Well, there was this time in the late 1960’s, when I was in Omaha, Nebraska doing a T.V. commercial for that renowned product Bux Cornrootworm Insecticide. This was part of the array of beneficial farm products that were being produced by Chevron Ortho products (and we wonder why the Autism rate increase so dramatically).
I was there with Larry Duke (a genius art director and later Levis Poster, etc. Illustrator). Our chosen actor for our commercial was Pat Buttrum (Gene Autry’s former movie side kick). Mr. Buttrum was currently appearing in a T.V. series called Green Acres (starring Ava Gabor, etc.). It was about city folk who buy a farm. Their neighbor was Pat Buttrum. So we figured he was perfect to sell Bux to the farming community.
We went to dinner the night before the “shoot” and across the restaurant Mr. Buttrum spies an old friend, singer “?” Robert Goulet — who was appearing at that great Omaha venue, The Aksarben Theater (that’s Nebraska spelled backwards, get it?). So the two of them wander off to partake of way too many drinks.
Cut to the next day, when we stop to ask some farmer on a dirt road for directions to one particular corn field in an area of cornfields as far as you can see in any direction. As the farmer is pointing, Pat Buttrum opened the back door of the car and puked on that poor farmer’s shoes. We could only imagine how proud the farmer must have felt when he went home tracking vomit into the house and proudly announcing that Pat Buttrum from Green Acres puked on his shoes not more than10 minutes ago.
I won’t go into the video cameraman’s concern with color adjustment saying, “there must be something wrong with this equipment.…I can’t get that green cast out of Mr. Buttrum’s face”. It was that green of someone who’d been up drinking all night. And I won’t elaborate further by discussing how many chickens Mr. Buttrum sat on when making himself comfortable sitting on those bags of Bux Cornrootworm Insecticide).
Todd Miller