You know the feeling. When ‘that guy’ from your agency starts holding court on the Teams meeting with the client and simply won’t stop.
It’s an unlikely role that Timothée Chalamet has played beautifully in an 18-minute film promoting the forthcoming Marty Supreme movie.
Released to appear like a leaked Zoom call, it has all the features of an awkward video call, complete with a frighteningly realistic depiction of a virtual marketing team. It shows the film’s agency team and Chalamet himself, who joins the call to share his ideas.
It quickly takes an absurd turn, with Chalamet’s bold vision not fully landing, but the agency backing it all the same. He wants to be on a Wheaties box. He urges the team to remember Barbie‘s marketing ploy: the colour pink. He suggests that Marty Supreme go all in with “hardcore and corroded orange”: paint the Statue of Liberty orange, paint the Eiffel Tower orange. He wants people to get “inundated” with orange, the film’s potential symbol.
Chalamet wants this marketing stunt to be “the biggest thing that happens on Earth this year”.
The session culminates in a sixty-second team meditation on the values of “culmination, integration and fruitionising”. Whatever that means.
The comments under the satirical Zoom call, though, are full of praise for Chalamet’s convincing performance. One comment reads, “this is the most Shia LaBeouf I’ve seen Chalamet”.
“I’ve been in a lot of entertainment marketing meetings, they are exactly like this,” another comment said.
Marty Supreme is a sports comedy-drama, and the latest film from director Josh Safdie, marking his first solo effort since he and his brother parted ways to work on their own projects.
Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a table-tennis player who intends on becoming world champion of the sport.
The stunt presents a bleak portrayal of our industry’s desire to stay top of mind, sometimes at the expense of meaning or genuineness. As many look to create noise, what ultimately stays with consumers is the one that speaks to them most genuinely. This skit, in its meta way, may have done just that.
