TEN YEARS AGO, The Atlantic Monthly published Mark Crispin Miller's brilliant and sustained attack on the marriage of movies and marketing. "At times," Miller wrote, "the movies have made good on [their initial] promise, by treating us not as wired consumers, but respectfully, as persons somehow still outside [the media-industrial complex], and so still able to be moved and challenged by its devastations." That was 1990, however, and this being 2001, those times have become very rare. Cross-merchandising, synergistic promotions, and million-dollar placement deals have become the rule rather than the exception in Hollywood. But even in this age of Demolition Men and Runaway Brides, the flagrant product placement in Cast Away is something to behold.
Cast Away is the story of Crusoe-esque FedEx executive Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks), who finds his obsession with punctuality thwarted by an unexpected four-year layover on the shores of a deserted isle. It has struck most critics as a terribly effective film, and Hanks (who lost forty pounds to play the role, which, given his salary, amounts to 2 lbs/$1,000,000) is expected to have a good shot at winning his third Oscar because of it. The New Yorker's David Denby, for instance, found himself transported to heights of Tennysonian eloquence: "Cast Away," he supposed "will be called a 'triumph of the human spirit,' or some sort of triumph, but what truly matters in the film is not these banalities but such momentous things as the peculiar murmuring noise that the wind makes in a cave and the mournful singsong moaning of a whale just before it breaks the surface and spouts water."
I didn't like the film quite as much as that, though I do think there was much to appreciate: For one thing, Hank's physical transformation, and the subtlety of his performance, really are Oscar-worthy. I also admired Robert Zemeckis' deft handling of the movie's middle-third (which takes place entirely on a 99-acre island near Fiji and contains barely any dialog), the riveting airplane crash, and some nifty storm scenes. Still, I agree with Denby that the film is some sort of triumph. More specifically, it is a triumph for Federal Express.

SEEING FEDEX ADS in films isn't exactly a new phenomenon -- North, Runaway Bride, Bowfinger, The Matrix, and Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo and Juliet come to mind, among others -- but these films have nothing on Cast Away. The film begins with a rather gratuitous tour of the company's Russian operation (one particularly unsubtle panning shot passes from a café filled with various stereotypical Soviets, to a Lenin plaque just happening to be pried off the café wall as the camera goes by, to a truck brandishing a Cyrillic transliteration of the famous FedEx logo.) "Eighty-seven hours [to deliver a package] is a shameful outrage -- an eternity!" Hanks instructs his Russian charges. "We can never allow ourselves the sin of losing track of time." The subplot, which has nothing to do with ensuing events and is dropped once Hanks returns to the company's Memphis hub, seems to be that, though Federal Express would rather employ workaholics than drunks, Russia remains open for business, and FedEx is leading the way. (A FedEx spokesman has made a point of explaining that the company's real Russian operation runs much more smoothly than the film's.) Along the way, we're treated to a loving, if incidental, telling of the company's first night in operation in 1973.
Shortly afterwards the film's main action begins. If you've seen the trailer, which gives away every plot twist in what is, in any case, a rather straightforward movie, you already know that Hanks hitches a ride aboard a FedEx plane that goes down somewhere in the South Pacific, does his stint in solitary, and returns to civilization only to find that, FedEx-style, his love wouldn't wait. I'll try not to give what little else there is away. Hanks is the lone crash survivor, the island is small and barren of animal life, the only things to wash ashore, except Hanks, are a dozen or so FedEx packages. And this is where the going, from a plot-versus-product-placement point of view, begins to get tricky.
It takes Hanks months to open the packages. Finding himself without tools, food, or clothes in a search area the size of Texas, he stacks them neatly in a pile, as if in preparation to deliver them once he's overcome the inevitable and momentary obstacle of his strandedness. When the bloated corpse of a coworker who went down in the crash washes up on the shore of his island, Hanks strips it of its shoes and takes a flashlight from its pocket before burying it, but the packages remain sacred months and months into his island tenure. Who knows what they could have contained? Morally, it seems, the corporation demands more from the employee than any army would think to ask of a soldier.
Similarly, product placement twists the plot awkwardly once Hanks gets off the island. The message of this movie (and though it's carried more lightly than the message of the last Zemeckis/Hanks collaboration, Forrest Gump, lightness is not the first word that comes to mind), is that things get lost when one lives life by the clock. As a result, Hanks learns a lot about himself, time, and himself-in-time while on the island, but seems to forget it all once he returns to the mainland. The last scene of the movie has him redelivering one of the packages washed upon his island shore. Despite everything that the movie is telling us -- and the aesthetics of this film push rather heavily towards a different ending -- we end up with a corporate line that’s as realistic as the idea that a castaway would leave potentially life-saving packages unopened. As for why Hanks didn't sue FedEx upon his return, or why his fiancée didn't sue upon his disappearance? That's never mentioned.

IT'S POSSIBLE TO TAKE a charitable stance towards all this: Hanks' refusal to open the packages might, for instance, have less to do with the Code of the FedEx Man than with his hopelessness of finding himself in a terrible predicament. And he isn't re-delivering the packages at the end at all, but going around to thank people whose possessions (once he claimed them as his own) saved his life. But according to Charles Broyles, the former Newsweek editor-turned-screenwriter who wrote Cast Away, things are in fact what they appear to be at first glance: Hanks only "opens the packages at the point where he has to face the fact that he's not going to get rescued, and he has to get serious," he tells the Sacramento Bee. (What was he doing his first year on the island? Playing bridge?) And the FedEx ethic? It's "still with him at the end. The last thing he does is deliver the package."
What's disturbing isn't so much the degree of corporate loyalty Hanks feels as the number of aesthetic compromises the brand forces the film to make. Take, for instance, Broyles's assertion that using FedEx "gave us an immediate shorthand. Once you saw the truck and packages, you understood. It was much more effective than making up a phony company. It’s a global symbol for deadlines." The second part of this argument seems, at first, to be a somewhat compelling one: To call the delivery service "TrendEx" might very well be asking today's moviegoer to make unprecedented leaps of the imagination. But was this Broyles's only option? Hanks could just as easily have been a traveling salesman or, for that matter, a multitasking and overscheduled dot-com executive. (Actually, Broyles's argument turns out to be the same argument CBS producer Stephen Stohnm puts forth in defense of product placement in a soap opera which features over 250 brand names. "If people are going to believe they're inside a Canadian Mall, they're not going to believe it unless there are real companies and brand names around.")
More revealing than the argument from authenticity is the position that using brand names "just makes the screenwriter’s job easier." Here's another of Broyles's formulations: "FedEx seemed like the perfect modern company. You wouldn't need to set up any screen time trying to explain who Chuck was." Those who were around in the 1980s might remember Brett Easton Ellis’ heavy use of brand names to denote character. Then, it was seen as an aesthetic weakness, and Ellis pleaded that the device was ironical, rather than illuminative. Today, Broyles embraces what Ellis' critics meant as insult. But is he doing the cinema a service by doing so? Contrast Broyles's philosophy to the advice director Sidney Lumet gives in Making Movies:
In a good drama, the line where characters and story blend should be indiscernible. I once read a very well-written script with first-rate dialogue. But the characters had nothing specific to do with the story line. That particular story could have happened to many different kinds of people. In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama the story determines the characters.
But in Broyles's hands, it isn't even story that determines characters; it's whatever tagline you think when you hear the words "FedEx." I don't doubt the screenwriter when he says it was easier to write Hanks as a FedEx man. I just wish he'd worked a bit harder at writing him a character to play. Still, Cast Away rakes in millions, Hanks and Zemeckis await their Oscar nominations, and the audience goes home happy with whatever it gets. It might be too late to turn back Cast Away's clock, but is it too late to turn back Hollywood's?

TODAY, CASTLE ROCK Entertainment , CBS, Columbia, Dreanmworks, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, MGM, Miramax, Morgan Creek, New Line Cinema, Paramount, Trimark, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Disney, and Warner Brothers all employ Product Placement or Production Resources executives to consult with the hundreds of companies seeking to place their brands in pictures. These executives analyze scripts before they go into production, come up with breakdowns for "production opportunities," and go in search of sponsors. Given the cost of promoting a film in today's market, merchandising deals are becoming mandatory. Merchants, on the other hand, get captive audiences, get celebrities that wouldn’t ordinarily endorse their product to do so, and minimize advertising costs. "Imagine the impact of your customers seeing their favorite star using your product in a feature film," one placement company's ad reads. "Both your company's name and product thereby become an integral part of the show, conveying both subliminal messages and implied endorsements."
And the merchant exercises more than a bit of power over the finished product: "We have a pool of readers who review scripts of each movie which identifies specific opportunities for beer placement," an Anheuser-Busch executive explains. "We then make a decision as to whether or not they meet our placement guidelines. There are occasionally gray areas where in certain films you have 'conditional approval' of some scenes…."
This golden age of product placement began more recently than you’d think. In 1982, the Rogers and Cowan Agency successfully placed an ad for Reese’ Pieces in E.T., and Coca-Cola, which had just bought Columbia Pictures, began a frantic plugging of its products in the studio's films. (Zemeckis, who put a Tab ad into Back to The Future, showed his openness to the concept early on). In 1987 alone, Addidas placed their product in 60 films. The following year, Forbes and Fortune got into a bidding war over which magazine Wall Street's Charlie Sheen would refer to as "the Bible." Philip Morris payed the producers of License to Kill three-hundred and fifty thousand dollars to encourage James Bond to smoke Larks; the next Bond flick contained ads for BMW, Smirnoff, Tanqueray, Heineken, Adidas, Omega, Ericsson , Brioni , and Visa. Black & Decker paid twenty-thousand dollars to have Bruce Willis use their drill in a Die Hard movie, then sued for a hundred-and-fifty grand when the scene was cut. Similarly, Reebok won a ten-million dollar settlement from Trimark pictures when an entire Reebok ad, which was meant to run over the closing credits of Jerry MacGuire, was deleted.
A film needn't flaunt its placements the way a grotesque production like You've Got Mail does; the audience often leaves theatres unaware that they've seen an ad -- though more often than not they've seen more than one. It seems quaint, at this point, to note, as the Consumer Union did in a 1995 report, that "Advertising invites skepticism. When others urge us to do what they want, one is alerted to the possibility that their wishes may not be in their best interest." Or that, as a fine Washington Post piece on the trend noted, product placement works precisely because it eludes our defenses. Or that a disproportionate amount of hidden ads are directed towards children (Disney is a leading culprit).

BUT MORE ALARMING than the trend's escalation is the complexity of forms product placement is beginning to take. Cast Away, for instance, received no money from FedEx; rather, FedEx CEO Fred Smith is a friend of Broyles's (both are Vietnam vets), and an investor in the film's production company. According to the Sacramento Bee, FedEx "Managing Director of Global Brand Management" Gail Christensen spent two years working with Broyles. "As we stepped back and looked [at the script]," she says, "we thought it's not product placement, we’re a character in this movie. It's not just a FedEx product on a screen. It transcends product placement." Smith himself has been quoted saying, rather disingenuously, that he's not convinced the association won't hurt FedEx's reputation (apparently, people might stop using the service out of fear that their packages might go down somewhere over the Pacific).
This is not to say that product placement is nefarious by definition; Cast Away's second-most visible brand is a Wilson volleyball which washes ashore and becomes Hanks' constant companion on the island. Wilson provided the production with sixty volleyballs, but was given no clues as to what use they'd be put to. As it turns out, the placement is witty and winning; Hanks dubs the ball "Wilson," gives it a bloody handprint for a face, and sticks some straw in its crown; a rather neutral endorsement, if such a thing is possible. But Wilson's "Business Manager of Volleyballs" (the title deserves a screenplay of its own!) wasn't particularly worried; "I'm not sure how you portray a volleyball badly," he says.
It’s true that films are about people, and people use products. They may as well use real ones. But it’s also true that it’s becoming increasingly harder to make mid-and-big-budget films that advertisers might shy away from, or treat subjects marketing men consider outside the pale. On one level, film characters are deprived of the free-will audiences need to believe in if they are to believe they’re watching a character and not a cartoon. On another, knowledge on the viewer’s part that deception is part and parcel of the movie-going experience makes it hard to maintain the suspension of disbelief movies rely on: Hence, movies rely less on believable situations than eye-popping explosions, which cost money to make and market, which encourages more product placement, ad infinitum. The compromises needn’t be great, but the subtlest ones can sometimes be more insidious than the greatest: From top to bottom, the process is often, if not invariably, corrupt, and movies themselves, no less than audiences, are the victim of this corruption.
What’s needed, then, is a set of standardized guidelines to regulate the practice. It is widely believed that studios would discontinue product placements if they were required to identify advertisers in a film’s end credits. This speaks more to the corruption of the practice than the sensibility of a proposal. But even a set of guidelines published in Variety would help; an abbreviated Dogma 2001 that could eventually have much more of a life-saving impact on the movies than Lars von Trier could have hoped for: Product placement shall not interfere with plot or character development. Product placement shall not break the scene’s surface; in other words, characters can meet at Starbucks, but probably shouldn’t recite odes to it. Product placement should either be banned from movies aimed at children, or parents should be made aware of exactly what ads their kids are being made to watch, so that they may explain the transaction to their sons and daughters.
Given the nature of Broyles' relationship with Smith (and keeping in mind the precedent Reebok set when it settled with Trimark), it's no longer possible to assess the degree to which placement in general influences the films we see. The uses CastAway puts FedEx to might be the most nuanced instance of product placement we’ve seen to date (which isn’t surprising, given that the brand and its presentation is allowed to develop over the course of more than two hours). But does a film which explores brands, rather than people, remain a feature, or has it become a promotional tool? "[Federal Express] is extraordinarily complex, world-spanning, and it ends isolation, it connects anyone with anyone," Broyles says of the corporation, and the same very nearly applies to product placement in general. It too is extraordinarily complex and world-spanning, but instead of ending isolation it augments it: the trend (1) makes it difficult for filmmakers to create three-dimensional characters and scenarios which the audience can empathize with, and (2) deceives and manipulates it. There’d be nothing wrong with that if we took it for granted that ads, and nothing but ads, are what we’re paying to watch. But if film is to survive as an art, we needn't lower our standards to match Hollywood's.

Alex Abramovich is a senior writer at FEED.

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to the concept early on
Who else can we blame? Ronald Reagan, who\'d shilled for GE, Van Heusen, and other companies before coming to the White House, and cut funding for public schools and public broadcasting once he got there, forced both to go in search of corporate sponsors, thereby giving Hollywood moral license to do the same. Recently, ads have crept up in elementary-school math texts, the Smithsonian has begun displaying the logos of corporate sponsors, and the Department of Defense began soliciting corporate sponsorships for events on military bases. Today, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard all maintain \"entertainment liaison officers\" in Hollywood. Not long ago, a London paper quoted one such officer\'s thoughts on a film in which in which a USAF pilot hijacks and explodes a nuke \"We are not saying that these things can\'t happen,\" Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Gillman told the Sunday Telegraph. \"After all, the military is a microcosm of the American soul. But if one of our men is a villain, then we want to show how we would correct it.\"

Conversely, we could blame the influx of directors who started out in advertising, made the jump to Hollywood, and see nothing particularly wrong with mixing art and commerce -- John Frankenheimer, Tony and Ridley Scott, Hugh Hudson, Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, and others. My point is, the marketers aren’t to blame so much as the market itself; the trend isn’t so much immoral (though it’s that, too), as amoral.


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