From Hovis to Hollywood: how Ridley Scott and Britain's ad men reinvented the blockbuster

In late 1976, David V Picker, the president of motion pictures at Paramount studios, visited a tiny office in Soho’s Great Malborough Street for a meeting that would help change British advertising and Hollywood movies forever. The offices were home to The Alan Parker Film Company, a fledgling commercials production firm. Picker was fascinated that a talent like Parker could have emerged from what was still considered the backwater of London.

What the movie executive found was hive of creative activity. “I was in production on an ad,” says Parker. “David Puttnam was there too and Hugh Hudson was using the office for a costume call. Picker looked around and said ‘This is the busiest I’ve ever seen the British film industry!’”

Soon, the small group of men in that Soho office, joined by contempories including Ridley Scott and Adrian Lyne, would take over the Hollywood film industry. Film was just one of the areas in which British advertising influenced wider culture between the 1960s and 1980s.

At the Festival Of British Advertising in London this month, both Parker and Scott’s contribution to ads and movies will be celebrated with both of them in discussion about their formative years in adland.

Alan Parker had fallen into advertising in the 1960s, working his way up from the post room of ad agency PKL to become the industry’s most celebrated copywriter before transferring his skills to directing. His ads were funny and informal; a rejection of the hard-sell, slogan-heavy commercials that had gone before.  

He cast people with regional accents from outside London; he encouraged ad-libbed dialogue and used colloquial language. His ads for Birdseye frozen burgers featured scruff bag kids from Yorkshire exchanging wisecracks across the dinner table. His classic for Cockburns showed  officers and steering class passengers awkwardly sharing glasses of sherry on a rescue boat after a shipwreck. They were quintessentially British.

Having made a couple of BBC dramas (he won a Bafta for his 1975 TV film The Evacuees) he set his heart on making feature films. But within the movie business there was a stigma attached to ad directors. “I was really the first ad director to try and break into movies and it just wasn’t a recognised career path,” he says. “In this country there was this inherent snobbery about ads. I remember this review of my first film which said: ‘Alan Parker comes from the world of advertising which gives us an easy stick to beat him with.’ That summed up the attitude.”

It was David Puttnam, who had worked with Parker at ad agency Collett Dickenson Pearce, that eventually broke down barriers. Puttnam had begun his working life as an account executive at CDP. By his mid twenties his career was thriving but he decided to quit advertising to pursue a career as a film producer .

“The British film industry was crap,” says Puttnam. “The stuff they were producing was s___ and I knew it. But then I saw The Graduate and I thought to myself for the first time ‘I could do that.’ There was nothing in that film that required budget. It was a makeable film. I knew the talents who I believed could write a film like that and I knew the musicians who could create that kind of score.” He set about cultivating Parker as a potential filmmaker and encouraged him to write his own screenplays.

Parker’s popular Birdseye ads provided his inspiration. “I wanted to write a script that movie executives thought I would be able to direct,” he said. “I’d already made commercials starring kids exchanging funny dialogue so thought up a film along the same lines.”

The result was Bugsy Malone. Parker invested his own cash into making the film and left Puttnam to hustle the film some recognition. It was a role he was ideally suited to. “David would simply refuse to leave a room until he got what he wanted,” explains an ex-advertising colleague. It was this attitude that resulted in Bugsy Malone being entered into the 1976 Cannes Film Festival. “I had to fight tooth and nail to get it entered because it was a kids film,” he says. “But I managed to find a loophole in the rules and force them to show it.”

The film was screened on the final day of that year’s festival. The week had been defined by dark, arty dramas such as Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver. Parker’s depression era musical provided the perfect antidote. By the time the jaded Cannes delegates had finished watching Bugsy Malone, Alan Parker was the hottest directorial talent in town.

“The audience went berserk,” says Puttnam, the film’s producer. “Alan was carried out of the cinema literally shoulder high!” The success was what led David V Picker and other Hollywood execs to flock to London in search of more directing talent.

But not all of Parker’s advertising colleagues were pleased about his rise. “I was sick when I found out that he had got a film,” says Ridley Scott. “I didn’t sleep for a week.” Scott was a graduate of the Royal Academy of Art who had worked as a set designer at the BBC on shows such as Z Cars before moving into advertising for largely financial reason.

“I realised I could make three times my TV day rate in ads so I quit my job at the BBC and went freelance as a director. My dad couldn’t believe it – I’d just bought my first house in East Sheen and had a second son on the way!” Scott and Parker had been rival directors in ad land, but while Parker specialised in humour Scott’s commercials were all about visual style.

“When I started, the industry was still a bit depressed,” he says. “But I could see that it was a light bulb that was about to shine a light on the rest of culture and society… I decided to elevate the medium.” Scott was a film obsessive who worked out a way of applying the elaborate lighting techniques of Orson Wells to commercials for Radion soap powder and Strongbow cider.

His 1970’s campaign for Hovis bread, set on the cobbled streets of 1940’s Northern England, confirmed his reputation as an aesthetic master. “I wrote three screenplays myself before I ever got lucky,” he says. “One of them came close to actually being released. It was with the Bee Gees, whose career was struggling at the time. It was a medieval film starring them but, unfortunately, they refused to actually sing in it. And I had a hunch that people wanted to see the Bee Gees sing, not act. I honestly thought the film thing was never going to happen at one stage.”

Movie execs bombarded Puttnam after the success of Bugsy Malone. “A friend of mine from Paramount Pictures said ‘Have you got anyone else like Parker?’” Puttnam recalls. “I said ‘I think I might have’ and went straight to the phone box. I called Ridley in London and said ‘Get yourself on the first plane over here.’” The following day, Scott was hired to make his first film, The Duelists – a Napoleonic drama with a $1.4 million budget.

For British ad directors, the doors to Hollywood were open. Tony Scott, Ridley’s younger, wilder brother, had been developing his own distinctive visual style with seventies ads for Levis, Brutus jeans and Pepsi Cola. “I cornered the market in sexy, rock n roll stuff,” Tony Scott told me in 2006. “From the start I had a blast. I was paid to film in exotic locations and meet the most beautiful girls I’d ever seen in my life. I couldn’t believe it.”

Tony Scott’s early films, such as The Hunger, Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop II, exemplified what ad directors initially brought to features. Rich with blaring, pop-rock soundtracks, stunning visuals and fast paced editing, his style would define the 1980’s genre of blockbuster popularized by the Hollywood producers who became his patrons: Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. “Jerry [Bruckheimer] was the first person to see the energy and dynamism that ad directors could bring to movies because he was from a commercials background himself,” says Tony Scott.

Hugh Hudson, who had enjoyed success with commercials for Dubbonet and Birdseye Frozen Pies, was 42 by the time he got to shott his first feature film. In 1980, he won an Oscar for Chariots of Fire. Adrian Lyne, the talented but chaotic director of seminal Levis commercials in the seventies, was another Bruckheimer discovery who found huge success with Flashdance and Fatal Attraction. By the mid eighties, British ad directors were dominating the box-office.

They brought technical flair and innovation straight from the sets of commercials. The high budgets available in advertising allowed directors to spend more money per frame on ads than they would on movies. They could afford to experiment with lenses, lights and post production techniques on their commercials – then transfer those techniques to movies.

“I remember making this ad up in Yorkshire when I got a message that Stanley Kubrick had called,” recalls Adrian Lyne. “He’d seen an ad I’d made for milk in which I’d used a particular type of graduated filter. He wanted to know exactly which filter I’d used.”

Rildey Scott’s commercials company, RSA, still thrives on Beak Street Soho today. Scott plays an active role in the firm and still occasionally shoots commercials himself. “As far as I am concerned, they are mini films, not devices for selling,” he says. Parker, meanwhile, fell out of love with the medium.  

“We were considered to be somewhat bubble gum because we’d come from a commercial world and I was sensitive to that,” he says. “Ridley got clobbered too because his work was thought to be so dreadfully slick visually by critics of the time. What they didn’t realise was that what they were looking at was the greatest cinematic visual stylist of his age. I was affected by the criticsim and therefore I didn’t want to do commercials.  Ridley had no such worries.  He used to say “Oh, f___ them. Ask ’em how much money they make!”  

Sam Delaney will be in conversation with Sir Alan Parker, followed by a screening of Bugsy Malone, at Curzon Soho, Sunday March 12 at 6.30pm. Sir Ridley Scott: From Adland To Hollywood, featuring an exclusive interview with Scott on his career, will take place at Curzon Soho on 12th March at 3.30pm followed by a screening of The Duellists. 

Both events are part of the The IPA Festival of British Advertising. See here for further information