Product placement advertising—that Pepsi Cola you see some movie actor slinging back in your favorite film—is so commonplace we hardly notice. But it wasn't always that way, or was it?
A prominent screenwriter, S. J. Perelman knew a thing or two about Hollywood, but even so, it's unnerving to see how well he predicted the enduring marriage of movies and money—way back in 1943.
Aesthetes may decry this rapprochement between art and commerce, this spiritual wedding of L.B. Mayer and R.H. Macy, but I feel the match was made in heaven. The day is dawning when film and department stores may fuse into a single medium, with mighty themes like Resurrection and Gone with the Wind harnessed directly to the task of merchandising winter sportswear and peanut-fed hams. Once self-consciousness disappears, January white sales, midsummer clearances, and current specials will be neatly embodied in the pictures themselves, and it should surprise nobody to hear Miss Loy address Mr. Powell thus in some future Thin Man: "Why, hello, dear, long time no see. Yes, this divine mink coat, tailored by mink-wise craftsmen from specially selected skins, is only $578.89 at Namms' in Brooklyn, Porch & Schlagober's in Dallas, the Boston Store in Cleveland, the Cleveland Store in Boston, and Kerosene Brothers in Denver." As for the legitimate theater, it will probably preserve its usual stiff-necked attitude for a while, but in time it must adapt itself to the external pressure of pictures and radio.
Humorist S. J. Perelman was one of the most prominent humorists of his generation. He won an Oscar for the screenplay of Around the World in Eighty Days.
below to hear radio segment.
