My first copywriting job

My first paying gig was writing movie taglines for an agency in Los Angeles. 

To create a tagline, a copywriter reads a hundred-twenty page script, then boils the whole story down to a few words. 

The agency would hire as many writers as the budget allowed, often engaging a half-dozen from $300 - $1500 each, hoping out of a hundred clichés, one might shine with the glaze of originality. 

My first assignment was to contribute to the screen adaptation of Henry James’s early classic, Washington Square. Having recently studied James in a seminar, I felt a giddy sense of pride at suddenly putting my language skills to practical use, though my contribution failed to make the final cut.

My second assignment, however, working on Howard Stern’s soon-to-be-released biopic, Private Parts, went well—and my line was chosen. 

My language would affix every vehicle of advertising for the theatrical release, and each and every mass-produced work of art/unit rising out of the smithy that was the story of Howard Stern and his Private Parts—the VHS, the DVD, the CD, the RSVP to Mr. Stern’s BYOB PARTY, and the cover of the Exclusive Private Parts Diorama To Mr. Stern’s Private Parts coloring book. (I exaggerate a little.) Everything about this iconic American figure summed up in the eleven words that had flowed from the sweet, inebriate stream of my pen; the comic chain of nouns and verbs and modifiers that encapsulated absolutely nothing about Mr. Stern, to whom I had paid little attention, but for whom I crafted perhaps the epitaph of my very own life.

I was paid $300.

Two years later, I was in the lobby and saw an award for it in the display. It had my name on it. They hadn’t told me. 

I was furious. Another movie I’d written the winning tagline for—Saving Private Ryan—was also displayed. The copywriter’s name wasn’t mine.

I raised a stink, which resulted in a meeting with a partner. They searched the stack of work for Spielberg’s classic to determine if, in fact, I had been the one to submit the winning line. My faxed exploration was “missing.”

They offered to give me the Private Parts trophy, and I took it. But I never worked for them again.

Today, those words hang in the portfolio of my mind as a measure of all my potential and all my deepest fears, my own private tagline:

Never before has a man done so much with so little.