But now the Bond franchise is much more canny, less hung up on being stylish and more likely to go after something like McDonalds”. A modern Bond movie can expect to make $10m from product placements at $30,000 a shot.Period films might appear safe havens in this respect, but not according to Tiffany Whittome, one of the few product placement specialists who would actually speak to me. She has supplied Jameson Whiskey for the currently filming Norah – the Joyce biopic featuring Ewan McGregor. “Alcohol is always easy to place in period movies because the designs don’t change much; cigarettes would be too, but there are too many legal problems”.Where will it end? Fowler, whose company designed campaigns like that for Trainspotting, tells me he’s seen the George Lucas list of “endorsement opportunities” connected to The Phantom Menace. It’s slightly mindbending by all accounts, worked out with a vaguely paranoid and surreal intricacy that one suspects overshadows the energy put into making the actual, boring old film.

Fox has dreamed up an astonishingly non-ironic (and, sadly, secret) list of products they will permit to be associated with each character The possibilities are mind boggling. Will Darth Vader be the new Milk Tray man? Will R2D2 whizz round the kitchen floor with a bottle of Flash? Will Natalie Portman’s teenage queen dab her acne with Clearasil? “There’s this new character called Jar-Jar,” reveals Fowler, referring to the streetwise alien with an absurd Jamaican accent already dubbed the most irritating thing about the film. “I believe that the right company would be allowed to create `an official Jar-Jar three-bean salad’ for the right fee paid for licensing, of course.”The idea that someone actually sat down and decided that a three, not a two or four bean salad, was appropriate for this character, is pretty near unfathomable. Hollywood clearly has learnt a lot from the influx of product-savvy directors in the late Seventies who cut their teeth shooting commercials, notably British talents like the Scott brothers and Alan Parker. Only recently Tony Kaye and Jake Scott – son of Ridley – have followed the same post-advertising trajectory from Nike trainers to personal trainers, as have the directors of Waking Ned and the upcoming hip-hop movie Belly.With such hard-nosed directors at the helm, Hollywood has woken up to commercial vistas undreamt of by the likes of Louis B Mayer. And by the time Disney reversed a serious decline in its fortunes in the early Eighties by ruthlessly strip-mining its own brand, everyone had cottoned on.

Merchandising can now end up driving the whole process.Films like Toy Story give you the feeling that the merchandising angle was dreamt up first. But for bare-faced, consumer-culture brazenness, Spielberg’s Jurassic Park takes the prize: one scene actually features a toy shop selling Jurassic Park merchandising (step into the foyer, folks and buy a velociraptor).We’re now completely used to the endless twistings and turnings of “ironic” post-modern culture. We’re even used to seeing reverse product placement, firms trying to produce Duff beer (a spoof beer in the Simpsons) in real life or the imaginary sweets in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory from whistling lollipops onwards being reproduced. Even Fly Fishing by JR Hartley was cynically contrived for the Christmas market after its fictional counterpart was endlessly rehearsed in a whimsical Yellow Pages ad.Commercialism is a fact of life (but not the only fact, despite Alan Parker’s pernicious dictats on the subject) that is here to stay. Hollywood will find ever more ingenious ways to sell itself because that is what Hollywood is about. Multi-media DVD and the Internet offer even more effective means of self-exploitation.

So, don’t mind the three-bean salad or the ads within films within films. The true irony about product placement is that we’ve learnt to accept it as a necessary, even faintly engaging practice.. HOW EXHILARATING it must be to be one of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s 12 dancers, pitching into reckless criss-crossing, with Steve Reich’s percussion throbbing in your ears. When in 1971 Reich wrote Drumming for bongo drums, marimbas and glockenspiels, he considered it a culmination of his musical processes. When last year Keersmaeker used it for a dance piece of the same name, she was casting her gaze at her beginnings and revealing how far she has moved. Those beginnings were Fase in 1982, the second work of a 22-year-old Belgian choreographer.