Trailers pt.1

Trailers, we've all seen trailers. Love them or hate them, they are an essential part of the film industry. However you feel about them, trailers are as old as cinema itself, right? Or, in fact older, if you accept that the first trailer was for the theater.

In 1913, Nils Granlund handled advertising for the Loew Theater chain and in November that year he produced a short film as advertising for The pleasure seekers. It was made up of actual rehearsal footage, and it became a huge success, setting a trend for the cinema that's, still today, extremely active.

In those days, trailers were shown after the movie, thus the name trailer as they trailed after the feature presentation, but the problem was that the audience tended to leave after the film was done. Therefore they started showing them before the film, to what is essentially a captive audience.

Of course, the earliest days of cinema was the silent era, so it wasn't until the talkies came along, pioneered by The Jazz Singer (generally considered the first talkie) in 1927 that trailers started to bloom. The jazz singer had a whopping seven minute long trailer, something unthinkable by today's standards.

As the film makers got more used to making trailers, they added a new feature to them, or rather between them: cartoons. The perhaps greatest example of these were the old Looney Tunes shorts. If you ever wondered why Bugs, Daffy, etc. sometimes addresses the theater, it's for this reason. They were never intended to be seen at home.

From between approximately 1920 to the end of the 50's all trailers were made by National Screen Service, who had ironclad contracts with everyone on Hollywood. These trailers invariably show scenes from the film covered with huge letters like THE GREATEST LOVE STORY EVER TOLD and dramatic stuff like that, and they were accompanied by voice overs equally bombastic.

With the eventual demise of the NSS, trailers started to become more artistic and unpredictable. Stanley Kubrick led the way here with his trailer for Doctor Strangelove, but it wasn't until Spielberg’s Jaws in 1975 that the trailer starts to look modern in our eyes. Jaws is basically the first blockbuster, and it's only fitting that it's trailers were equally groundbreaking. Universal used $1.8 million promoting the film, including an incredible $700,000 on television advertising alone with two dozen 30-second advertisements airing each night on prime-time TV.

Other noteworthy trailers at the time were Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, George Lucas's Star Wars and Ridley Scott's Alien. The modern trailer was well and truly born.

Here the history of the trailer becomes a bit muddy, but standouts include Independence Day for showing a major spoiler (the white house being destroyed) and The Blair Witch Project for breaking open the door for the found footage genre, with the added bonus of using the internet as a part of the trailer campaign.

Naturally the scope of this post is woefully inadequate to properly analyze this subject, so I have to cut it short here. We'll continue next time, so until then, have a great week!