iProduct Placement: Burn After Reading

Nicole Martinelli ()

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In “Burn After Reading,” the Coen brother’s black comedy about privacy and politics, Brad Pitt plays Chad, an amiable goof who works in a gym.

Along with co-worker Frances McDormand, who thinks plastic surgery will buy her love, he tries to sell a memoir from a former CIA agent found in a diskette left behind at the gym.
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Chad is almost always plugged in to an iPod (and singing out loud) even when he’s on a stake out — as shown in the movie poster. Pitt doesn’t have a big part, but gets a lot of mileage out of playing a dim bulb in a stellar cast including George Clooney,  John Malkovich and Tilda Swinton.

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About the author

nicole_martinelli

Nicole Martinelli is a San Francisco native who has lived in Milan and Florence, Italy. She's written for Wired.com, The New York Times and Newsweek. You can find her on Twitter , Facebook and Google+.

If you're doing something new/cool that's Apple related, email her about it.

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  • imajoebob

    Unless it’s an iPod touch, I have doubt that it’s product placement. Barring seeing the credits, of course. The white iPod is so ubiquitous that using anything else would be distracting or confusing to the audience. Everyone knows it’s an iPod. Everyone knows what it does. Everyone knows what he’s using it for. It automatically adds a dimension to the character without bothering to explain it.

    The lack of a big, glowing Apple logo on the player has me more confident. Remember all those “high tech” movies in the nineties that had big-ass AT&T logos all over the telephones? I had the same models at work and there was barely a logo on the base. I didn’t really notice product placements until movies starting using “Poppy Cola” and “Taco Barn” or driving in really odd cars with no marque on them.

    Coke will pay to have Brad Pitt drink a Fresca. Dell will pay for George Clooney use their laptop. Verizon will pay to have everyone talk on their phone (with that big white logo). But Apple doesn’t need to pay to have someone use an iPod classic. A Zune just doesn’t translate.

  • http://www.wickedcooltech.com/index.php/356/time-capsule-shows-up-on-life.html Chris Maxcer

    I’m not sure if the iPod is a product placement in “Burn After Reading” . . . but I’ve noticed quite a bit of Apple product placements lately. Most recently, on Monday’s episode of “24″ on Fox, a bad guy plugged into a USB port on what looked a heckuva lot like the backside of a Mac mini (hospital scene), and then later, when Jack was on the run, it looked like he swiped an iPhone, and then broke into a car that had a black MacBook inside, which he then used, of course, by plugging in a Sprint USB dongle — most definitely a product placement shot for that one! Chloe may have been using some Macs and monitors, too . . . but I forget . . . sometimes I actually pay attention to the actors and what they’re saying.