Street-smart Chilli Palmer goes to Hollywood
Anti insider selling
Yesterday I waffled away about my subscription-free mastermind.
It’s choca-bloc full of weirdos, contrarians, outcasts and misfits. Not even one of them is bbq-friendly-normal. But they’ve all come from beyond the touchline to tear up the game. And win.
Just like Chilli Palmer.
Ernesto “Chilli” Palmer was a Brooklyn born low level mafia guy from New York. But he’d made the move down to the sun of Miami. Chilli’s main gig was loansharking and making sure the suckers paid on time.
But he also loved movies.
Chilli tracks a low-life that bailed before paying, and he finds himself in Hollywood. So he decides to go into the movie business.
With no experience.
However, Chilli’s got chops from the street. He can run rings around a lotta the insiders that have been based in tinsel town for years.
Chilli’s a good analogous character to how John Carlton frames himself and likeminded marketers and copywriters.
They don’t have fancy degrees earned from a lecturer that’s never sold. No New York agency was ever gonna peruse their CV. They’re not respectable to the take-themselves-too-seriously corporate and boring “marketers” drowning the world in drivel and slop.
Instead, these punks were street-smart and a little rock and roll.
They had fun and kicked ass.
As in they kicked the asses of the too-goody-two-shoes degree holders tryna sling product by boring their prospects to sleep.
And Carlton and the gang loved doing it.
Just like Chilli Palmer in Elmore Leonard’s novel Get Shorty.
I’m about forty pages from the end and goddamn it’s fun reading. Good old Elmore’s got voice and tone.
Funnily…
Elmore himself had been an agency copywriter. But he swears he never learnt a single thing there about writing. It was seven dragged-out years before he made his escape.
I reckon Elmore would have made a great copywriter in the John Carlton style if he had wanted. But because he didn’t we get about 50 fun novels to read.
A fair trade off imo.
And this is kind of how I see myself. From the outside of the marketing world. More Carlton than Madison Avenue.
No point in me tryna compete with kids fresh outta uni. You know, doing creative strategy or whatever the hell they’ve decided to call copywriting now.
Instead I’m from the frowned upon world of recruiting where I had to look people in the eyes and try to get ‘em to change jobs.
Plus, I had a bit of a hedonistic rock and roll life myself.
Been to the best and wildest clubs and parties there is. Lived in Ireland, London, Sydney, Amsterdam, Lisbon and now Marseille.
Got a few cuts and bruises to show for it too.
I even had to give up the booze. Not like one of those online optimising guru podcast types. But because I had to.
And I’m not interested in working for the agencies or the corporates either. I hate artificial-polite HR small talk.
I’m here to have fun and spice things up a little. Like Chilli.