Trailers pt. 2

Last week we talked a bit about the history of the movie trailer. This week we focus on different kinds of trailers.

First up we should separate them into three different camps; honest, misleading and dishonest trailers.

An honest trailer shows you what the movie is about, plain and simple. There's not much else to say, except that the biggest problem an honest trailer can have is when it shows too much. I still remember when I went to the movies back in 1996 and saw the trailer for The Rock. I turned to my friend and told him that this was either the whole movie or it would be the best action film of all time. As it turned out, it was pretty much the whole movie.

Misleading trailers don't outright lie, but they present a distorted version of the film. Like showing a scene with a famous actor, giving the impression that (s)he is prominently featured in the film, when in reality that is the only scene the actor is present.

There is a fine line between the misleading trailer and the dishonest trailer. But when it is crossed, you do not get to see the film you thought you were going to. Studios usually use these when a famous actor is riding high on a particular genre, but suddenly makes a movie that's very different. They know that audiences will flock to see a new movie like the previous ones so they shift the trailers focus and outright lie.

Studios also lie in the trailer if they become concerned that the audience won't like a movie, but since it's already made they can't shelve it without loosing all their money.

An example of when the trailer shows scenes that aren't in the film at all is Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988). The trailer shows Steve Martin pushing a small boy off a pier into the water, while Michael Caine shoves an ice-cream into a girls face, all while strolling down the street. This scene is not in the film.

Apart from these three categories we have the teaser trailer. The teaser is usually cut together from early footage and it's sole function is to give you a rough idea of the movie. Just enough to whet your appetite, or as the name implies, to tease you. Teasers can be misleading and dishonest, but they are usually so short and abstract that it's unfair to categorize them as such.

If you remember last weeks post, I mentioned that the Jazz Singer had a seven minute trailer. Now these days that's impossible, partially because no advertiser would make a commercial that long, but also because the MPAA forbids it. According to them, a trailer can be no longer than two and a half minutes long. Every major studio gets to exceed this once per year, and only if it is really necessary.

Apart from the length of the trailers, the MPAA also hands out the so called bands for the trailers. Not musical bands, mind you, but the usually green splash screen that appears before the trailer starts. The following preview has been approved... you know how they go. The green band denotes a trailer that conforms to all MPAA's rigid demands concerning content, including profanity, nudity, violence etc.

If the trailer does not conform, it gets a red band, denoting that it's for mature audiences only. You may have seen these though they are fairly rare, if not as rare as the yellow band, intended for internet only trailers. The yellow band is so rare, that I can't find more than screenshots of them.

Now I'm not saying that making a trailer is in any way easy, but it seems to me that Hollywood is getting worse at making them. It seems that the trailer for the newest Terminator film, Genisys, spoils the major twist in the movie. Yeah, that's smart... Sure I prefer an honest trailer above all, but don't spoil the twist, or even hint that there is a twist.

That's it for this subject and today's post. So until next time, have a great week!

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!