How In the World Did We Do It?

We’ve all had the experience of listening as an older friend or relative talked about how things “used to be in the old days.”

Before television … when we sat around listening to the radio.

Before remote controls … when we actually had to walk across the room to change channels. (Actually, my father had a remote. Me. “Larry, change it to channel 7.”)

Before the Salk vaccine … when every summer was “polio season” and worried parents kept children away from movie theatres, swimming pools and other public places where they could be exposed to this crippling, often fatal, disease.

You get the picture.  True stories that bring chuckles, laughter or looks of disbelief.

I’m going to date myself here, but frankly I don’t care. I’m as old as I am and there’s not a thing I can do about it. So there.

I was talking to someone the other day and we were reminiscing about how we used to conduct business before the advent of modern communication technologies.

I’ll set the stage …

Imagine a major new automotive product announcement show in Las Vegas to introduce a raft of new cars and trucks to thousands of dealers. We had a budget of many millions of dollars. We had a live cast of singers and dancers … and a 21-piece orchestra … and 70mm motion picture segments projected on an enormous screen. And we even had top-name star talent: Bill Cosby. I could go on, but you get the picture. It was a really big deal back then (in the early ‘80s). And frankly, it would be just as big a big deal today if car companies still did shows like this – but by and large, they don’t. Not on that scale.

I talked with a friend who produced the show in question (I was the writer), and we found ourselves marveling at the fact that we put on this spectacular event without laptop computers … without faxes … without cell phones … without email … without mobile devices of any kind.

And even though we know we did do it – because we were both there – we honestly can’t quite believe it.

The clients back then were no less demanding than they are today. For example, they insisted that script changes be made overnight. So we typed (yes, on machines called typewriters) our fingers to the bone, burned through reams of Xerox paper at the copier, stuffed the revised scripts in brown envelopes and, as the sun was rising, stuck them under our clients’ hotel room doors. I suppose you could call that “Memail.”

If someone back in Detroit needed to reach me in Vegas, they called the hotel and had me paged – but since we usually shut down the paging system in the theatre, it didn’t work very well. If I needed to reach someone back at the home office, I used a pay phone and a telephone credit card, or I ran back to my room to use the phone beside my bed.

There was no such thing as PowerPoint. Visual support for the speeches was in the form of photographic slides, loaded into trays and mounted on slide projectors operated by union projectionists. That crash you just heard? That was a tray of glass-mounted 4X5 slides that a butter-fingered projectionist dropped from a scaffold.

If we needed something – anything – the only fast way to get it was to use FedEx or one of the other overnight shipping companies. If it was a real panic, we shipped it gate-to-gate – which basically meant that someone from our crew met the plane when it landed.

Flash forward to today. Same show. Same creative. Same venue. Same everything. What’s different is all of the whiz-bang technology we have at our fingertips. But, is the end product – the show itself – any better?  Any more creative? Any more memorable.? I honestly don’t think so.

A script written on a laptop isn’t necessarily any better than one banged out on a Royal typewriter. It’s all about the quality of the writing. A visual or illustration produced in PhotoShop or another computer program might be faster to generate, but is it  better? It still comes down to the skill of the artist.

But here’s the kicker. Most of you will have to take my word for this, but even with all of the cool, high-tech, time-saving technology we have today, I don’t think that getting to a successful production is any easier than it used to be, either. Faster, maybe. But not easier.

Creativity … innovation … breakthrough thinking … solid writing … flawless execution – these things can be facilitated by technology, but they’re not driven by it.

Does that mean I want to go back to the “old days?” Hardly. But, as a writer, there’s one thing about the way things used to be that I do sometimes miss: recognizing that what I just wrote was pure crap and being able to enjoy the emotional cleansing of ripping the page out of the typewriter, crumpling it into a ball and throwing it as hard as I could across the room.

Until next time …