CHICAGO — Someone, I’ve long thought, should make a movie of Lowell Thompson’s life and finally that is happening. A painter/writer/former ad man/legendary storyteller, Thompson is making the movie himself, collaborating with some old colleagues from the advertising world and some new friends. He is typically enthusiastic, saying, “I’m thinking Oscars,” and then erupting in his distinctively joyful laugh.
The film is titled “Channels Changers” and you can see a bit of it on YouTube. It is to be a feature-length movie about the pioneering Black people who began to influence the advertising business during the 1960s and beyond.
Thompson and former Chicago advertising man Cotton Stevenson are co-executive producers of the film. “After I left the ad business and Chicago, I began making documentaries (“Diversity University” (2014), “Stand” (2016) and “The Good Brothers” (2019)) and having some success,” he told me, from his home in California. “I first met Lowell on Facebook and we shared certain political and world views and were both from the ad world. Chicago is where I came right after college. I met my wife. We had a son. When I came to visit earlier this year, Lowell and I met and he told me about his new book and that was that.”
That book is a soon-to-be-published memoir titled “Mad Invisible Man,” which charts not only Thompson’s life but is a behind-the-scenes look at the all but forgotten or ignored ways in which Black talent contributed to the creation of some of the most prominent commercials, on and most profoundly, behind the cameras.
“It’s an important story that needs to be told,” Stevenson says.
Thompson says, rightly, “This film is more than just me.” He then talks of his life, going back to his birth in Bronzeville in 1947.
His family — Lowell was one of 11 kids — soon moved into an apartment in what was then the clean and safe Robert Taylor Homes public housing development.
Drawing pictures since early childhood, he showed enough talent at Wendell Phillips High School to earn a scholarship to the School of the Art Institute. But he was gone in six months, feeling, “I saw no future in what was basically an all-white art world.”
He took a job as “office boy” in the Chicago Tribune’s Creative Services Department, where he worked illustrating clothing advertisements. His portfolio soon landed him a job with the advertising agency Foote, Cone & Belding. His timing was fortuitous. In the midst of the civil rights movement and in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, companies were eager to reach out to the African American community and ad agencies began to recruit Black applicants.
Thompson became an art director, working for the Chicago offices of many of the biggest agencies in the world, on campaigns for Coca-Cola, United Airlines and helping produce the first Black-audience TV commercials for McDonald’s. Though he was happy and “never felt any racism personally,” he began to sense an undercurrent of racism in the business and wrote a lengthy article about that for Print magazine called “The Invisible Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.”
That article led to an Advertising Age story with the headline, “Dirty Little Secret.” Thompson felt the sting of the industry, as his advertising work dried up. He moved on, founding the nonprofit Partnership Against Racism, and, for a time, co-hosting a weekly WLIT-FM radio program called “The Race Question.”
He also devoted more time to his own painting and writing. In 2012 he had his biggest success, writing “African Americans in Chicago” (Arcadia Publishing). “I was in a bookstore and I saw books about Italians in Chicago, about Jews, Japanese — but none about African Americans,” he says. “So I sent them an email that said, ‘I’m the man to do it.’”
Arcadia agreed and the book has been a steady bestseller ever since.
He has also written 1995′s “Whitefolks: Seeing America Through Black Eyes” and 2018′s “Branding Humans: Selling White Supremacy to America.”
I have written about Thompson before. He is ever filled with ideas and opinions and a charming self-confidence. As he said of “RaceMan Answers,” his self-published e-book and pocket-size softcover in 2014, “This book can solve the race problem in the United States.”
He has, as you can see, a rakish look. His left eye, troublesome from birth, got worse after he turned 50. As he began experiencing double vision, he started wearing a patch. But he has always had a way with words. Some time ago he told me, “There are only two kinds of people in Chicago. Those that get the blues and those that give ‘em.”
He has lived modestly in Uptown for many years and is always out and about, at coffee shops, bookstores and galleries, events of all sorts.
He and Stevenson continue to work on their film. They shot some interviews and other material in May, connecting with old friends from the business, and have already received a donation from the president of one big ad agency here and recently launched a GoFundMe page.
One easily senses the zeal of both men as Thompson says, “It was Black hands and minds that were behind some of America’s whitest ads. We colorized them from the inside, that’s the beauty of it.”
The pair originally thought they might need a professional actor as narrator/host but, says Stevenson, “As soon as I saw Lowell on camera, I said, ‘That’s it.’”
Thompson smiles and says, “I watch myself in it and I think, ‘Well, maybe I missed my calling.’ I could have been Denzel.”
