Commercials Festival is awarding a Clio, the industry's equivalent of an Oscar, to the best actor in a commercial. Among the nominees is plump Charlotte Rae, who does a devastating satire of a nightclub torch singer mugging her way through the new Alka-Seltzer anthem, I've Got the Blahs. Easy wit, in fact, is the Homelies' forte. One of the best comic commercials now running features Bill McCutcheon, an inconspicuous little chap with a Silly Putty face who gets carried away by the Greek music in an Olympic Airways jet and dances in the aisle.

Squiggly Mouth. It may look like fun, but making commercials is usually one long, exhausting series of takes and retakes. Philip Bruns recalls the horrors of struggling to twist his squiggly mouth into a satisfied grin as he munched through five quarts of Heinz Kosher Pickles. Howard Mann, a nightclub comic with a Kosher dill nose, once had to sit patiently while makeup men reworked his uneven toes, then ran up and down a steep hill 20 times to celebrate the joys of Ting foot deodorant. During practice takes for one commercial, shmoo-shaped Peter Gumeny strung a hammock between two wooden blocks stuck to the walls with Weldwood Contact Glue, slipped his 240 lbs. into the sling, and then lay helplessly as the blocks separated and he went crashing to the floor.

But the rewards are worth the rigors. If a commercial has a long run, a Homely can make $7,500 for one day's work; many make more than $40,000 a year. The competition is sharp, especially since such established Homelies as Wally Cox, Jane Withers, Bert Lahr and Phyllis Diller have mugged their way into the act. A casting call for a street worker, for example, will attract 100 candidates, some lugging along shovels and jackhammers for that authentic look. But in the end, as the Homely homily has it, it's the face that launches a thousand trips to the shopping center.

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