Check Book: Live From New York

It's Monday Morning!!

Surprise! Blank Check has started a newsletter! Your favorite connoisseurs of context are gonna go on even more tangents, commit to even more bits, and share opinions on even more pieces of entertainment industry news because - hey, why not. Thanks for joining us!

IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:

THE BARDI PARTY REPORT

After years of speculation, months of hype, and weeks of sponsored content, the SNL 50th Anniversary special came and went. I laughed, I cried, I had to look up what connection Lil Wayne had to SNL history (none, really). Here’s a brief rundown:

THE HIGHS

• Adam Sandler’s heartfelt tribute to 50 years of SNL history. I speak for the whole Blank Check team when I say that Sandler as Elder Statesman is such an unexpected but beautiful fit. “8 years of Hartman the glue,” adding Norm now to the expected Farley tribute - tears. I also want to shoutout the biggest surprise of the evening - JACK FUCKING NICHOLSON making his first public appearance in like 3 years to introduce the Sandman. So nice to see our old friend. I cannot believe he’s almost 90.

• Eddie Murphy as Tracy Morgan. Eddie Murphy recounting the plot of Harry Potter. The absolute history of Eddie Murphy sharing a sketch with Will Ferrell. So glad he’s back in the SNL fold. Funniest person alive.

• Bill Murray on Update. Absolutely crushed. “Most locked-in he’s seemed in years” - Alan Smithee, our pseudonymous editor via text.

• The return of Mike Myers as Linda Richman. I watched this telecast with my mother and it is so funny to see how she’s pretty much just Linda Richman now. Always a favorite character of mine.

• John Mulaney’s musical tribute to New York City. This feels like the retirement of this beloved recurring sketch. I don’t know how you top it. David Spade being over it halfway through, Nathan Lane singing “cocaine and some vodka” to the tune of “Hakuna Matata,” Sarah Squirm’s terrible Bloomberg impression, KATE MCKINNON AS GIULIANI SINGING ONE SHOT WITH LIN AS HAMILTON!

• Fred Armisen saying he’d resurrect a killed sketch once Kevin Spacey returns to host and then waiting for audience high fives that never came. God-tier bit.

• Jon Lovitz at the American Girl cafe across the street.

THE LOWS

• Tom Hanks as MAGA white guy Doug on Black Jeopardy was really funny back during the first Trump administration, but feels depressing now. Sucked the air out of an otherwise great sketch.

• Will Ferrell’s Robert Goulet and Kristen Wiig’s tiny handed freak Dooneese are two of my favorite characters, but their collab fell short. Dooneese eating a bird in a movie theater? She’s done crazier shit.

• I love her, but two Sabrina Carpenter moments? And we’re already canonizing the Domingo sketch? No thanks.

• While Miley Cyrus and Brittany Howard’s cover of “Nothing Compares 2 U” was beautiful, the recent revisionist history of the Sinead moment in both this telecast and the SNL music doc feels gross. They hung her out to dry.

• I folded my laundry during the Lil Wayne performance, which was more connected to his Super Bowl Halftime “snub” and less connected to SNL history.

• I LOVE RACHEL DRATCH! But if we’re gonna bring back Debbie Downer, at least give her some new lines!

THE WHOAS

• Cannot believe they did an “In Memoriam” segment about canceled and poorly-aged bits. I’m not saying that this was a BAD thing, per se, I’m just shocked that they’re owning it. The Lucy Liu skit was particularly heinous, my jaw was on the floor.

• Al Sharpton sitting next to Rob Schneider in the audience. Lol. Lmao, even.

Congratulations to Lorne & company for fifty years of consistently inconsistent hilarity. We will keep watching and complaining…because we love it.

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE … DISSERTATION???

Okay, let me clear up a slight misconception: my 2022 PhD dissertation—titled Pack Your Product’s Bags, It’s Going Hollywood: Explaining the Mainstream Emergence of Cinematic Product Placement in the 1980s—is not literally about the Reese’s Pieces in E.T. It’s actually about, well, the broader mainstream emergence of cinematic product placement in the 1980s (baby). But it’s also not not about the Reese’s Pieces in E.T.!

You see, in the larger body of product placement scholarship, perhaps no movie is viewed as more culturally significant than Steven Spielberg’s weepy 1982 classic. The story goes like this: originally, Spielberg and screenwriter Melissa Mathison planned for their titular alien to follow a trail of the director’s “favorite candy”—M&Ms—back to Elliott’s home. But Spielberg worked in as much secrecy as possible in those days, so he was reluctant to provide the candy’s parent company Mars Inc. with the screenplay or character sketches for his upcoming movie. With production looming and Mars unsure about the effectiveness of a potential tie-in with such a seemingly risky property, Spielberg and producer Kathleen Kennedy instead turned to the Hershey Company, who in 1978 had launched a peanut buttery competitor to M&Ms: Reese’s Pieces.¹ A tie-in deal was reached: in addition to having their candy placed in the film, Hershey’s would launch a six-week, $1 million advertising campaign that simultaneously promoted both Reese’s Pieces and Spielberg’s latest film.²

But as Kerry Segrave writes, “There was nothing unusual in the product placement involved in E.T.”³ In fact, as Jay Newell, Charles T. Salmon, and Susan Chang detail in their article “The Hidden History of Product Placement,” tie-ins like the one showcased in E.T. developed nearly concurrently with the invention of cinema itself: as early as 1896, for instance, Cinématographe inventors Auguste and Louis Lumière agreed to feature Lever Brothers soap in a series of their “actualités” in exchange for increased access to the Swiss film market.⁴ But what “set E.T. apart,” according to Segrave, were “the phenomenal results attributed to the placement of the candy Reese’s Pieces in that movie. Soon the story took on legendary proportions.”⁵ A July 1982 People article, for instance, claimed that sales for Reese’s Pieces tripled within just two weeks of the release of E.T.⁶ Patrick Vonderau argues that the ensuing media blitz around the film and its tie-in candy partner made product placement “a widely discussed aspect of the institution of cinema” for the first time.⁷

In my dissertation—God, it’s giving me war flashbacks to be writing those words again—I outlined the various historical currents that transformed product placement from a disorganized series of handshake deals into the multi-billion-dollar industry it is today. I examined how product placement became more entrenched in an increasingly conglomerated Hollywood as the film industry looked for new methods of risk mitigation after the Paramount Decision divorced the theaters from their studios, eliminating the ability to block book and sustain run-zone-clearance systems. I explored how the industry’s vested interest in staying out of the courts via the self-regulation of the Hays Office encouraged product placement to maintain a clandestine existence, especially when compared to other mediums like radio and television that more blatantly melded entertainment speech and commercial speech. I looked at the industrial discourses around product placement, particularly those originating in the pages of the independent theater trade Harrison’s Reports during Hollywood’s Golden Age. And I used Tootsie and the Bond franchise to break down how elements of film style—like mise-en-scène, cinematography, and editing—shape viewers’ perception of the products that end up being placed on screen.

But there is one intervention—sorry, this is how they teach us to talk in grad school!—that I am most proud of: in my second chapter, I used the George R. Simkowski papers at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research to detail the inner workings of Chicago-area product placement firm Prime Time Marketing in the 1980s. The company—which was founded in 1976—maintained an active roster of clients—including Coffee Mate, Jim Beam, Rydell, Old Style, and Nestle—who it would actively place in films and promote via tie-up campaigns. What companies like Prime Time Marketing—or the West Coast’s Associated Film Promotions—offered more than anything else were efficiency and scale: whereas earlier eras of product placement largely consisted of haphazardly arranged one-off deals, the product placement marketers of the 1970s and 1980s offered a one-stop shop of a wide range of branded props and associated promotions.

Though the deal that landed Reese’s Pieces in E.T. was made without the assistance of one of these companies, its outsized success would likely not have happened without the groundwork laid by the flurry of product placement activity spurred by companies like Prime Time Marketing in the years before the film’s release. And were I not to have spent eight years toiling away in graduate school to end up writing a 200-plus-page document with views in the single digits, I probably wouldn’t be here writing about movies for you all today. So, I guess what we can take away from all this is simply that going to graduate school is totally 100% worth it. The Doctor is now out. Bye bye!

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

Ben Hosley, Producer: “This week, my recommendation is actually more about bringing awareness to an important topic: soils team. I recently discovered that there is a competitive intercollegiate dirt judging sport. I am thrilled. Def interested in my brand Congratulations becoming a league sponsor! Huge shout out to host of the So True podcast, comedian Caleb Hearon, for revealing on the recent ep with Chris Fleming, that he was a soils team athlete. Dirt life.”

David Sims, Host: “I’m just gonna go ahead and recommend Luca since my daughter makes me watch it every day. Her favorite part is when the bully gets thrown in the fountain. I will also recommend playing the Game Gear game World Series Baseball ’95 on my Analogue Pocket cause I’ve been doing that a lot. Let’s go METS”

Griffin Newman, Host: “Think my newsletter rec this week is going to be the Mama Odie animatronics on Tiana’s Bayou Adventure at Disneyland.”

AJ McKeon, Editor: “Dr. Rachael Haverland at the Endometriosis Center of Excellence in Dallas.”

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “Three recent albums I’ve loved: Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, an instant classic from one of my very favorite songwriters; Lower by Benjamin Booker, a spiky, shape-shifting, and blisteringly contemporary soul album with production from the great Kenny Segal; and Mapambazuko by Ale Hop and Titi Bakorta, a cross-continent collaboration that culminated in what is easily the most fun—and frantic—album of the year so far.”

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “In honor of SNL50, I’ll recommend the 2008 sketch Mirror Image which reinvigorated my love of fart sounds.”

THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST

GAY ET, THE “EXTRA” EXTRATERRESTRIAL IS NOW PART OF THE BLANK CHECK CANON:

And on Patreon, we’ve got our second Spielberg bonus episode on LA 2017, Something Evil, and Savage.

COMING SOON:

1. ET Online, June 13, 2022.

2. Campaign, June 11, 2015.

3. Kerry Segrave, Product Placement in Hollywood Films: A History, 147.

4. Jay Newell, Charles T. Salmon, and Susan Chang, “The Hidden History of Product Placement,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 50, no. 4 (December 2006), 579-580.

5. Segrave, Product Placement in Hollywood Films, 147

6. People, July 26, 1982.

7. Patrick Vonderau, “Kim Novak and Morgan Stairways: Thinking about the Theory and History of the Tie-in,” in Films That Sell: Motion Pictures and Advertising, eds. Bo Florin, Nico De Klerk, and Patrick Vonderau, 212.