Wynter, L. (2002) p.179

“It was paralysis by analysis," said Bob Lachky, Anheuser-Busch vice president for brand management. "Breakthrough ideas were hard to come by; you had too many eyes on the process."

"You can't be running storyboards up to a guy who's gonna be at the country club aIl weekend," said Lachky, who is white but apparently fluent in Ebonics. But that first day on the set, Lachky recalls, he looked over the latest script and saw some revisions that almost gave him a heart attack. The ad's tag line, the word "True" on a simple black background below the red-and white Budweiser logo and above the Budweiser web address, had been changed-to "Right on," the 1970s mantra of black affirmation. The same substitution had also been made in the few snippets of dialogue that weren't the totemic "Whassup?!"

"True" was so baggy-jeans-and-dance-hall reggae. "Right on" was very bell bottoms and Earth, Wind and Fire. If he hadn't acted, Lachky recalled, his beer commercial would have come out sounding like a new Shaft movie thirty years after the original but almost a year before the Sam Jackson remake. Lachky ordered the original wording restored faster than Isaac Hayes's backup singers could coo "shut yo' mouth." Later, he told me, he thanked God for his instinct and the guts to follow it.

My first thought was "What white guy changed this to 'Right on'? This isn't the Mod Squad, guys, give us some credit." It cracked me up. We'd already bought the "True." But what if we hadn't been smart enough to know. . . if we had put "Right on" in it, it would have killed it. It would have been a disaster. I mean if ("Right on") isn't on a Curtis Mayfield track, I don't want to hear it in my commercial.

The bottom line: Lachky knew it wasn't real and didn't have to think twice about saying so. His decisiveness floored thirty-four-year-old film maker Charles Stone III, who produced and directed the original short film featuring himself and three other African-American friends on which the wildly popular "True" commercials were, as it would turn out, faithfully based. In fact, it was Stone himself, not some "white guy," who had changed the script, fearing at the last minute that "True" might be too New York regional, too much of the streets of Harlem or Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where he lives, to work in the American beer-drinking heartland. Stone says he second-guessed himself because he underestimated just how thoroughly Lachky and Anheuser-Busch "got it."

I was impressed. That instance, as well as others that followed, showed it was all about following in the integrity of the spot. They wanted this spot to be all that it could be in replicating the original film. Budweiser felt that if we were going to do this, we should really do it.