Guess Who Needs It

One night a couple of years ago, when the candy-butcher hero of Gypsy appeared on stage, a man in the audience said to the adman sitting next to him: "Hey, you're missing the boat here. That guy ought to be a Butterfinger salesman." Since the first man was sales director of the company that makes Butterfingers, the adman was on the phone next morning to Warner Bros, offering to spend $3,000,000 on a promotional campaign if Warner would plug Butterfingers in the movie version of Gypsy. Now, in the wide-screen Gypsy, Candy Salesman Karl Maiden spiritedly says: "Crispy Butterfingers are better than those plain chocolate bars."

Sneakin commercials are nothing new to the movies, but the studios have become increasingly brazen about hustling advertising. Paramount now has a full $5,000,000 in advertisers' money tied up in promotion of its pictures, and Columbia was happy to cast Danny Kaye as The Man from the Diners' Club, a movie that makes the point that love cannot help but come to the man who carries a credit card.

Most tie-ins are subtler, but not much. Planters Peanuts and Royal Crown Cola constitute Jerry Lewis' diet in The Nutty Professor. Rewarding him roughly at the rate of a dollar a calorie, the two companies have paid $250,000 to plug the movie, including blurbs on 40 million peanut sacks and millions of six-packs of cola. The Ideal Toy Corp. has pledged $3,000,000 in promotion to have its products shown in a forthcoming Lewis film. Debbie Reynolds' dog will soon go dough-eyed over Red Heart Dog Food in My Six Loves. In The Manchurian Candidate, the camera lingers long on the marquee of Jilly's Restaurant, as if it were the only one in New York. The owner is a pal of Star Frank Sinatra, and the plug was merely a favor.

Big money seldom changes hands. The film shows the product; the product maker advertises the film on billboards and packages. But smalltime money deals still go on, of course, with advertisers making direct contributions to stagehands, prop-men and even actors to slip their products before the cameras. Most stars still refuse to have any part of it. "I tried to get Cary Grant in on a tie-in," says one Hollywood flack, "but he just looked at me and said, 'Who needs it?' "

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