Back in mid-June, while most viewers were hooked on the awfulness of Kurt Bills' short film, Bluestem looked to the director''s lineage and noticed a link to an earlier, though far more progressive, Minnesota U.S. Senate candidate.
In Kurt Bills and a talking donkey too: the Wellstonian roots of PoliDemic's dramatic entry, we reported:
The Book of Proverbs tells us that fools dwell in the house of mirth, but the roots of Kurt Bills' movie trailer that drew so much attention yesterday are anchored in Bill Hillsman's North Woods Advertising, where director Vaughn Juares once toiled as creative director.
North Woods Advertising's off-beat ads worked for Paul Wellstone in 1990, Jesse Ventura in 1998 and Alan Grayson in 2008. . . .
Juares last appears as a spokester for Hillsman in Nexis in a Pioneer Press article about "The Second Fraud: a Ponzipalooza," a documentary about the Petters case. And then there's his sci-fi cloning horror flick, "I'm not Jesus, Mommy." Before there was PoliDemic, there was FilmDemic.
There's a lot of Wellstonian recycling in the Bill's campaign. Talking another page from the Wellstone playbook, Bills has painted a schoolbus--but since one flagbus is so 1990, Bills has three buses.
The Wellstonian element missing from Bills' adapatations? Humor. This stuff is painfully earnest.
That same flaw persists in the copy of one famous Wellstone ad released just today. The Associated Press reports in GOP's Bills likens underdog Minn. bid to Wellstone:
The Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Minnesota is trying to summon a little underdog magic by drawing a parallel to Democratic icon Paul Wellstone.
The Kurt Bills campaign released an online ad Monday that's nearly identical to the 1990 ad entitled "Fast Paced Paul." The offbeat ad introduced the little-known college professor to Minnesota voters, and he proceeded to upset incumbent Republican Rudy Boschwitz that year.
in 1990, this stuff was fresh. Now it's just Kurt Bills.
Did the same vendor work on this from Bills?
Photo: Kurt Bills, the Mini-Paul Wellstone? Not quite.
Related posts: Kurt Bills and a talking donkey too: the Wellstonian roots of PoliDemic's dramatic entry
Earned media for the MNGOP US Senate primary: failed reality tv pilot vs. Twilight Zone trailer
The Wellstone "fast-paced" ad wasn't that great, but the Bills ad is painful—and twice as long.
Posted by: Charlie Quimby | Jul 30, 2012 at 07:25 PM