Reviews & Interviews

THE IGNORANCE at The Etcetera Theatre.
Review in the Stage by Derek Smith

Such a menacing sceanrio requires convincing nastiness, of course, and as Malcolm, Frank Scantori certainly has that, though he lunges at his first victim with all the grace of a dart player before being shot by the seemingly demure, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth Belinda.

ADECCO Articles

http://www.biggerworld.com/news/adecco_makers.htm

Article from the “Haagsche Courant” 27-04-2001
Fat man in Leidschendam.
He gained fame through a tv-commercial in which he shed his clothes in front of a female job applicant. Actor Frank Scantori repeated this amazing strip act yesterday afternoon in Leidschendam. At the opening of the new Adecco shop in the shopping centre Leidsenhage, Scantori lost his clothes again and gave everybody a good view of his well proportioned body.

Andrew Osborn in Brussels Wednesday February 7, 2001 The Guardian
Full monty: naked Brit shocks Belgium

Rarely have so many been offended by the spectacle of an Englishman without any clothes as in Belgium, where the generously proportioned naked torso of an unknown London comedian have caused moral outrage.

Frank Scantori, the comedian in question, may be unknown in Britain but in Belgium he has become a cause célèbre by appearing naked in a television ad campaign which has scandalised the nation.
Mr Scantori plays the part of an overweight office boss doing his best to recruit a young girl to his firm. His methods, however, are unconventional.

His jokey, Full-Monty-style striptease culminates in him clambering naked on to his desk and proffering the startled youngster a contract with which he covers his groin. The ad is for Adecco, one of the world's biggest recruitment agencies, and the message it tries to convey is that young people should not rush to accept the first job they are offered without first trying out a variety of jobs by signing up with the agency.

With its deliberately provocative slogan, Don't let yourself be seduced too quickly, it strikes a special chord in Belgium, where employers are offering all kinds of incentives to attract young graduates because of a national labour shortage.
Intended to amuse rather than offend, the ad has drawn a storm of protest from viewers. It has also triggered a court case and been banned by the country's advertising standards agency.
Several broadcasters have refused to show it.

The problem, they argue, is that it could encourage sexual harassment in the work place, and that is in bad taste.
Duval Guillaume, the advertising agency which came up with the idea, specialises in provocative campaigns - ads in the same series have featured employers as prostitutes soliciting graduates from shop windows and a gaggle of bosses offering a contract to a newborn baby.

Jens Mortier, the striptease ad's creator, is unrepentant. "It's true that it's provocative, but we're not shocking people just for the sake of it," he said. "If you want to reach people, you have to do something that they notice.""There is some nudity here, but it's so over the top that it's clearly a parody. If we had used a beautiful woman doing a striptease nobody would have complained. It's just that we reversed the roles." The ad ended its run last month, but not before millions of people in Belgium and the Netherlands had seen it. The fuss it is creating shows no signs of dying down either. RTBF, Belgium's equivalent of the BBC, had to be forced to show it after losing an acrimonious court case with Adecco. In ultra-liberal Holland, on the other hand, the ad has raised few eyebrows and has even been nominated as one of the best ads of the year.

BBC NEWS
Wednesday, 7 February, 2001, 17:10 GMT
BELGIANS FUME OVER STRIPTEASE AD

An advert for an employment agency featuring an overweight boss stripping off to try to recruit a young girl has been banned in Belgium. The advertising standards authority in Brussels took action after receiving 200 complaints saying it was "vulgar" and incited sexual harassment. But the firm and the advert's design agency Duval Guillaume said the TV and print commercials were meant to amuse and warn young people not to accept the first job on offer.

The advert features British actor Frank Scantori stripping naked and clambering onto the desk. He then offers the young woman job-seeker a contract, which he uses to cover his groin. "There's a real war for talent going on, employers go further and further to hire new talent," Jens Mortier, creative director of Duval Guillaume, told BBC News Online. "But Adecco says live a little before you sign up and get to know the market and yourself first.
"Do not get seduced by all the things employers are offering - the campaign is a parody of this situation."

Award
Mr Scantori - who weighs in at 18.5 st at a height of 5ft7in - told BBC News Online he thought the fuss was "ridiculous". "To say it incites sexual harrassment is ridiculous as I am the one who is being seen as a sexual object," he said. "I wonder if it would have caused the same fuss if I had been some sort of Adonis figure?" Adecco is one of the world's largest recruitment agencies. Its chief executive in the UK, Richard Martin, explained the reasoning behind the commercial.

"Good advertising is all about impact and these ads use dramatic and exaggerated images to convey a serious message," he said. But Jean Claude Dastot of the advertising standards authority in Brussels said those who had complained about the ad had expressed shock at its indecency. Mr Dastot added that nudity was not generally frowned upon in advertising in Belgium but that it "depended on the product". As well as the ban, the advert has triggered a court case. Adecco successfully sued RTBF - Belgium's public service network - when it refused to show the ad. But not everyone finds Mr Scantori's strip act offensive. In Holland, the public love it and have nominated it for the best advert of the year award. "The mixed reaction of the Dutch and the Belgians just goes to show that sometimes you simply can't export ad campaigns across national and cultural borders and hope they will get the same reaction," said Mr Martin. "But would we run the campaign in the UK? No - we would do something of our own," he added.

BELGIAN MAGAZINE INTERVIEW
with Andreas Hasle, the producer, Bart Van den Bempt, the director, and Jens Mortier, the creative director from Duval Guillaume.

Q: When the script of this clip was written, was it clear in your mind that the character of the "boss" was going to be a fat man, and why ?

Andreas: Yes, we were after an easily recognisable stereotypical caricature of a company boss. In pre-production
we were always thinking about doing two versions though, the other being with a less fat man.

Q: How did you select the actor, was there a casting and on which criteria was the casting made?

Andreas: We had a big casting session in London, with about 30 actors. The criteria were size and willingness
to do 'the Full Monty'.

Bart VdB: I explicitly asked for men between 45 and 65 years old without an athletic body who didn't feel embarrassed about their own body.

Q: Why did your choice finally end on Frank Scantori ?

Andreas: As many people know, stripping is actually a very difficult art form and, I suppose, not being a typical sex-symbol may inhibit people as well.

Jens: When we saw the casting it was always clear that Frank was way ahead of anyone else. Actually he was so good that he convinced both us and the client that we didn't have to shoot the alternative version. We have heard a rumour that Frank may have tried the stripping thing once or twice before, but you will have to check with himself...

Bart VdB: Frank was the actor who did the nicest choreography and who had the most developed sense of rhythm.
In spite of his body size he was very supple and pliant. He had a nice personality and was a good actor, that was why he was my first choice.

Q: Do you think that a fat hairy man can also be beautiful and sexy in some people's eyes ? Did you imagine that before doing the clip ?

Andreas: I am sure it can and I don't think Frank could have done it so well had he not felt sexy himself. For us the
spot was never really about sex though, but a symbol on how far employers are willing to go to secure the signature of that wanted employee.

Bart VdB: A very superfluous question. I don't bother to answer it. As someone said very long time ago : "De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum.".

Q: What was the main goal in making a fat hairy man strip, was it to catch the attention of the viewer, shock the viewer, disgust the viewer ? What was the first idea behind it ?

Jens: The idea behind it is to guide young talent through a booming market. We make a parody of the fact that
employers sometimes exaggerate to seduce young people to work with them. And we warn young people not to get seduced or sign to soon. The striptease is the third commercial we made in this concept.

Bart VdB: Not really a question for the director, but I do think it is an idea that nicely thwarts characters and roles. If
it would have been a beautiful slim lady dancing on the table no one would have minded. A feminist action- group in Antwerp considers the commercial as emancipatory in an provocative way.

Q: Did you expect in any way the reaction of the RTBF and the press, reflecting the majority of the people who found the commercial rude and/or obscene?

Bart VdB: No, considering the horrendous and soporific trash all television-stations are broadcasting on a daily basis the reaction is quite overacted. It seems like everyone is only watching the commercial breaks nowadays. And it
also seems as if people are so used to see "Mr. and Mss. Young, Beautiful, Successful and Plastic" in these commercial breaks that their world-view capsizes as soon as a fat man takes of his shirt and shows his belly.

Jens: If you can't see the humour in the commercial, boy have you got a problem.

Q: Were you glad at that reaction, or disappointed by it ?

Bart VdB: I do not experience such strong emotions on such trivial matters, alas! Personally, I think the whole
controversy indicates how bored and out-of-touch people in the West are towards the reality they are living in. Maybe something really bewildering should happen to them, it might help them to bring things back into perspective.

Jens: When we produce a campaign, we want people to notice it. But not by any means. The message should always
be relevant. But it's good that all these discussions are going on. Especially since the public really loves the commercial.

Q: Do you think that the commercial managed to make its point, to be efficient, despite the "fuss" and the reaction
of the audience, and don't you think that this "drama" caused by it, might have in fact ruin the promotional effect wanted by Adecco ?

Bart VdB: The last time I saw Mr.Adecco on television during a talk show discussing "the fat man commercial", he
didn't seem to be too unhappy with all the free attention his company was getting from all the media.

Jens: We got so much attention & free publicity for the right reasons, that this was a good thing.

Q: Now, this whole affair is making waves even in countries where the commercial wasn't even shown in the first place. What do you think of it?

Bart VdB: Not so many years ago thousands of people were willing to kill some author who allegedly had offended their religion by writing a story. Probably not a single one of them had ever read a mere sentence of the book, but
that didn't seem to be important to them. They saw a unique opportunity to make noise.

Last question :
Q: Did your opinion about fat people, their looks, change in any way since you made this clip ?

Bart VdB: Apparently, large people stir up a lot of emotions. It looks like they are the new dissidents in the slick universe of the commercial breaks. I would say : "Keep up the good work! And god knows, maybe in two hundred years your dimensions will again be the standard and ideal! Just give mankind time to evolve.".