A Staples wall clock plays a curious role in the new film Dirty Pretty Things, a thriller starring Audrey Tautou. The 10-in. timepiece, with its maker's logo plainly visible, fills the screen at a couple of points in the film and looks suspiciously like something put there through the sort of paid product placement that marketers employ to get everything from soft drinks to cars featured in movies. But in this case Staples didn't pay a dime. Instead it is the latest lucky beneficiary of an artist's aesthetic choices.
Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski, the film's production designer, says, "We just bought a clock." His set decorator found it at a London flea market. Getting a wall clock that was "kind of American looking" satisfied his desire to give context to the film's Nigerian-born lead character, who had lived in New York City. "It was a way of saying he brought it with him from America," says the production designer.
The serendipitous meeting of art and commerce is "a big wow," according to Susan Ciulla, vice president of merchandising for office-supply giant Staples. She won't disclose sales figures, but Ciulla says the clock, which retails for $8.98, is already "the best-selling one Staples has in its mix." And its high profile in the movie might well give it a boost.
Edward T. McAvoy, production designer of the 1999 film Office Space, was pondering ways to accessorize that film's geeky character Milton and latched onto a stapler. He wondered, What could I do as a designer to make this stapler special so as to justify Milton's need to possess it and the bosses' need to covet it? He decided to make it fire-engine red. "I called Swingline and said, 'Do you make a red stapler?' and they said no," McAvoy recalls. "And I said, 'Well, do you mind if I use your logo on the side of a stapler I'm going to paint red?' They didn't mind at all." McAvoy took four Swingline staplers to a local auto-body shop and told the workers he wanted them "perfectly painted, just like you'd paint a car." He later added a computer-rendered logo.
Once the film was released, buyers began asking for the red stapler. But Swingline didn't make it. "We concluded we really needed to put a red stapler on the market," says Bruce Neapole, Swingline's president. He says Swingline continues to sell thousands each month of what it calls the Rio Red Stapler.
Any accessory that lands on a trend-setting TV show like HBO's Sex and the City can also become an instant fashion hit. Last season costume designer Patricia Field picked out a diamond horseshoe necklace for actress Sarah Jessica Parker to wear on one episode. Soon after, HBO was flooded with calls and e-mail messages--and jewelry-design firm Mia & Lizzie, based in Los Angeles, was inundated with orders.
These lightning bolts of product stardom have led some manufacturers to push their wares on production and costume designers--outside the channels of paid product placement. "Companies send me all kinds of stuff," says Ritchie Kremer, a Hollywood prop master. Last summer a manufacturer offered Kremer a cool-looking pen, which the company hoped he would place in the hands of George Clooney, the star of Intolerable Cruelty, due in theaters in October. But the prototype didn't work, and the maker didn't have one that did. So Kremer used a pen from his prop stash instead.