Sorry about the delay, but when I got home I had two major work deadlines I was running late for plus twenty plays to read. It's been over a week and I haven't unpacked from the trip yet.
Now, the part you've been waiting for…
Saturday night before the Superbowl we were treated to a swank dinner where we met several more Doritos marketing and advertising bigwigs. It was in part to honor us, and in part to honor the team that put together the marketing strategy and the Crash event. Everybody was distributed into five large tables, each marked for one of the commercial finalists.
Check this spread out…
So last night Jonathan and I went to see Chronicle. The next morning the other guys showed up and I figured I'd hear about all the madness we missed out on. They said they spent the whole night looking for a place to eat because everything was overflowing, and wished they'd gone to the movie. When Frito-Lay isn't giving us something to do we have no idea what to do with ourselves.
Downtown Indy has been transformed into Superbowl Village. There's an NFL Experience expo, concerts, an astroturf field down an entire street, giant decals over everything, skyways connecting all the major buildings, and a zipline where people have been waiting for hours to swoosh down over the heads of thousands of crammed drunks and families. From our hotel we can not only see the stadium, but the highways where cars inch hopelessly slowly into downtown. The average wait for a taxi was an hour.
The city at night…
During yesterday's TV interviews, one of the TV stations asked two of the finalists (who shall remain nameless) what their favorite Lonely Island song was. The first guy said "Iran From You"—and the second guy nonchalantly said "Jizz in My Pants." Everyone in the green room suddenly started chattering, "Did he just say Jizz in My Pants on live TV?" I bolted into the control room and found out (surely to the great relief of the entire Frito-Lay organization) it was being taped for later editing.
After the exhausting Media Day, where each finalist did somewhere around 15 satellite interviews with stations around the country, we went to a swank bistro for lunch and had the world's best sliders followed by heaping plates of chicken, short rib, and dessert platters. I met some of the representatives from Goodby & Silverstein, the giant ad agency that does Frito-Lay's advertising and helps run this contest, and they seemed just as excited about the contest as everyone else, though they're more laid-back and cool like LA movie producers. Then back to the hotel for naptime.
Then on to…
We were on the way to the airport and a semi truck crashed in front of us, about a football field's length from the exit to the airport. We almost missed Crash the Superbowl because of a crash. Fortunately, nobody was injured (I checked) and in spite of blocking all the travel lanes with his sideways trailer, the driver kindly left a shoulder open for us to squeeze by.
We got to Indy and found that everything everywhere is branded Superbowl XLVI. It's on the floors, the walls, in every airport store, plastered 80 feet high on gigantic hotel decals. Even the pilot was talking about it. He apparently didn't know anything about sports, though; on the way in he came over the PA and welcomed everyone to Indy, "especially all you basketball fans."
And then…
Somebody asked me whether I'd be chronicling my experiences heading to the Superbowl, and the answer is: poorly. I haven't been keeping up with my FilmTraveler blog because I have a backlog of entries about Charles Darwin that I felt honor-bound to post before switching to anything frivolous. It's no wonder honor is so rare; it's bloody inconvenient.
So I'll be resurrecting it a teeny bit in order to post some updates whenever Facebook status updates prove too restrictive. The trouble with Facebook is that it's given a lot of talented people the illusion that by posting an occasional thought they're fulfilling their gifts as writers. Can you imagine if Christopher Nolan had written a status update instead of Inception?
I'm going to assume anyone reading this already knows my brother and I made a Doritos Crash the Superbowl commercial and it got picked as a finalist. So I'll skip to the details. I'm on my way to Indianapolis in three hours to jump on the Superbowl hype-train, and we'll be spending the game in the Frito-Lay skybox with the other finalists, corporate and creative bigwigs, and best of all, Andy Samberg and The Lonely Island (the creators of the famous Saturday Night Live digital shorts). There are several official events and social events planned, and other than an itinerary I don't know what's going to happen or how.
So, now…
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