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Hi. I'm Wheeler Winston Dixon, James Ryan professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln,
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and this is Frame By Frame, and I'd like to talk right now about product placement.
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Product placement is something that's becoming more and more common in movies,
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as movies cost more and more to make.
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You have to remember that movies in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s cost maybe...
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a big-budget in the 1980s would cost $12 million... $13 million.
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Today, a movie costs $100 million to make, and that's for a small comedy, or something like that.
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So how are you going to make up this kind of money? Product placement.
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I was at a studio this summer, talking to some executives, and they were saying that
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they aggressively go after product placement to put cars, soft drinks, food items...
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For example, Reese's Pieces in E.T. suddenly took off like crazy.
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But the forerunner in all of this, oddly enough, is a film by Howard Hawks called "Red Line 7000,"
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which was considered at the time scandalously the most-sponsored film in history.
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JACK: "Lemon." LIZ LEMON: "It's not product placement. I just like it."
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JACK: "What?" LIZ: "What?"
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Product placements are something which adds additional revenue not just to movies but to TV shows,
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and there's varying degrees of product placements.
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If you have something prominently in the foreground, you pay more.
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If it's something in the background, you pay less.
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If you see just the side of the product, you pay even less than that.
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And if you don't pay at all, the product vanishes out of the scheme.
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Merchandising has therefore become a kind of inescapable part of the movie process,
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particularly in the 21st century... not so much in the 30s and 40s and 50s...
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But now that the movies have become more of a business than an art form,
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product placement has become an art form in itself.
