Hail Mary Newsletters
The only newsletter with a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes and a cocktail to match.
In 1975, an ad copywriter named Gary Dahl was drinking with friends at a bar in Los Gatos, California.
They were complaining about their pets.
Dahl said he had a better idea.
A rock.
No feeding. No walking. No vet bills. No grief when it dies.
Just a smooth grey pebble from a Mexican beach, a cardboard box with air holes, and a 32-page training manual.
The manual was the whole joke.
He sold 1.5 million of them in six months. Became a millionaire. Opened a bar.
The last time a rock captured America like this, it cost $3.95 and came in a box.
Project Hail Mary is the pet rock of movies
Okay this headline is paying the biggest movie in the “universe” a huge disservice.
But this is what happens when you’ve watched way too much college basketball and you don’t know what is up or down anymore.
This pet rock cost $200 million.
And it opened to $80.5 million — the biggest debut for an original, non-franchise film since Oppenheimer.
There’s a reason this playbook worked so well in 1975.
In the wake of Vietnam, Watergate and a general sense that nothing was good made the absurdity of the pet rock just what we needed just like following 48 basketball games over 4 days. It’s exhausting.
It’s also what happens when you read too many headlines like, “An AI-powered TikTok account behind Fruit Love Island series is already the fastest-growing ever, gaining 3M+ followers in 9 days since launching on March 13th.”
Or that we have to do an investigative report to understand that the Chloe in Chloe vs. History with millions of followers is in fact someone that looks like Moby.
Or the kind of content that is absolutely cooking people of a certain age. As one commentator said, “running through the Boomers like nothing I’ve ever seen.” But how can you not help this charming young lady who makes shell purses?
People are screaming for safe content. In the efforts to diversify my metaphors. I’m dropping one of my favourite The American President lines about the average voter - similar to the slop watching boomer.
It’s like this post I saw this week talking about the aesthetic known as Global Village Coffee House. Take a look at. If you were there in the 1990s, you’ve soaked in those vibes. Global Village Coffee House was a reaction to 80s luxury and excess. It’s cozy nostalgia.
The same reason why everyone and their least favourite brands are doing the “What was it like in the 90’s” montages to the Goo Goo Dolls.
Warm amber everywhere, folk art from three continents, hand-painted signs that somehow made you feel like you’d traveled without ever leaving the suburban strip mall.
Every surface had something to say. None of it matched. All of it seemed to work.
They could never open this today. Too much going on. Too many fonts. A brand consultant would walk in and have a breakdown before they hit the cash.
Back to the movie. Ryan Gosling plays a science teacher who wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there.
His only company? A faceless, voiceless, crab-like alien made of rock.
Somehow the most lovable character in a movie since Groot?
They could’ve done the rock creature (Rocky) with CGI. Every studio note on every movie like this points toward CGI.
Cheaper. Easier. No craft services for the damn puppet masters.
Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller said no.
They brought in Neal Scanlan, the creature designer behind the best practical work in modern Star Wars. He built Rocky. Then they found James Ortiz, a New York theatre puppeteer who’d spent years bringing dinosaurs to life on Broadway.
Scanlan sat down with Ortiz and said: “I’m going to treat this like you’re Frank Oz, and my job is to build Yoda for you.”
Ortiz was on set in London for six months. Every single scene.
Sets were built four or five feet off the soundstage floor so the crew could cut holes beneath them. Five puppeteers moving as one creature. Gosling acting against something he could actually see and react to.
“It would’ve been much easier to put a tennis ball there and figure it out later in CGI,” Gosling said.
Narrator voice: They didn’t put a tennis ball there.
And you can feel it. You can feel it even if you can’t name it. Rocky feels alive because Rocky was alive, inches from Gosling’s face, operated by a guy who’d made mammoths walk on Broadway.
Audiences, and me in a March Madness haze, felt it. I had a big stupid smile on my face for two and a half hours. $80.5 million opening weekend. 95% on Rotten Tomatoes.
There’s an ad industry argument buried in this newsletter somewhere.
There it is. We’re in an exhausting moment. So exhausting i’ve AI’d my own face into a Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme.
That’s how serious it is. I think it makes my head look gigantic.
Where was I? Everything is dark and morally complicated. War. AI. Tariffs. The cancellation of the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and The Bachelorette crossover. The Rock with hair in the new live action Moana movie.
Every brand wants to subvert your expectations. Every campaign wants to be ironic or provocative or self-aware. They want to put little sweaters on mayonnaise jars. No, wait, really they did that.
Project Hail Mary is none of those things.Although Ryan Gosling is getting rave review for wearing an iconic Cowichan-style Curling Sweater with birds on it.
A man and a rock figure out how to trust each other across a language barrier, an atmospheric barrier and the basic incompatibility of their two species. Then they save the universe.
And yet Canada and America can’t make a trade deal, and the Strait of Hormuz is still blocked.
Nobody dies for shock value. The ending earns every tear because the movie took the long road to get there.
The audience didn’t just like it. They needed it. Badly
That’s the brief most brands are ignoring now. Not how do we surprise people. Or even delight people. Not how we get our CEO to eat our “product.” Not how do we challenge the category. Not how do we put a little sweater on my condiment stunts.
Just: how do we give people something to really feel good about.
The brands getting this right aren’t the ones being clever. There are not many of those anyway.
Drink Cart Approved Agency Discussion Topics™:
It’s back. Here’s your links too good not share over a cocktail.
The power of Chuck Norris branding is real. And it will punch you in the face.
They are giving away awards to AI “personalities” is probably the saddest thing I’ve read all week.
OpenAI might be the worst run company. News last night that they are shutting down Sora despite a massive $1 billion Disney deal. Which is also dead. That was a wild six months. This just 24 hours after Claude dropped more features.
Fashion cracks me up. They are picking now to ditch quiet luxury?
If Scottie Pippen is telling you “AGI isn’t scary” at the same time as he’s talking to a sentient can of Mr. Pibb in an ad, I think someone’s cheese has slipped off their cracker.
Drink Cart Cocktail: The Gypsy Queen
This story goes back nearly a hundred years to 1938. The Russian Tea Room, still standing on 57th Street, still serving Beef Stroganoff, still one of the more ridiculous dining experiences money can buy in Manhattan.
Back then it was a gathering place for the Russian Imperial Ballet who had fled to New York after the Revolution and opened the place in 1927. They were trying to introduce America to vodka. They printed a cocktail pamphlet. In it was the Gypsy Queen.
Drinks historian David Wondrich later dug it up and confirmed it as one of the first American vodka cocktails on record. The timing was real bad. WWII started the following year and the whole experiment more or less got shelved. The Gypsy Queen quietly disappeared for decades.
Which is a damn shame. Because it’s actually a pretty great drink.
Vodka, Bénédictine and orange bitters. Stirred. Served up. Lemon twist.
Bénédictine is a French herbal liqueur made from 27 plants and spices. Recipe unchanged since 1510. It tastes like honey and Christmas and something your grandfather kept in a locked cabinet.
The vodka doesn’t do much here except step back and let Bénédictine run the show. Which, as a philosophy, feels right for this issue.
Get out of the way of the thing that’s actually good.
The Gypsy Queen
2 oz vodka
½ oz Bénédictine
2 dashes orange bitters
Lemon twist
Stir with ice until cold. Strain into a chilled coupe. Express the lemon peel and drop it in. It’s like having a herbal martini in the best way possible.