Stars Pitching Cars . . . Before They Were Stars

It’s been estimated that actor Matthew McConaughey has earned as much as $90 million from a series of arty commercials he’s done for Lincoln. While that kind of endorsement deal may be a dream for many actors, the truth is that plenty of actors with McConaughey’s level of fame have also done car commercials—they just weren’t famous at the time.

The entertainment industry is a tough way to make a living. Most actors and actresses toil in relative obscurity hoping for a lucky break. While working toward that lucky break, many support themselves working in commercials and doing corporate videos and presentations. Sometimes they hawk cars. Let’s look at a few.

We’ll start out with some American Motors ads that ran in the late 1960s.

Note: Please excuse the video quality on some of the ads. They’re the best versions I could find.

To punch above its weight, AMC hired advertising agency Wells Rich Greene to produce a series of genuinely funny and somewhat self-deprecating commercials. Perhaps the most memorable campaign, which actually resulted in significant sales, was “What’s a Matador?” used to promote AMC’s midsize coupe in the mid 1970s.

Wells Rich Greene, which was located in New York City, must have had a strong connection to the city’s acting community, as it hired a number of performers who would end up with top billing as their careers prospered.

Richard Dreyfuss: AMC

Richard Dreyfuss, who starred in Jaws and Close Encounters of a Third Kind, plays the leader of a gang of young NYC toughs who encounter a Javelin. Vic Tayback, who played the diner owner on the long-running sitcom Alice and had a long career as a character actor, also appears.

Herb Edelman: AMC

Twice nominated for an Emmy award, Herb Edelman’s best-known role was as Stanley Zbornak, the ex-husband of Dorothy Zbornak (played by Bea Arthur) on The Golden Girls. Here he’s a guy who discovers that a Javelin might be a bit sporty for his self-image.

Robert De Niro: AMC

Perhaps the biggest star of the future employed by AMC was Robert De Niro. Long before he had a role playing a car salesman with a mafia past in Analyze That, he helped sell cars in a commercial for AMC, showing up in his old neighborhood to impress his green-grocer parents with his new Ambassador.

Dustin Hoffman: Volkswagen

A year before Dustin Hoffman got his break starring in The Graduate (I know many of you think the star of that movie was the Alfa Romeo Duetto Spider that Hoffman drove), he appeared in a commercial for the “larger” (compared to the Beetle) Volkswagen Fastback sedan. If the script wasn’t written specifically for Hoffman’s persona, I can understand why they cast him. Very entertaining.

Brad Pitt: Honda

Once they are famous, many notable actors get work doing commercials in Japan and other Asian countries. Brad Pitt was on the cusp of stardom when he did these two Japanese Domestic Market ads for the Integra, which was sold under the Honda brand there.

Gary Burghoff: Plymouth

If you watch enough period commercials you start seeing themes across both car companies and their ad agencies. For American Motors, the Wells Rich Greene agency cast De Niro with an appropriately Italian mother. Riffing off of that same maternal theme, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Plymouth’s ad agency, Young & Rubicam, produced a series of “Mama” commercials. In this ad for the 1970 Plymouth “Bananacuda”, Gary Burghoff, who played Radar O’Reilly in the hugely successful TV adaptation of MASH, plays a character named Marvin with a malaprop-spouting (“torsion-bobbers suspension”) mother who sounds a bit Yiddish.

“Mama” and Marvin returned a year later, this time with Burghoff at the wheel of a more sensible 1971 Satellite Sebring.

Kristen Stewart: Porsche

Like many actors, Kristen Stewart, who starred in Twilight, got her start acting as a child. Here she is in a commercial playing a girl who is not upset that she misses the bus to school since she then gets a ride with her dad in his Porsche 911 Carrera.

Paul Rudd: Toyota

Paul Rudd has had a successful 30-year career playing both comedic roles, as in his breakout film Clueless, as well as playing the superhero Ant-Man. Three years before he made Clueless, Rudd played a young man borrowing his brother’s new Toyota Tercel (ignore the title, that’s not Martin Sheen).

Ron Glass: Chevrolet

Ron Glass was best known for his role as a detective in the long-running sitcom Barney Miller and as a spiritual guide in the Firefly/Serenity science fiction franchise. A year before he started on Barney Miller, Glass was telling consumers about the increased trade-in values of their two-year-old Chevys.

James Doohan: Toyota

When James Doohan made this commercial for the 1968 Toyota Corona, the original Star Trek series was still on the air, so technically he was already famous for playing the starship Enterprise’s chief engineer, Montgomery Scott. Still, if you wanted a spokesperson to talk about a reliable machine, you probably couldn’t make a better pick. No, there’s no mention of dilithium crystals.