Every video producer at HEC (Humongous Electronics Company) knew that the key to getting a project approved was The Plan. These were written in such a way that the subversive intent of the wildly avant-garde creative team was cleverly hidden behind the kind of buttoned-up verbiage favored by executives and their Nervous Subordinates®.
A prime example was the Project Plan for an Autofact 87 Trade Show Video Wall submitted by a colleague, the legendary Jan Szymanski, whose name is still murmured in hushed tones wherever former HECies gather.
The attendees at Autofact were predominantly male engineers and automobile enthusiasts, the kind of guys who could reprogram a HEC minicomputer before breakfast and bore out the transmission of a ’64 Mustang after lunch. Here’s an excerpt from the Plan.
Ignore the misspellings. Szymanski was too legendary a personality to bother with trifles.
Anyway… The actual video consisted primarily of leather bustier-clad models cavorting on a beach, intercut with the “successful executive” making out with a glamorous lady in the backseat of a limo, with a half dozen police helicopters hovering in the background.
Due to the astronomical budgets for HEC videos in those days, Szymanski had no trouble arranging for LA streets to be blocked off for his shoot and summoning massive fleets of choppers and cop cars at will.
He also commissioned an original theme song entitled “So Unfair” composed by the front man for a rock group named the Invincible Bonobos. In the video, the song was performed in an intimate night club Szymanski had rented for the evening.
Visible in the footage were the male clients who had bankrolled the production, gyrating to the infectiously driving beat of the Bonobos, who had been flown to the West Coast and housed in the Beverly Hills Hotel on HEC’s dime.
The video was a big hit at Autofact.
However, when bootleg copies began to circulate throughout HEC, objections were raised by a cadre of HR busybodies, offended by the scantily clad models and, especially, by the antics in the limo, which culminated in the amorous lady succumbing to the charms of the Aryan-looking exec while singing, with orgasmic gusto, “You’ve got the upper hand!”
The fuss raised by the busybodies inevitably drew attention to the yawning chasm between the Project Plan and the actual substance of the video.
The clients claimed to have NO IDEA what Szymanski was up to, notwithstanding their uninhibited frolicking, captured on film, to the tune of “So Unfair” in a sleazy LA dive.
The production was subsequently and forever after known to HEC insiders as The Nasty Girls Video. Szymanski was roundly berated by management, shunned by the busybodies, and ordered by HR to attend a series of Valuing Differences Workshops.
Szymanski took all this in stride and with his habitual good humor, but subsequently resigned from HEC and moved to Hollywood, an equally toxic environment but with much better weather.
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