Maxim Coffee: the Japanese commercial that paid Kirk Douglas just to say a single word
Throughout his career, Kirk Douglas was viewed as a beacon of integrity in an industry where people were all too happy to stab each other in the back.
The actor was instrumental in ending the communist blackout of the 1950s when he fought hard to ensure Spartacus screenwriter Dalton Trumbo would be credited under his real name and not the variety of pseudonyms he’d been using to navigate around his imposed exile from cinema, opening the floodgates for the witchhunt to end.
Beyond that, Douglas was also a pioneering figure for actors who sought to gain more autonomy as artists. For much of the ‘Golden Age’, the biggest names in the business were tied to studio contracts, giving them very little say in which roles they played and which movies they appeared in.
While the A-listers had a certain amount of wiggle room, it wasn’t enough for Douglas. To that end, he established his own production company and developed his own passion projects from the ground up, adopting the ‘one for me, one for them’ mantra to ensure that even though he was happy to take high-paying gigs that traded on his reputation and popularity, there was always a film lurking right around the corner that he was deeply invested in on a personal level.
That said, paycheque gigs are notoriously hard to turn down. Very few people, regardless of their profession, would turn their nose up at the opportunity to make the maximum amount of money for the least amount of work, and Douglas was no different. Sort of like a proto-Tommy Lee Jones, the Academy Award winner jetted off to the other side of the world to star in a string of Japanese commercials.
The Maxim coffee brand was his company of choice, and Douglas appeared in multiple ads in the 1970s. In one, he played Sherlock Holmes, and in another, he enthusiastically endorsed the piping hot beverage alongside legendary James Bond composer John Barry without uttering a single word. It was a ridiculously effortless way to buffer his bank balance, especially when he landed $50,000 for two syllables.
In the TV spot, which runs for all of 14 seconds, Douglas sports his finest Wild West attire in a bizarrely meta advert that sees him throwing horseshoes right next to a camera operator perched on a camera rig who couldn’t possibly look any less excited to be there. When it’s finally his time to shine, what’s the one word he utters with such gusto that it’s hard to begrudge the fact that it netted him $50,000? “Coffee!”
It’s good work for anyone fortunate enough to get it, with Douglas once again ahead of the industry curve by taking it upon himself to head off to the other side of the world to shoot commercials that nobody in the United States would see and require him to do almost nothing other than collect a handsome reward for his efforts.
