12: The Privilege of Being Bruce Campbell
On July 19, 2007, the television network AMC debuted the show Mad Men. A meticulously researched and designed period piece about advertising executives in the 1960s, over the course of seven seasons it followed the life and career of Don Draper, a blandly handsome and charming rich white man who does whatever the hell he wants without much in the way of consequence, and as the 1960s progresses in the show, he and society as a whole begin to wake up to the fact that society has overvalued blandly handsome charming rich white men like him, and how maybe there should be consequences for their misdeeds. Its sharp writing and interesting characters made it a worthwhile watch for those seven years, but what hooked viewers at the outset was the incredible difference in culture between the American workplace of 2007 and that of the show’s American workplace of 1960. Almost every bit of commentary on the show’s pilot focussed on the constant drinking and smoking taking place inside the Sterling Cooper offices. Men suddenly took an interest in wearing suits. More than anything though, the show made the privileged life of Don Draper look incredibly fun. Don Draper is a morally bad person, but his life is effectively one long party broken up by intermittent presentations where he talks eloquently about the nature of desire and how that can sell film projectors.
Over the course of several flashbacks during the run of Mad Men, we learn how the young Korean War soldier Dick Whitman stumbles into lucky break after lucky break that sees him stumble first into the identity of deceased Lieutenant Don Draper and subsequently into a job at an ad agency. Each of these breaks however is more about how he looks and carries himself than about any kind demonstration of mastery or skill. With his strong jaw and easy charm, anyone who meets Draper simply assumes “oh, you clearly belong here. Right this way sir”.
We do not know anything about the personal or professional history behind the Manhattan Argus reporter Smitty, but I bet it’s a lot like Don Draper’s in that it’s more about charm and having a correct look than it is about actual skill. There is no textual evidence for this, we know nothing of Smitty’s backstory, but I am willing to bet this due to the fact that Smitty is played by Bruce Campbell. Aside from playing leads in Hudsucker co-writer Sam Raimi’s film debut The Evil Dead (1981), its subsequent sequels, and the bizarro one-season tv shows The Adventures Of Brisco County Jr and Jack Of All Trades, Campbell is known as a striking character actor. He’s one of the best “oh who is that guy? I know that guy!” actors in the business, playing bit parts in film and television, such as the Surgeon General of Los Angeles in John Carpenter’s Escape from LA (1996), and Autolycus the King of Thieves in sister shows Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess. He was the wrestling announcer who christened a newly spiderbit Peter Parker as “Spider-Man” in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2001), and he portrayed Ronald Regan delivering a stump speech on his 1980 campaign in the FX TV reboot of Fargo.
Character actors like Campbell are mostly known for their types. When you need an avuncular type, you hire Stephen Tobolowsky, when you need an Oxford Don you hire Tom Wilkinson, and when you need someone suitably smarmy, you hire Bruce Campbell. Campbell has a strong jaw, lucious black (now a little salt and pepper) hair, and a confident bearing. He’s good looking, but in a way that suggests a caricature of a good looking man. His smile is a little too ironic and his gaze a bit too squinty to ever play the romantic lead, but he’s perfect as the attractive-yet-emotionally-distant current boyfriend that the leading lady will dump by the end of the film. A perfect example of the Bruce Campbell type is one of his newer ones, as Gary “Captain” Green in the artsy quasi comedy series Lodge 49 (spoilers for the first season of Lodge 49 to follow in the remainder of this paragraph). “Captain” is a kind of white whale for plumbing supply salesman Ernie, knowing his name is tied to dozens of new developments in the Long Beach, California area, knowing that they have yet to commit to a plumbing supplier, but also knowing that the new buildings will need dozens of toilets and sinks and miles of pipes, Ernie desperately seeks him and the associated huge commission out. It turns out however that Captain is a developer of Potemkin Villages. He seeks out land that is impossible to build on for environmental factors and sells the rights to build on it promising huge returns knowing that no construction will ever happen (and thus none of his investment money will be spent). His easy charm and ability to smile and shake hands and confidently sell a lie is peak Bruce Campbell.
Campbell in Lodge 49, with the world beating a path to his kiddy pool.
We know little about Smitty, Campbell’s character in The Hudsucker Proxy, but what we do know backs up the idea that he is little but an easy smile and blithe charm backed up by little substance. He is a reporter for the Manhattan Argus, but we never see him writing or working on anything. What we do see him doing is wasting time palling around with his buddy Amy, using her unexpected $10 ($90 in today’s buying power) windfall to scam his way into a free highball with her. We see him sitting in on a meeting with Amy that he has no business being in, using his time to sketch a picture of his boss with his butt in a satchel and contributing nothing of value.
Lastly we see him filing a hit piece on Norville (one that potentially was written primarily by Sidney Mussburger), claiming he had stolen his idea for the Hula Hoop from Buzz the elevator operator, a story he has apparently done none of his due diligence on by not contacting Norville or apparently even Buzz in flagrant disregard of journalism best practices. And yet by the end of the film, he remains on the Argus’s payroll, despite apparently being a terrible journalist. Once again his easy smile and charm filling in for actual substance. How can you fire a guy named Smitty?
In Bruce Campbell’s book If Chins Could Kill, he remarks on his time working on Hudsucker, mentioning how amazed he was with Jennifer Jason Leigh’s professionalism on the set. An unsettling aspect of the acting profession is that one can be paid a remarkable amount of money for showing up and saying words into a camera, and oftentimes these very people will not know the words they are supposed to be saying into the camera until just before they need to say them. Campbell mentions specifically the high degree of professionalism Jennifer Jason Leigh displayed in not only knowing her many many lines before her scenes but in fact knowing them by heart before arriving on the set, making him realize in his still-young acting career that he had a long way to go before becoming a great actor (he also mentions that she was the nicest person on set, and is his go-to answer when people ask him who his favorite actor to work with is)*. Likewise in the film, Amy files two well researched and fully factual stories about Hudsucker Industries to Smitty’s one hack job story, has won one Pulitzer to Smitty’s zero, helps in writing the Argus’s crossword puzzle, and does all this while also maintaining a full time second job as Norville’s secretary to keep her Hudsucker cover, and still after all this, the Argus’s Chief defers to Smitty the one time he and Amy disagree on the nature of a Hudsucker story. Amy works circles around him and yet he gets the respect. We know little about Smitty behind his few minutes of screen time, but Bruce Campbell’s smarmy smile speaks volumes about him.
*The book also contains a delightful anecdote about how on the Hudsucker set his hat was nearly stolen by a fox. It is a charming book and provides many an insight into low budget indie filmmaking and the reality of being a non-movie-star working character actor and is very worth a read.
Advanced Reading:
There is a fun fact about Campbell and his connection to the Coens that did not fit anywhere in this essay but I would be remiss to not remark upon. A very early acting gig for Campbell was as teacher Alan Stewart in a locally produced Detroit soap opera named “Generations”. The show was corny but put a decent amount of pocket change in Campbell’s pockets and let him have regular work to hone his acting chops. This would have been the end of it and been a minor footnote to his career but for the fact that after spending time in the editing bay with Sam Raimi while working on The Evil Dead (1981), Joel Coen took an interest in Campbell’s career and watched a few episodes of Generations, finding the overwrought soap opera acting hilarious, and as a result snuck footage of the show into the film Fargo (1996) as isolated and agitated hitmen Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) try and fail to get reception on their tiny TV in their cold Brainerd cabin, Generations is the show they’re trying to watch, which is how Campbell has a credit in Fargo without having shown up for a single day of filming. In addition, in their 2003 completely acceptable romantic comedy Intolerable Cruelty, Campbell is in a scene in which he plays an overacting screen partner to Billy Bob Thornton’s character Howard P Doyle as the audience realizes that Howard P Doyle is an actor, not an oil baron. The fact that Campbell’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it screen presence is as an overacting actor and that his character’s name is “Soap Opera Actor” can only be a masterful act of casting trolling by Joel Coen, in a nod to how hilarious he found Campbell’s 80s local Detroit acting job to be.