Jeff Beer, writing for Fast Company about a documentary on Ilon Specht, the copywriter who wrote the iconic line for L’Oreal, “Because I’m Worth It.”

In the film, she describes male colleagues who were always arguing with her and taking credit when something worked. She recalled how during pitch and idea meetings for L’Oreal Preference hair color, male colleagues had suggested an idea that cast the woman as an object, rather than the subject. “I was feeling angry. I’m not interested in writing anything about looking good for men. Fuck ‘em,” says an elderly, and terminally ill, Specht in the film, before looking straight down the camera to the male camera operator. “And fuck you, too.”

The film won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions a couple weeks ago as it was commissioned by L’Oreal.

The original ad for L’Oreal Preference hair color that first used the line, “Because I’m Worth It” is a single shot of a woman walking towards the camera, explaining why she likes it, and how it makes her feel.

In the doc, we find out that spot almost never happened. In fact, Specht went behind her bosses’ back to create the ad after her agency produced and the brand approved a spot with almost the exact same script, except it was a man speaking the words on behalf of his wife, walking silently beside him. It’s clear that 50 years later it still made Specht angry. Angry enough to not want to talk about advertising or that campaign ever again.

On 4/4, Marvel released a wonderful teaser poster for their upcoming movie, The Fantastic Four: First Steps. This will be the fourth iteration of the first family of comics on film. There was an unreleased Roger Corman-produced movie from 1994, with a fascinating history.

My wife and I are big movie lovers. Every year, between January and March, we race to see all the Oscar-nominated films. We watched A Complete Unknown last night and The Brutalist a couple of weeks ago. The latter far outshines the former as a movie, but both share a common theme: the creative obsession.

Timothée Chalamet, as Bob Dylan, is up at all hours writing songs. Sometimes he rushes into his apartment, stumbling over furniture, holding onto an idea in his head, hoping it won’t flitter away, and frantically writes it down. Adrien Brody, playing a visionary architect named László Tóth, paces compulsively around the construction site of his latest project, ensuring everything is built to perfection. He even admonishes and tries to fire a young worker who’s just goofing off.

There is an all-consuming something that takes over your thoughts and actions when you’re in the groove willing something to life, whether it’s a song, building, design, or program. I’ve been feeling this way lately with a side project I’ve been working on off-hours—a web application that’s been consuming my thoughts for about a week. A lot of this obsession is a tenacity around solving a problem. For me, it has been fixing bugs in code—using Cursor AI. But in the past, it has been figuring out how to combine two disparate ideas into a succinct logo, or working out a user flow. These ideas come at all hours. Often for me it’s in the shower but sometimes right before going to sleep. Sometimes my brain works on a solution while I sleep, and I wake up with a revelation about a problem that seemed insurmountable the night before. It’s exhausting and exhilarating at the same time.

Recently Guillermo Esteves did a fantastic experiment with HTML5 and CSS3 by recreating the opening crawl to Star Wars. Although it only currently works in Safari 4, it’s a good preview of how to create something dynamic using web standards and web fonts once the other browsers come along.

But Guillermo’s experiment also reminded me of how awful the typography was of those opening crawls. The original Star Wars opening crawl uses two different typefaces (three if you count “A long time ago…”), is justified without hyphenation, and thus creates obvious rivers and awkward tracking.