If you’ve ever come up with your Bucket List then you have a film to thank for it. Computer programmers had occasionally used the term in a different context, but its current meaning – the things you want to do before you die – originated from the 2007 film with the same name.
When fiction becomes reality
Film and TV aren’t just for passive viewing – they have the power to shape society.
The term ‘gaslighting’ comes from the 1938 British play Gas Light, which was adapted into a film in 1944. It tells the story of a husband who manipulates his wife into thinking she is insane; dimming and brightening the gas lights in their home when she is alone.
Spectre opens with an incredible shot of Daniel Craig, as James Bond, pursuing a villain through a Día de Muertos parade in Mexico City. The parade actually never existed before the film, but it was so popular that it prompted locals to put on their own real life version – it has been running annually ever since.
In one of Mad Men’s most famous scenes, Don Draper pitches an idea for an ad about ketchup: there is no product, just the tagline “Pass the Heinz”. In 2017, Heinz turned this fictitious campaign into a reality, creating three printed posters of classic American food (fries, burgers and steaks), without the picture of the product, the familiar colours of the brand, or anything else that could remind to anyone what the ad was really about. Anything except for the phrase “Pass the Heinz”.
The Oscar-winning film Sideways did more for Pinot Noir than any wine seller could have dreamed of. The film’s hero, a schoolmaster and wine snob played by Paul Giamatti, loathes merlot and loves pinot noir, its less favoured rival. In the weeks after the film opened Sainsbury’s reported a 20% surge in pinot sales, while across the US sales increased by 16%.
Rocket launches are synonymous with countdowns (T minus), but this wasn’t a scientific invention. Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang invented the countdown in his 1929 silent film Woman in the Moon, as a way of building suspense for the fictional launch. NASA adopted it as common practice decades later.
In the bestselling thriller, an assassin uses the birth certificates of dead babies to obtain fake passports. Unfortunately for the authorities, this publicised a genuine loophole in the system – the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) uncovered 1,200 cases involving the use of dead people’s identities, and it was only in 2012 (35 years after the book was released) that the loophole was closed.
In 1992 the 100-year-old Wensleydale creamery was in danger of closing, but luckily Wallace & Gromit came along. The iconic TV duo helped to revive the cheese’s popularity, and when the 2005 full-length film, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, was released, sales increased by 23%.