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Numbers Versus Art in the Trailer Business
The Politics of Trailer Cutting
Tony Silver has been producing trailers since the 1960s, with credits including the memorable Alien (1979) teaser. |
In an industry blessed with some of society’s most creative minds, one might wonder why the great majority of movie trailers feel as if they could have rolled off an assembly line. While other types of advertising are constantly reinventing themselves and trying new approaches to promotion, the theatrical trailer seems to have settled into a cozy, standard, predictable form: two-and-a-half minutes in length, offering a preview of virtually every plot point in the movie and almost always stumped by some disembodied, avuncular narrator telling us exactly what the movie is supposed to be about. Maybe this shouldn’t seem surprising when so many new movies feel as if they, too, are rolling off assembly lines.
“To a very large degree, it would not be wrong to say now that trailers are made by the numbers,” verifies Tony Silver, who has been producing them since the 1960s and whose numerous campaign credits include Platoon, Dances With Wolves, The Remains of the Day, The Truman Show and Miller’s Crossing. “And rightly or wrongly, no audio visual material for movies goes out without being extensively researched. The marketing goal is to get the maximum advance probable approval for the content of the trailer for a particular demographic.”
But does it really have to be that cut and dry? Couldn’t movies benefit from new and innovative ways of making trailers and thinking about campaigns? An experienced moviemaker himself, Silver says he likes to approach a trailer by thinking in terms of “not what is the story of this movie, but what is the experience of the movie.” He cites an example of this kind of execution in the teaser he created for Alien (on larger productions, the teaser is a shorter trailer that precedes by months—sometimes even a year—the conventional trailer and usually has more of a conceptual bent).
LA’s Trailer Park creates approximately 90 percent of all trailers made with credits including Moulin Rouge (2001). |
In the Alien teaser Silver wanted to capture the “sense of fright and dread” that was in the movie without showing much of what was in the movie itself. When he finished, he had used only one shot from the original production; the rest of his teaser was created on a tabletop and animation stand. Silver’s memorable campaign showed a leathery, egg-shaped object that almost looked like a planet. Bright light streamed from a crack in the object as it moved slowly through space and a screaming, crying sound accompanied the now-famous warning on the screen: “In space no one can hear you scream.”
“For me,” Silver professes, “the trailers that are most interesting and work best don’t scatter the energy by trying to push a bunch of buttons, but create one button or two buttons which are created out of an original ability of the trailermaker to somehow convey the sense of a large, complex, rich, exciting, involving, compelling experience that you can immerse yourself in completely.”
“The fact that there is desktop editing can give the
director time to come up with his own campaign. Maybe then
we’ll see an example of some audacious
trailer that blows away the industry, but it hasn’t
happened yet.” |
Ironically, he found that one of the hardest things he has ever done was making a trailer for his own film, Arisman: Facing the Audience, a documentary about the life and work of the charismatic, mystical, engaging artist, Marshall Arisman. “Talk about boiling your project down into two minutes!” he laments. What he found most difficult was thinking in terms “of a completely different kind of sense of elapsed time in the length of the scene and the length of the moment.”
“It’s getting more and more rare to have the occasion where you are not obligated to telling the story in a trailer,” notes Tim Nett, a trailer producer at Trailer Park in Los Angeles, one of about 10 companies that produce approximately 90 percent of all trailers made. “When trailers are tested, we find that audiences want to know what the movie is about and they want to understand it the best they can.” After testing, Nett says that he gets a very detailed breakdown of what people are—and are not—responding to and goes from there.
Within this highly market-driven process, however, editors, in collaboration with graphic designers, sound editors and music supervisors, are being asked to make much more of a contribution and to make creative decisions in the process of creating a trailer. Nett often begins a project by handing the movie and the copy material to an editor, shutting the door, letting him or her combine the elements and seeing what happens. Silver also notes that editors are taking on a more significant role in the production of trailers and that the craft has become “ever more sophisticated, with all kinds of advancements—which make it a more visceral, more exciting and much more technical process.”
New developments in desktop editing are changing everything—not only in trailers, but in feature film production, as well. It’s surprising, for instance, that Trailer Park, with credits for films like Pearl Harbor, Moulin Rouge, Black Hawk Down and X-Men cuts exclusively on Final Cut Pro, a product, Nett reminds us, that “anyone can buy at the software store down the street.” The recent advancements Apple has made in Final Cut Pro—specifically in terms of edit decision lists, graphics integration and open media transfer—have opened new doors, unlocked new talent and allowed more complex things to be done on lower and lower budgets.
So what about the exciting and increasing pool of smaller films? Why is it rare to not even see the mold broken here? Jason Kliot, producer and co-founder of Open City Films and Blow Up Films, whose films include Miguel Arteta’s Chuck and Buck and Dan Minahan’s Series 7: The Contenders, and who is currently producing a number of digital features for blow-up to 35mm, admits that even his company, which is “committed to working with visionary filmmakers,” has never really let loose what he would consider a “groundbreaking trailer.”
Steven Soderbergh conceptualized and cut the trailer for Full Frontal (2002). |
Kliot feels the process tends to often get bogged down on the distribution end. He has observed that distributors hire companies to make their trailers and that they try to make these companies work quickly to save money. So in the end there is very little room, time, resources or motivation to experiment with the accepted form. “For creativity, you need there to be more of a willingness to take risks—and that’s never the case.”
But he’s also excited about the advancements in desktop editing: Kliot thinks that having access to Final Cut Pro will allow directors and editors to make their own trailers. “The fact that there is desktop editing can give the director time to come up with his own campaign. Maybe then we’ll see an example of some audacious trailer that blows away the industry, but it hasn’t really been happening yet.”
Matthew Cohen, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Creative Advertising at Miramax, admits that executives would rather play it safe. He points, however, to a trailer such as the one for Steven Soderbergh’s Full Frontal as an attempt to try something new. Soderbergh conceptualized and cut the trailer himself (in fact he cut the whole film himself on Final Cut Pro). Soderbergh’s idea simply involves cast names running on black against dialogue from the movie. There are no scenes in the trailer from the movie whatsoever.
Asked about this unusual departure from the typical Miramax trailer and if he thinks Soderbergh’s idea works, Cohen says: “The Full Frontal piece tells me about the movie. It tells me the genre of the movie. It tells me that it’s about people, that it’s modern, about relationships and that it’s about confusion in the modern world. That might sound very broad and cliché but it was a really fantastic way of unfolding those complicated ideas.”
It remains to be seen whether or not Soderbergh’s trailer is just an anomaly or the beginning of a trend and whether we will see other departures in film marketing. “As we go forward,” Cohen hypothesizes, “there might be less and less testing done by braver executives with a good track record. Because the testing ultimately is going to reveal the same thing—and it’s going to homogenize everything. And that becomes a death knell.”
Whatever new concepts and techniques might be considered
in the making of trailers, the bottom line is that the priority
will ultimately always be selling the movie. “In the end,”
Tony Silver concludes, “no matter how creative you think you
are, it really comes down to what the movie can be to an audience
and how you can faithfully convey to the audience the idea that
a really entertaining or valuable experience awaits them.”
MM
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This story was published in the Summer 2002 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Numbers vs. Art: / The Politics of Trailer Cutting
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