Craig McNamara writes

Santa faces some uncomfortable truths when he’s subjected to the harsh scrutiny of a focus group.   Since I’d had early success getting  Red-Nosed Drunk  produced in 2024, I decided to try adapting another holiday essay I’d written years ago, this one about Santa Claus getting an image makeover. (You can read the original essay here .)   Because there was no actual narrative in the one-page essay, I created a meeting between St. Nick and two marketing professionals.    Admittedly, the premise made for a pretty static play. Still, I thought it could work in ten minutes or less. The marketers presenting research that undermined all the tropes of Santa, and his reactions to their bizarre recommendations, seemed surprising, absurd, and funny.    One big problem, though: My play, like the essay that inspired it, turned on a pop culture reference that was nearly 50 years old (a popular character from the 1970s-era sitcom,  Happy Days ).  ...

After a performance of my play,  Wanted Man  – wherein a woman comes up with a surprising way to meet somebody after she witnesses a bank robbery – the lead actress mentioned to me that she felt like the story was from another time, noting the absence of cell phones in the story.   A perceptive comment – because  Wanted Man  is indeed a remnant of a previous era. It was adapted from an unsold screenplay that I wrote in the mid 1990s.  The screenplay had one standout scene that drove most of the action that follows. I just had to figure out how to compress the whole two-hour story into that one scene. Despite this being more of an exercise in salvaging an old idea than a serious playwriting effort, it took me four drafts just to get everything set up right so it all pays off somewhat logically (for a romantic comedy, anyway).  When I finished, before I set it aside and went on to other things, I decided I might as well enter it into at least one play fe...

In a way, this was 35 years in the making.   Back in 1989, a local screenwriters’ group sponsored a public reading of a movie script I had written called  The Last Couple to Prom . It was an ‘80s screwball comedy wannabe, in which the protagonist, Ben, moved next door to his high school crush, Tracy, and spun an escalating series of lies and deceptions in order to get close to her. Instead, he becomes friends with her husband and learns a secret that could end their marriage and give him the chance with Tracy he was hoping for.   At the end of the night, I received a cassette tape recording of the production … which I never revisited for the next three decades.     Back then, I was weirdly averse to outlining, or even just thinking through, script ideas I had. I would just start writing, hoping my momentum would carry me through the next 90 to 110 pages. Spoiler: More than once, it didn’t. This time it did, but it also baked in some storytelling problems th...

Target has been around since 1959, when its first store opened in the Roseville, Minnesota, a suburb just north of St. Paul.  And for much of next four decades, its advertising was practical, safe, and largely forgotten as soon as the ad ended.     But during the mid-90s, things started changing. It began with the chain's very conscious positioning of itself as a “discounter unlike other discounters,” typified by the theme, "Expect more. Pay less." And when Target broke into the East Coast market, opening a store in Menlo Park, New Jersey,  in  1996, they turned to New York agency Kirchenbaum and Bond, who gave them a striking campaign that married household products to fashion, and helped make Target a favorite of fashionistas.   So the stage was set for Minneapolis agency, Peterson Milla Hooks, to make Target's next leap. Dubbed the “ Sign of the Times ” campaign, it turned their red bullseye logo into a design element in all of their advertising, combini...

A casual apology during coffee between friends leads a series of surprising confessions. That's my 10-minute play, The Besting of Friends , inspired by an occurrence in my life.  (Yes, I inadvertently lost a childhood friend's action figure. Yes, he had totally forgotten the incident when I replaced the figure decades later. No, nothing else that follows actually happened.) Over the last two years I've racked up a lot of rejections for plays I've submitted to various short-play festivals. (Part of the process, and a career in advertising has given me lots of experience in having ideas rejected.) So, at best, I was hoping that The Besting of Friends would at least make it into one of the many competitions in which it was entered. I was pleasantly surprised that it was produced  by two different theatre companies in the same month, February 2025.  The Rainy Day Artistic Collective, based in Seattle, included my play in their New Works New Writers 2025 showcase that was s...

So there I was, on the sands of a Florida beach, surrounded by a group of young people in swimwear, all eyes on me as I instructed them in the dance they were about to perform. The dance I was still coming up with barely five minutes earlier. The Shark Dance.   In 1994, I was a writer at an ad agency in Minneapolis, where one of my projects was the launch of that year’s Tigershark personal watercraft models made by Arctic Cat. Along with writing the ads and brochure, I would be going down to Florida to help supervise the film shoot of people riding Tigersharks in the gulf.    That included a riff on  Jaws , where beachgoers are panicked by a kid yelling “Shark!” as he spots a guy on a Tigershark. And later, the four Tigershark models zooming left to right across the screen, followed by a large shark fin we had made that was pulled through the water on a submerged rig. The fin was convincing enough that two riders unconnected to our shoot darted over and started yelli...

Last fall, I posted here about having a two-minute (yes, two-minute) play,  Thinking of Elephants , produced by the Minnesota Shorts Festival.    It was a simple idea for what was essentially a quick skit. Taking place in a laundromat, one person’s discomfort at having the “underthings” in her basket seen by a coworker ends in a kind of “mutually assured destruction” scenario; she demands a peek at his own “unmentionables.”   But even for that simple scenario, I wrote too much dialogue and had to throw out many lines to keep it to about two minutes.   But after seeing the two-minute production, I wondered if the idea couldn’t sustain the 10-minute length that most short-play competitions request. The key wasn’t just to add back in my excised dialogue, but to find an emotional core to the story that would make it about more than just embarrassment. Pondering this for a while, I realized that the text of the story – feeling exposed before a coworker – could be su...

An oddly intriguing 1960s-era campaign I stumbled across recently.  Let’s handle this part right up front: Obviously, seen through modern eyes, it’s sexist as all get-out – but if you just want to reinforce your disgust at the ads, there are other web sites out there that will indulge you.    Here, I’m more interested in examining these ads as an  ad campaign  – what made them attention-getting, recognizable, and endlessly reproducible, as well as how they channeled the zeitgeist (for better and worse). So who is this Mr. Thomson with the audacity to feature himself as a handsy designer of women’s apparel?    The internet is surprisingly barren when it comes to The Thomson Company , the textile manufacturer behind the ads, the brand, and the exclamation – but digging deep, here’s what I’ve been able to find out and suss out. Though he was the public face (so to speak) of the company, our Mr. Thomson was, in fact, an advertising creation, as fictitious ...

The mid-century, it seems, was the heyday for advertising that traded on the trope of the caveman dragging off a mate by her locks.  As eye-catching, evocative imagery, it was just too potent for ad men to resist -- especially when it could be presented with an anachronistic twist. Thus, we have this 1949 Arrow ad which gives women the upper hand in the mating ritual, informing us that "A man hasn't a chance in an Arrow White Shirt."    "Correct, young-man-about-to-live-in-a-cave!" the copy confirms, "Their handsome, perfect-fitting collars are irresistible." (And don't worry about their mismatched clothing. By the time she's finished dragging him home, that white shirt will be a memory, in dirty, ragged shreds.) In 1956, the scenario again made an appearance, with men and women back in their traditional roles, this time to cast bone-ribbed girdles as something out the stone age ... or something very much like it. "Come out of the bone age...

Not just a vivid poster here. A vivid lesson in the impact of good cropping. I was reading an article on the movie-poster art of Al Kallis for American International Pictures. AIP was, per Wikipedia ,  "the first company to use focus groups, polling American teenagers about what they would like to see and using their responses to determine titles, stars, and story content. … a typical production involved creating a great title, getting an artist such as Albert Kallis who supervised all AIP artwork from 1955 to 1973 to create a dynamic, eye-catching poster, then raising the cash, and finally writing and casting the film.” Kallis had the pedigree. Along with his previous work as a poster layout artist for the influential Saul Bass, Kallis was the son of Maurice Kallis, a famed movie poster artist himself.   Perusing the work of Kallis the younger, I have to assume that his posters were likely more effective at evoking terror and dread than the movies themselves....

When I first came across it, I (wrongly) assumed it was the work of Doyle Dane Bernbach, using a very minimalist layout to catch attention and evoke emotion, sort of like they did with the Polaroid ads in the ‘60s . No logo, just a simple headline, and an intriguing illustration that tells you nothing about the product, only the elation it will inspire in the woman in the your life. What an incredible way to portray a woman leaping into the arms of her man, I thought, showing only what’s necessary to imply the situation, spurring the reader to imagine the embrace, the eyes, the kiss.   Brilliant, I thought. Then I read the headline.    “Wear an Arrow Shirt and you'll simply sweep her off her feet!”   No.   No, I don’t believe this ad, even for a minute.    The only way to sell this scenario is if the emotion implied feels true. Even in 1949, it’s hard to imagine anyone got this excited about a dress shirt. Unless he just got home from the service and t...

Yes, yes, I know, print advertising is dead, especially newspaper advertising – but ads still use space in other mediums, so apply these observations as you will.   Make the height of the ad part of the concept Look how this 1966 Mobil ad really sells the comparison of car collision at 80 mph with the impact of a car dropped from a ten-story building. You could have used a rooftop shot of the car going over; you could have shown a tighter shot of a car falling past a row of windows; you could have shown the crushed car at the base of the building; but Len Sirowitz of Doyle Dane Bernbach used the height of the newspaper space to show the full size of building, inviting us the imagine the long fall of the automobile and what happens when it hits the ground. And making a static photo feel as dramatic as the same demonstration in the accompanying TV commercial .    (The layout is even more brilliant when you consider that the ad was likely encountered by people reading the ne...