Pack Your Product's Bags, It's Going Hollywood

Download or read book Pack Your Product's Bags, It's Going Hollywood written by JJ Bersch and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the contemporary moment, product placement-the insertion of branded props into a film's mise-en-scène-is an integral financial feature of the American film industry. While most scholars identify the 1980s as the era in which product placement first took on greater prominence in American cinema, literature on the subject neglects the lengthy evolution of this practice prior to its mainstream emergence. This dissertation offers a comprehensive exploration of the industrial, discursive, legal, and aesthetic causes that laid the groundwork for product placement's proliferation in the movies. Rather than tracing a single historical through line, this dissertation joins together multiple threads to explore not just why product placement became such a significant element of the film industry, but also why this mainstream emergence occurred in the 1980s. I explore how product placement's methods of money-saving and revenue generation became an attractive method of risk management to the American film industry in the wake of the Paramount Decision. I detail the rise of an industry solely devoted to product placement marketing, whose companies streamlined the practice, allowing for the insertion of branded props at a previously unseen scale. Because these companies sold their services to prospective clients in both the film industry and in product manufacturing, the product placement marketer existed in a gray area between the spheres of commercialism and art. I investigate the legal history of product placement in America, outlining how a lack of governmental regulation differentiated the film industry from its comparably more restricted competitors in radio and television. I survey public historical discourses about product placement, maintaining that these criticisms ultimately pushed product placement underground without ever seriously threatening an end to the practice. And I inspect the narrative and aesthetic dimensions of product placement, arguing that on-screen product placement leads a contradictory existence, at once hoping to be seen by viewers without being overly distracting or obvious. Ultimately, this dissertation serves as a thorough explanation for product placement's mainstream emergence in the 1980s, and thus, an important history that sheds insight on one of the contemporary film industry's most common and financially significant features.