{"id":11873,"date":"2014-07-16T20:43:33","date_gmt":"2014-07-17T02:43:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=11873"},"modified":"2014-07-16T20:43:33","modified_gmt":"2014-07-17T02:43:33","slug":"a-brief-history-of-the-modern-movie-trailer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=11873","title":{"rendered":"A Brief History of the Modern Movie Trailer"},"content":{"rendered":"

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, movie trailers were just commercials, disposable ads for upcoming films. Then, in 1998, came the trailer for what was then the most eagerly awaited movie in years: Star Wars: Episode I \u2013 The Phantom Menace<\/em>. Fans bought tickets to Meet Joe Black<\/em> just to see the Star Wars<\/em> clip and walked out before the supposed main attraction started. In a pre-broadband, pre-YouTube era, fans downloaded the Phantom Menace<\/em> promo millions of times, poring over it for clues. And an evolution that had begun more than 20 years earlier finally became evident: the modest movie trailer had grown into an attraction in itself, one as worthy of scrutiny and appreciation as the art form it advertised.<\/p>\n

Today, the Internet has made available to us a cornucopia of trailers we can watch when we want, as often as we want, for free. In addition to tracking the box office, Variety<\/em> and The Hollywood Reporter<\/em> now chart the most popular new trailers as well, with the top clips scoring in the millions of streaming views. (The Fault in Our Stars<\/em> trailer, at this writing, has drawn more than 25 million viewers, more than twice as many as have bought tickets to the hit movie itself.) And online critics can now give close readings of trailers the way they do for full-length films.<\/p>\n

The humble film promo wasn\u2019t necessarily built to withstand such intense scrutiny. But over the past 50 years or so, trailers have matured into bite-size pop-art commodities, worthy of both critical study and mass consumption. (Indeed, it\u2019s easy to watch the online clips the way we eat popcorn, one morsel after another, after another.) Here\u2019s a brief history of how trailers have come into their own.<\/p>\n

1940s to 1950s: The Monopoly<\/strong><\/p>\n

Before 1960, trailers for Hollywood movies were a lot like the movies they promoted: products of a small monopoly. They were all created by a company called National Screen Service<\/a>, which compiled clips into two- or three-minute promos and rented them to movie theaters, tossing a kickback to the studios that supplied them with the footage. (In the silent era, the ads would follow the movies \u2014 rather than preceding them as they do today \u2014 which is why they\u2019re called \u201ctrailers.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Watch TCM for a few hours, and you\u2019ll see plenty of these old-school trailers, all made according to a house style marked by lots of on-screen text, breathless voice-overs, and hyperbolic superlatives (\u201cColossal!\u201d \u201cStupendous!\u201d).<\/p>\n

1960s: Directors Take Charge<\/strong><\/p>\n

The trailer took the first major step in its modern evolution when Alfred Hitchcock broke with tradition to appear in his own trailer for his 1960 game-changing thriller, Psycho<\/em>. Instead of featuring footage from the film, the six-and-a-half-minute short showed the Master of Suspense touring the Bates Motel set like a crime scene, and ended with him setting up \u2014 but not spoiling \u2014 the film\u2019s shower scene.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Other auteurs followed suit. Rather than describe the controversial premise of Lolita<\/em> (1962), Stanley Kubrick constructed an abstract, geometric set of images that posed the meta-question of how Hollywood had managed to adapt Vladimir Nabokov\u2019s scandalous novel in the first place.<\/div>\n

He followed that up with a memorable promo for Dr. Strangelove \u2014 <\/em>which would become one of the most celebrated trailers of all time \u2014 selling the cutting-edge black comedy via strobe-speed cuts and images from the film that seemed random and absurdly out of context. (The clip anticipated the subliminal imagery forced on Malcolm McDowell\u2019s Alex as a behavioral modification tool seven years later in Kubrick\u2019s A Clockwork Orange.) \u201cThe evolution of trailers in the 1960s mirrors the evolution of advertising,\u201d says Mark Woollen, whose LA-based Mark Woollen & Associates<\/a> is one of Hollywood\u2019s leading trailer boutiques. He cites the still-influential Dr. Strangelove promo: \u201cPeople still go back and look at it \u2014 it\u2019s as fresh today as it was in the 1960s.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The monopoly of National Screen Service began to erode as studios, sensing a shift in a way to engage audiences, began to assert ownership in the creation of trailers \u2014 which paralleled the rise of auteurist film-making and adult-targeted movies.<\/p>\n

1970s to 1980s: Blockbusters Change the Game<\/strong><\/p>\n

That auteurist era is said to have ended with the coming of wide-release blockbusters like Jaws<\/em> (1975) and Star Wars <\/em>(1977) and just as movies became more formulaic, so did trailers.<\/p>\n

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For the next two decades or so, there were some common elements in trailers: the slow demise of on-screen text coupled with the rise of MTV-style quick-cut editing that emphasized the idea of a movie as a ride to be experienced, rather than a story featuring unique characters.<\/p>\n

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Easily the most familiar component of this new shift was the reliance on a \u201cVoice\u201d \u2014 a Burning Bush-worthy baritone usually delivered by either Dan LaFontaine and Hal Douglas, legendary voice-over artists who\u2019ve provided the vocals heard in thousands of trailers over the last 50 years. Watch Douglas parody himself in a promo for 2002\u2019s Comedian