a streetwise little focker

When I was in North Carolina for Christmas, my parents and I went to see Little Fockers, partly because nothing else was playing at the local one-screen theater that day. The movie's set in Chicago, and there's a scene in which Robert De Niro's character is stalking his son-in-law, played by Ben Stiller, on the el, but before he gets on the train he sticks a magazine between the doors to keep them from closing.

I was pretty sure the magazine was an issue of StreetWise, probably from the fall of 2009, when Little Fockers was being filmed at the Sheridan el stop in Chicago's Wrigleyville neighborhood. I worked as a volunteer proofreader for StreetWise from March 2009 to June of last year, so I let Ben Cook, the magazine's production manager, know about the "product placement" in the movie. He replied:

I’m glad you caught that! About a year ago the prop guy for that movie came and got a bunch of issues from us, but we kind of figured that it wouldn’t be in the movie, or if it was it would be under 30 other magazines in the background behind an extra’s big head ... something like that. Now I have to see the movie that I never would have seen otherwise, just so I can see Robert De Niro holding something you and I worked on. How weird and amazing!