Reversal of Fortune

NOVEL IDEA Product placement is common enough in movies and TV shows that, when you see a lingering shot of Pierce Brosnan's James Bond driving a BMW or a bag of Doritos on ''Survivor,'' you can assume that a promotional deal with the manufacturer inserted that product there as a subtle form of advertising. Product placement is not, however, common in literary novels by well-known authors. That may change with a precedent-setting work by Fay Weldon, the British novelist best known for ''The Life and Loves of a She-Devil.'' She signed a deal for an undisclosed sum with Italian jeweler Bulgari, agreeing to mention the company or its products by name at least a dozen times in her next book. She went well beyond that, calling the novel ''The Bulgari Connection,'' making the jeweler's London store central to the plot, and avoiding mention of any other jewelers. Weldon told the New York Times that when Bulgari first approached her with the idea, she worried that ''my name will be mud forever.'' But she decided, ''I don't care. Let it be mud. They never give me the Booker Prize [England's top literary award] anyway.'' Her agent said, ''Does it matter if you are paid by a publisher or paid by an Italian jewelry firm?'' When the book is published in America in November, critics will surely decry it as a corruption of art and a betrayal of the reader, but Bret Easton Ellis is probably off kicking himself for spending his entire career dropping trendy brand names into his prose for free.

PASSING NOTES Troy Donahue, the Freddie Prinze Jr. of the late 1950s and early '60s, died of a heart attack at 65 on Sunday in Santa Monica. The teen idol shot to stardom opposite Sandra Dee in 1959's ''A Summer Place'' (the ''American Pie'' of its day), and went on to star in such then-racy films as ''Palm Springs Weekend'' and ''Parrish'' and the TV series ''Surfside Six'' and ''Hawaiian Eye.'' As he aged, he could only land cameos, including one in ''The Godfather Part II,'' where he played a character named Merle Johnson (Donahue's real name), and one in John Waters' ''Cry-Baby.'' He descended into drug and alcohol abuse, spending several months in the early 1980s living homeless in New York's Central Park, but he eventually found sobriety. Married four times (one wife was Suzanne Pleshette), he was engaged to opera singer Zheng Cao at the time of his death....

Make-up pioneer John Chambers, who won Oscars for his work 20 years before there was a competitive make-up category, died at 78 on August 25 at the Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement home in Woodland Hills, Calif. His best-known creations were Mr. Spock's ears on the original ''Star Trek'' and the monkey masks in the 1968 ''Planet of the Apes.''...

Film critic Pauline Kael, who influenced generations of critics and filmmkers from her perch at The New Yorker magazine, died at 82 yesterday at her home in Great Barrington, Mass. She revolutionized film criticism with an approach based more on her emotional response to a movie than to whether the film aspired to lofty art or simple entertainment. She lavishly praised movies that displayed creativity and craft, and she mercilessly flayed those marked by pretentiousness or pandering -- often in prose more vivid and memorable than the films themselves. The author of 10 books, including, ''I Lost It at the Movies,'' she was an important champion of American filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg during Hollywood's last golden age in the early 1970s. Suffering from Parkinson's disease, she retired from The New Yorker after 24 years in 1991, but her influence continues to be felt in the work of filmmakers like Wes Anderson (''Rushmore''), who still sought her advice and approval, and in the hundreds of her acolytes (sometimes known as ''Paulettes'') currently serving as critics for print and web outlets nationwide, emulating her by writing about movies as if they mattered.