Making Fast Money

Like him, or hate him, Morgan Spurlock has quickly become a staple of the documentary world. It all started with the premiere of Super Size Me at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. His personal adventures have taken us inside of the world of fast food, into the battlefields of the Middle East, and now into the world of product placement. Well… it’s not that simple. Spurlock set out to make a film about product placement and instead may have created the most meta movie ever produced.

The idea was to direct a documentary titled The Greatest Movie Ever Sold that would explore the growing world of product placement in television shows and movies. The twist being that the doc would be completely financed by product placement. Sounds simple enough, right? Actually, it’s a bit more complicated. The movie follows Spurlock as he tries to pitch the concept to various brands (Spurlock claims that almost 500 brands were contacted). As you might expect, finding twelve companies to cover the reported $1.5 million budget wasn’t easy — especially considering the controversial nature of the filmmaker.

So while the movie features cutaway segments helping to explain the process of how branded sponsorships end up in television and films, the majority of the documentary is Morgan’s quest — to find funding and creatively insert the product placements within his journey. For example, he drives everywhere in a Mini and drinks Pom during his interviews and meetings.

But it doesn’t stop there. Morgan also explores the experience of co-promotion — in this portion of the documentary we see how the film, the movie you’re currently watching, will be sold to consumers through cross promotional co-branded advertising. We even see Spurlock out promoting the documentary on late night talkshows (taped segments which will later run the week of theatrical release). So essentially, we’re watching a movie about the making of the movie we’re watching, from funding to week of release promotion. I doubt it will ever get more meta than that.

The more interesting segments involved a trip to Sao Paulo, where outdoor advertising has been banned by law, a trip to a company which Hollywood employs to test movie trailers, analyzing viewer brainwaves using MRI machines to find out which commercials created more of an emotional response, and a trip to a school which is selling advertisements inside of their school buses. But on a whole, I learned almost nothing new about the world of product placement. Those three examples have more to do with advertising as a whole than advertising inside of film.

Coming to a station near you any time soon?Photo: Tim GilliamPresident Obama doesn't seem
like he's going to let this high-speed rail thing go, making it a centerpiece
of the infrastructure section of his State of the Union Address last night:

Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans
access to high-speed rail. This could allow you to go places in half the time
it takes to travel by car. For some trips, it will be faster than flying --
without the pat-down. As we speak, routes in California and the Midwest are
already underway.

Sounds great, if you're a
high-speed rail fan. But last fall's midterm elections exposed GOP opposition
to Obama's plan to bring fast train service to all regions of the country. As a
gubernatorial candidate, Republican Scott Walker of Wisconsin made opposition
to a Milwaukee-Madison high-speed route a centerpiece of his campaign. After he
was elected, he
handed the feds back $810 million that would have funded the line, on the
grounds that it would be too expensive for the state to run. It was a move
echoed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's rejection of funds for a regular-speed
rail tunnel under the Hudson River (Christie is fighting hard not to repay money the feds already spent on that project).

And in California, which
ended up getting some of that Wisconsin money, there's been controversy over the first phase of the state's own HSR project, with detractors calling it "a train to
nowhere" and farm communities worried about the impact on available land.

So it's notable that Obama
doesn't seem to be backing down from his push to make HSR part of his legacy.
That 80 percent figure is pretty aggressive.

The president also hammered
away at the need for the need to continue upgrading and repairing the
transportation infrastructure we already have:

So
over the last two years, we've begun rebuilding for the 21st century, a project
that has meant thousands of good jobs for the hard-hit construction industry.
And tonight, I'm proposing that we redouble those efforts.

We'll
put more Americans to work repairing crumbling roads and bridges. We'll make
sure this is fully paid for, attract private investment, and pick projects
based [on] what's best for the economy, not politicians.

Obama's
stance was cheered by Transportation for
America (T4A) a coalition group calling for a reform of the nation's
transportation system. At the same time, the group's statement also acknowledges the difficulty of
getting projects funded. From the statement released by T4A's executive director, James Corless, today:

We were thrilled to hear the President come right
out and say that investment in transportation and other infrastructure is
central to rebuilding and growing our economy. An upfront investment in the
most-needed, clean transportation projects is a great opportunity to create
near-term jobs and lay the groundwork for the future economy.

He acknowledged that money will be tight and we
have to make the best of use it. That requires fixing the 20th century
infrastructure -- our crumbling roads and bridges -- as we build out the
infrastructure for the 21st. That certainly includes
high-speed rail, but it also means helping communities get moving on
long-planned networks of light rail, street cars, rapid buses, and making
progress on road reconstruction to make our streets safer people walking,
biking and driving.

The President's vision for infrastructure is not just about
near-term construction jobs. It is, as he said, about growing new businesses,
livable neighborhoods and dynamic regions that can attract a young and mobile
workforce and compete with our international competitors. It's about the jobs
associated with new transportation technologies
and manufacturing modern transit vehicles, everything from real time
information systems to make our highways and transit corridors smarter, to the
new rail cars being built today by United Streetcar in Oregon that can breathe
new life into our cities and suburbs.

T4A's Equity Caucus, which focuses on
the needs of poor, working-class, and minority Americans, had this to say:

[O]ur inadequate, outdated,
and underfunded transportation systems are keeping too many struggling
Americans -- young and old, rural and urban -- from fully connecting and
contributing to the national economy.

 Millions of Americans
rely exclusively on public transit, walking, or biking to get to work, to the
doctor's office, to school, and to the grocery store. Nearly 20 percent of
African American households, 14 percent of Latino households, and 13 percent of
Asian households live without a car. Fifteen percent of Native Americans must
travel more than 100 miles to access basic services.

 Smarter transportation
investments can unleash the under-realized economic power of communities across
America.

All this comes in the context
of a transportation reauthorization bill that has been stalled for the past year and a
half in Congress -- and that was when the Democrats controlled both the House and the
Senate. With Republicans now in control of the House, things are bound to get more complicated. Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), the new Republican chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in the House, had this to say about the president's call for more infrastructure spending (via Transportation Nation):

After the Administration derailed a major six-year transportation
bill in 2009, it is encouraging that they are now on board with getting
infrastructure projects and jobs moving again. However, just another
proposal to spend more of the taxpayers’ money, when we have billions of
dollars sitting idle tied up in government red tape, will never get our
economic car out of the ditch.

We’ve got to do more with less to improve our infrastructure in a fiscally responsible manner.

Central to all future
discussion about infrastructure enhancement and repair will be the question of
money. With lawmakers avowedly against raising the gas tax, finding the cash to
build new systems -- or to stop the proverbial crumbling of the old ones -- is
going to be the biggest problem.

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