chuukyuu Among your work so far done, name the two ads that you like best and tell us the reason why.

Elgort With your indulgence, I should like to name three. The Landlord and Funeral Commercials for the Give a Damn Campaign and the Mistakes Commercial for Mayor Lindsay.

I like the Landlord Commercial because it takes a dry statistic-the fact that almost half of all nonwhites are forced to live in substandard or over-crowded housing-and relates it to an experience that everyone of us has had at one time or another. That of going to look for an apartment.

Like all the commercials we did for the New York Urban Coalition, it's honest. It isn't philosophical or ideological. It avoids a lot of phoney theatrics. And that's got to be part of its strength.

My second choice, the Funeral Commercial, is probably the most powerful commercial I have ever done. We did it during the second year of the Give a Damn Campaign. The mood of the city had changed.

People seemed to be trying to forget that the riots in Newark, Detroit and Watts had ever happened. So we responded by pulling out all the stops in a blatant attempt to shock people and remind them that the job is still undone.

Again, it's based on a fact. And while it's not like the Landlord Commercial, it makes its point. Conditions in our ghettos are so bad, a lot of black babies die.

Here is the description for the Hi, Mom! episode of the Junk Filter podcast:

The actor and writer Mike Mekus returns to the show from Brooklyn to discuss Brian De Palma’s third feature, the vicious satire Hi, Mom! (1970). The film features a breakout performance by Robert De Niro as a young man back from Vietnam who is hoping to convert his voyeuristic tendencies into a career as a pornographer with artistic pretensions, but who ultimately winds up playing a cop in a revolutionary theatre troupe’s new underground experimental play, “Be Black, Baby!”

This anarchic comedy serves as a time capsule of late 1960s NYC. De Palma uses it to show off his craft and his enthusiasm for the full potential of cinema—specifically, the possibilities for an American political cinema—demonstrating that Godard was just as much of an influence on his style as Hitchcock.

Mike and I discuss how incredibly prescient De Palma was in Hi, Mom!, as he sends up incels, computer dating, the entire Dimes Square style art scene, and New York’s guilty white liberal community. This is highlighted by the incendiary film-within-a-film, “Be Black, Baby!”, the first great cinema sequence in De Palma’s long career full of them, all of this barely contained within an 87-minute film that possesses a surprising New York Dirtbag Cinema energy still detectable today.

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”Landlord" - the 1969 commercial by the New York Urban Coalition that Hi, Mom!parodies at the very beginning

Trailer for Hi, Mom! (Brian De Palma, 1970)