While I haven’t made it to the MIT’s Time Traveler convention on May 07, 2005 yet, I have just witnessed the controversial apparition of a very suspicious time traveling, cross-dressing extra in an old Charlie Chaplin film. And I think I can say now with some degree of certainty that we may be witnessing one of the first experiments in temporal product placement by a time traveling, promotional mastermind, none other than the film maker, George Clarke himself.
The time traveler, film maker and possible cross dresser, George Clarke recently came to the world’s attention courtesy of the odd, anachronistic behavior of a suspicious background character talking on a cell phone at the premiere of a film in 1928 called The Circus starring Charlie Chaplin – long before cell phones or youtube were even invented.
“Being a filmmaker, I tend to watch a lot of the background action anyway…” says George Clarke in the video below. “…so I went to the Hollywood premiere in 1928 at Mann’s Chinese Theatre, and a certain scene happened just in the opening of it where I was kind of stumped…”
Now a film maker at a Hollywood premiere in 1928 is nothing unusual. Neither is a film maker with something to promote. But what is very unusual here is a time traveling film maker going back and forth in time to promote films in this very unusual way. For George to travel in a loop from the 1928 premiere of The Circus disguised in bad period costume just to be captured on film talking on a cell phone – which he freely admits is identical to his own phone – and then travel BACK to present day Belfast to use his appearance to make THIS short film for youtube (below) all to promote his own future films, which haven’t even been released yet… well like all good time travel stories, it makes your head spin!
I believe we may be looking at one of a new, sophisticated breed of temporal advertisers, traveling back and forth in time to promote products and films before they have even been invented or released yet! Clearly George’s flux capacitor is working much better than my own! If I run into George I fully intend to scan him with my updated The Monstrometer, now that it can detect the likes of him.
I include his video above so you can see for yourself, the labyrinth of products within films within films promoted by Time Traveler George Clarke and I challenge Mr. Clarke to use his time traveling skills to do something more than crashing movie premieres of the past to promote his films of the future. Like help me and Graham get to the MIT convention in 2005 so we can get some of those pretzels! We’re hungry!
