Let movies just be movies

SO REALLY, why even bother making the actual movie anymore?

Between the movie-theme trinkets packed in the fast food, the tie-in billboards on the streets outside the theater and the tape-loop advertising on the screen before the feature even starts, would anyone really notice if the movie itself just rolled up the aisle, past the concession stand with the movie-character popcorn buckets and out the door?

“Cars” opens Friday. But then, you know that already. You know that not just because Disney/Pixar is missing no opportunity to tell you -- it really needs this one to be big. You know because “Cars” is -- forgive me -- the biggest vehicle for salesmanship since the last presidential campaign.

State Farm Insurance courted the moviemakers for the tie-in rights to a “Cars” ad campaign. The first spot aired on “American Idol,” and you know how much that airtime costs. As a State Farm customer, I want to know how much of my uninsured-motorist premium is going to pay for this. Do I at least get a discount on the movie ticket if I show my proof of insurance?

AT&T; has its own “Cars” deal with Disney. The phone company promotes the movie (this extends to an online video game that begins with more pop-ups than a prairie dog colony) and, in exchange, Pixar creates animated TV ads for AT&T.; Sweeeeeeeet. “Cars” has a crowded back seat: Goodyear, Hertz, McDonald’s and Kelly Blue Book are along for the ride.

Are people that desperate to get into the movie business? Is all this so my State Farm agent can make offhand remarks to his golfing buddies about “our film”? It makes me nostalgic for the fuss about product placement. A few fleeting frames of a Coke can on a kitchen table in a fleeting scene? Small potatoes. Sorry, I mean small Tater Tots®.

Think of how the makers of recent movies must feel, not to have thought this up themselves. Surely there isn’t a divorce lawyer in town who wouldn’t have loved having Jennifer Aniston as a virtual client in bus-bench ads for “The Break-Up.” I know that the devil didn’t underwrite the cost of those murky, ominous “6-6-06” billboards, but the producers of the spawn-of-Satan remake of “The Omen” could have made some real change by teaming up with pharmaceuticals to make the movie into one huge and hugely profitable tie-in ad for birth control. The nervous-wreck right wing already thinks “An Inconvenient Truth” is an Al Gore campaign commercial. And what is that seagoing flop “Poseidon” if not one huge potential ad for Amtrak?

ALL THIS BEGAN because we consumers learned how to beat the Skinner box of advertising. The more we screened out full-frontal ad noise, the more advertisers went guerrilla. When they started putting ads on the inside doors of bathroom stalls, I was sure it couldn’t get any worse.

Then advertisers managed to cook up a deal with the Russians, delivering a fast-frozen, crispy-crust Pizza Hut salami pie to the International Space Station during a supply mission. That, I swore, had to be the highlight of lowbrow ad intrusiveness.

I finally lost it at the grocery store when I saw that the plain rubber logs that separate orders on the conveyor belt had been replaced with plastic batons bearing food ads on all four sides. I plan to steal one, to use it on the man who came up with that idea, to beat him to a pulp.

In a world like that, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner -- all that movie mogul crowd -- would be golf cart road kill. If they were such geniuses, how come they didn’t think up this stuff? How come no line of Jets and Sharks T-shirts to launch “West Side Story”? Where were the theme shower curtains timed to go on sale for the premiere of “Psycho”? If “The Wizard of Oz” was such a great movie, why wasn’t every little girl in 1939 America able to drag her parents to Sears for a pair of ruby slippers? And what kind of hit could “North by Northwest” be, with Cary Grant clambering all over those august schnozzes, if we didn’t see any ads for nasal spray?

Obviously, letting the movies just be movies isn’t good enough for 21st century moguls. With films sinking as often as they swim, with recent box office numbers trending south faster than college seniors at spring break, these ad tie-in deals will become the only reliable way to salvage an iffy investment.

Keep this in mind when you see “Cars.” The animated tale is about a car en route to win a big race who finds himself stuck in a backwater burg, where he learns that there are some things more important than riches, fame and sponsorship. But what you’re buying isn’t necessarily what they’re selling. That’s how you know it’s a fable.