A friend insists that Doug Pray‘s Art & Copy, a doc about “advertising’s profound effect on modern culture” and “about the most influential creative forces tapping the zeitgeist of our time,” is brilliant and a must-see. A Variety marketing exec is calling it “one of the greatest things she’s seen in ages,” he says. I’ll be seeing it at tonight’s 8:45 pm press screening.

The synopsis makes it sound like a companion piece to Adam Curtis‘s The Century of the Self, the story of how ads went from selling stuff they people need to stuff they desire. The film quotes Paul Mazer, a Wall Street banker working for Lehman Brothers in the 1930s, as urging an effort to “shift America from a needs to a desires culture…people must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. […] Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

http://festival.sundance.org/2009/film_events/films/art_copy