Lights! Camera! Ignition from Jetsetters Magazine at www.jetsettersmagazine.com

You’re sitting there watching TV when a commercial comes on for the new 2005 Pizzazzmobile V8. As the narrator extols its styling, its power, and its luxurious interior you yawn and flip the channel. A few days later, however, you’re at the movies when Tom Cruise comes racing along a mountain road overlooking Monte Carlo in that very same Pizzazzmobile. Will you take this opportunity to get up and go buy a bag of popcorn? Not hardly! Somewhere deep within your cerebrum something is being planted. “Wow! I’d look great, too, at the wheel of a Pizzazzmobile.” There, in a nutshell, lies the appeal of the increasingly popular — and controversial — practice known as product placement.

	Kim Basinger in a Porsche Midnight Black Cayenne Turbo . . .

In concept there is nothing mysterious or sinister about product placement. Basically it involves featuring a commercial product within an entertainment or artistic work, most often a movie or TV show. It’s nothing new, especially where cars are concerned. There was, for instance, James Bond’s Aston Martin in “Dr. No”; “Smokey and the Bandit” with Burt Reynold’s gleaming black Pontiac Trans Am; “Herbie, the Love Bug” and the eponymous VW Beetle; and the 1971 classic “Le Mans”, which featured Steve McQueen and a bevy of Porsches on the race track and on the road.

In recent years, however, produce placement has become big business. About $1.5 billion will be spent this year to place products — cars, candies, dishwashing liquid, and even some countries — in the 500 feature films released in the

United States

. Of that total, carmakers account for some $600 million. According to Autoweek, Ford spent $35 million to feature Jaguars and Thunderbirds in one movie alone, the 2002 James Bond shiller-thriller "Die Another Day." Other carmakers routinely spend up to $10 million per movie for the privilege of seeing their models roll across the big screen.

. . . in the movie " Cellular".

The competition among carmakers for a prime movie spot can be heated. In the John Grisham book “The Firm”, for instance, Tom Cruise’s employer gives him a BMW 318 as a perk of employment with his new law firm. But in the movie, this becomes a Mercedes convertible. Mercedes denies having had to pay for such prime exposure; rather, they appealed to producer, Sydney Pollack’s sense of zeitgeist. “He became convinced BMW was the car of the 1980s, while the Mercedes was the car of the 1990s,” says a Mercedes spokesperson.

BMW had greater luck placing its Z3 roadster in the 1995 Bond flick “Golden Eye.” While this was a tremendous commercial success, it alienated Bond purists and Bimmer-philes alike, who agreed that while Bond would have been happy to drive the larger, more powerful M5 muscle car, he wouldn’t have stepped foot in the dinky Z3.

However coveted such exposure on the big screen there’s a fine line that separates the credible from the contrived and audiences are quick to make the distinction. "When placement is gratuitous or clumsy neither the product nor audiences nor the moviemakers are served,” says Martin Peters, Media Relations Manager for Porsche. “Porsche is known as a high performance car but we don't seek out outlandish action stunts with Porsches flying through the air. From our standpoint the best placement shows our cars doing what they were built to do, in situations that flow naturally from the plot and character."

The escape Porsche awaits Kim.

Today, though Porsches are synonymous with power, speed, and sex appeal, the marque has avoided being type cast. In "Mission Impossible II", it's hard to imagine Tom Cruse at the wheel of anything less than a Boxster while racing through the mountains of

Spain

. Likewise, though Reese Witherspoon may first appear ditzy in "Legally Blonde", she radiates future greatness when she arrives at Harvard Law School in a pink version of the same model. In Disney's "The Kid", Bruce Willis' fastidious tastes are evident in his sprawling, ultra modern home and his sleek black Porsche 911. In "Hollow Man", we know ueber-tekkie Kevin Bacon is going to push the envelope of scientific research by the way he handles his 911 coupe.

However disparate the characters, says Peters, each movie expresses a different aspect of the Porsche experience. "You have to be true to your brand. You can't be all things to all people. It helps to have a director who understands cars.”

To say the least, that pretty much describes director David Ellis, the man behind some of movie-dom's most thrilling high speed scenes in such action epics as Cannonball Run, Smokey and the Bandits, Matrix Reloaded, Final Destination, Clear and Present Danger, Patriot Games, and Exit Wounds, to name a few. "You can say so much about a character by the car he drives and the way he handles it," says the director.

	The infamous crash scene.

As director David Ellis explains, this was precisely the approach he wanted to take with the 2004 suspense flick "Cellular" which starred, along with Kim Basinger and and Chris Evans, a Midnight Black Cayenne Turbo and a gleaming Arctic Blue Carrera roadster. "Cellular" isn't a side"swiping, sheet metal-smashing, semi-airborne car chase kind of movie,” says Ellis. "So often, people get carried away with stunts that it overwhelms the car and the character. The main character isn't a super hero, not a Bruce Willis kind of guy. He's just a normal guy with normal skills who's gotten in over his head. I didn't want him recklessly flipping cars and putting other people in jeopardy. So instead of a series of car crashes, we have a series of near misses, and they're just as exciting."

Even so, he had to see for himself what the two Porsches could realistically do. "I'd never driven a Cayenne so Porsche loaned me one. I was so impressed with its power we re-wrote a key part of the script to show how rugged and powerful it was." The scene in question requires Basinger to smash the Cayenne into a garage where kidnappers have imprisoned her young son. "Originally, when she smashes down the door, the car was supposed to get stuck in the wreckage. But we thought it would be cool to show the power of the Cayenne first breaking down the door, and then driving away."

Meanwhile, to make sure his leading man could handle the Carrera roadster, the director sent the actor to the Skip Barber Driving School . "There's one scene where Ryan commandeers the Carrera from its owner then has to accelerate out of a tunnel into on-coming traffic and then brake hard and do a one eighty spin.”

After completing that dicey maneuver, the breathless actor says, as if to its absent owner, 'Now I see why you drive a Porsche.”

Porsche expects that by this point, movie audiences will, too.

— By Jack Smith, Jetsetters Magazine Motor Editor; photos coutresy of Porsche.