Art & Copy: The Film

The San Francisco International Film Festival running now through May 7 features the West Coast premiere of “Art & Copy“, a feature-length documentary celebrating the work and careers of legendary advertisers. Stories about the creation of campaigns including Mary Wells’ colorful Braniff Airlines rebrand, Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein’s “Got Milk?”, and TBWAChiatDay’s Lee Clow’s “1984” commercial and current iPod ads are lovingly told. Doug Pray, who also directed the surf and family story “Surfwise,” doesn’t let many details about the industry’s origins or its current tastemakers escape him, whether in the form of staggering numbers about annual global ad spending or anecdotes about Madison Avenue agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (now referred to as DDB), which first paired copy writers and art directors and encouraged them to collaborate on print messaging.