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SCMS15: ‘”It wasn’t as good as the trailer”: Trailer Talk and Trailer History’ Keith M. Johnston

24/6/2015

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Back in March, the Watching the Trailer team (Fred Greene, Keith M. Johnston, and Ed Vollans) travelled to Montreal for the Society of Cinema & Media Studies (SCMS) annual conference. As well as meeting new and old friends in the trailer / promotional studies scene, we were there to present a series of (inter-related) papers on our ongoing audience research project.

Given we can’t share the physical presentations with you, here’s the next best thing: a series of blog posts that consider specific aspects of those papers. The first of these is Keith’s exploration of how some of the results of our audience research echo historical commentaries on the trailer from the film industry and general press… enjoy!
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In 1954, London’s Evening Standard published a cartoon of a man and woman outside a cinema. One of them (it appears to be the woman) says “It wasn’t as good as the trailer!” That cartoon was then used in an advertisement for British trailer company National Screen Service, as reproduced here.

In 2014, over 50 respondents to our first trailer audience survey made similar comments:

  • ‘The [Man of Steel] trailer was fantastic… [it] had a better story, better pacing, better use of music, and stronger emotions than the film did.’ (#143)
  • ‘Trailers are often better than the film’ (#308)
  • ‘The [Saving Mr Banks] trailer made me happy… [the film had an] overall lack of storytelling in comparison to the trailer’ (#179)
My immediate response upon seeing such overlaps and repetitions of language, particularly across a 60 year span of time, was to delve back into trailer history, to explore whether there were other instances where audience comments from our survey were mirrored by earlier thoughts, ideas and arguments about the place of the trailer. To be clear, I’m not saying that this earlier discourse caused the audience responses we’ve been getting, more that these are early examples of the narrative that tends to emerge whenever you talk to someone about a trailer.


So, let’s look at some specific examples to show you what I’m talking about:


‘Trailers these days show a summary of the absolute entire damn plot.’ (#29)

Ryan Gibley has argued that while they were once ‘a sophisticated tease’, modern trailers are ‘annihilating the expectation of excitement, the bliss of ignorance’ (‘Trailer trash’ New Statesmen 13 March 2006, p.42) – while the language of our survey respondents might be softer, there is a partial comparison here: 47 making direct claims that the trailer revealed too much. However, contrary to Gibley’s other claim, there is little evidence from trailer history that points to any sort of Golden Age of trailer sophistication, or that trailers were ever coy about making such plot revelations.

85 years before Gibley’s article (5-9 years after the film trailer was first used in cinema advertising: the debate about what the first trailer was, or when it was released, is a story for a whole other blog) the tone of such industry talk was – initially – kinder. The U.S. Exhibitors’ Trade Review noted that ‘theatres appreciate the artistic and mechanical efficiency’ of the trailer, while a film producer ‘knows that the public is receiving a true and definite conception of what his pictures stand for”.’ (Nov 5 1921, p1597) The idea of a ‘true… conception’ seems far removed from the experience of at least some of our participants, and the wider online debate around trailers regularly returns to the idea of complaints or frustrations over the ‘spoiler’ text.

Positive talk about trailers did not last very long, however. In the early sound era, The New York Times’ Mordaunt Hall demanded trailers of ‘a more judicious fashion, with a conservative wording and more rational and less sensational selection of the excerpts from the film’ (‘Those Exuberant Screen Barkers’ The New York Times July 28 1929, p.5), while Howard T. Lewis insisted that trailer sequences were ‘not always chosen with real appreciation… they do not fairly represent the real character of the play’ (The Motion Picture Industry, New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1933, p. 249). While other opinions were published, they are in a minority: it seems clear that this part of debate around trailer content has been going on for decades, with no end in sight. While I’m not attempting to answer why this recurs so frequently, it is one of the lines of enquiry we hope to pursue in the next phase of our audience research.
 

‘Trailers can misrepresent a film as their primary aim is promotion/selling’ (#385)

While this respondent understood why a trailer might misrepresent / mislead, many other participant responses were irate about this perceived trend in trailer production. Through the 1930s, there are regular recurrences of this claim that trailers were too loud, over-revelatory, and inclined to misrepresentation of the film. Film Daily opined that the trailer was ‘too elaborately filled with superlatives’ (May 7 1935, p. 8), ‘annoyingly bombastic’ (May 20 1935, p. 8), going so far as to circulate questionnaires asking if ‘trailers show too much of the coming attractions’ (December 2 1936, p. 6).

This initial burst of critical trailer talk seems to culminate in a 1948 special exhibitor’s committee. It made 15 recommendations to the trailer industry, which they felt had ‘lost track of the basic function of a trailer’ (‘Trailer Improvement Urged in Survey’, Film Daily March 3 1948, p. 6).


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The recommendations make interesting reading, and we’ve reproduced the list in full here. There are obvious parallels with modern trailer discourse, not least the request that “Trailers not reveal too much of the plot or too many of the best gags” (another area where history and current audience responses overlap). Some of the recommendations may seem irrelevant or frivolous to a modern audience: for example, #11, advising that “Trailers should avoid use of costumes wherever possible”. While it is unclear if this relates to a perception that historical dramas were a ‘hard sell’ (in 1948, at least), the survey as a whole is a fascinating glimpse into the exhibitor perception of how a trailer should work.


 



“All different aspects of film shown - a great taste” (#488)

Like a trailer, this blog can only offer a taste of almost 100 years of trailer ‘talk’ that was published in the industry and popular press: but it is clear that such ‘talk’ has tended to focus on the negative (I’ll tell you more about the positive another time). The dominant terms have remained the same for much of that period: ‘Misleading’, ‘reveals too much’, ‘best bits’, ‘bombastic’ and ‘too many’ recur through these commentaries, and most of them crop up (to different degrees) in our recent audience survey. 

So what does it all mean? 

Well, we’re still trying to make sense of that. 

There isn’t a simple cause-and-effect model here, but there does seem to be a cumulative discursive effect that builds up across the decades, a calcification of popular discussions of the trailer within particular frames or boundaries. Despite such slings and arrows, the trailer has lived to tell the tale – and is arguably bigger and more influential than at any point in that history – such ‘talk’ appears to have done little to dent that growth, and may actually have encouraged wider engagement with the debate on the value of trailers.

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Looking forward and looking back: Recut film trailers and cinematic memory

10/6/2015

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Watching the Trailer proudly presents: another guest blog post, this fortnight by Dr Kathleen Williams; welcome, thanks for joining us!
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Thousands of recut trailers have been uploaded to YouTube since its launch in 2005. Recut trailers typically involve the splicing together of footage from one or more filmic sources to create a trailer for a film – of a version of a film – that will not exist. They vary from the very popular (such as Scary Mary with over 14 million views), to those uploaded as part of an assignment that will not have an audience past their university professor (…and myself). There are technical tropes that recut creators use to classify their video as a trailer rather than a montage: voiceover, a classification screen (typically the Motion Picture Association of America), use of text, anticipatory language (‘coming soon’, ‘this summer’), and music. This campy 70s treatment of disaster film 2012 is a great example of these tropes in action:
Recuts involve a kind of looking forward and looking back, a willingness to engage in anticipation for a future that can’t be obtained while also drawing upon cinematic memory and a general sense of pastness. In this post, I’m going to look at how trailers can act as a conduit for cinematic memory, a networked object through which to play with recollections of our past media consumption.
 
A great number of recut trailers are focused on altering our memories of a specific feature film. Ferris Club recuts footage from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Rather than being centred on extroverted Ferris’ antics, the trailer plays on the subtleties of Ferris’ best friend, Cameron. By reordering footage from the film, and amplifying certain elements, this recut uncovers the latent storyline of Ferris being a figment of Cameron’s imagination. It, of course, also places Ferris Bueller’s Day Off into the same narrative world as Fight Club.

It subversively calls into question how we remember a specific film, showing that virtually any rereading is possible. It also requires us to draw upon what we understand Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to be (a cult teen film) and places it within the realm of a psychological thriller. Through editing we get to uncover what has always potentially been there. This can also be seen in trailers that recut a source film to exist within the world of 
 Brokeback Mountain; a lingering glance between two heterosexual leads is reread as a latent romantic narrative.  
The most popular of recuts such as Scary Mary and The Shining Recut also demonstrate this through what Chuck Tryon calls “genre-shifting” (2009) rather than specifically reordering an existing film to align with the narrative of another. Scary Mary recuts children’s film Mary Poppins into a horror film, The Shining Recut transforms canonical thriller The Shining into a family comedy, and Must Love Jaws details the love story between a man and a shark. Clearly, part of the 
humour and success of these trailers lies in upending the role of genre as a classifier; with some editing, children’s films can become the thing of nightmares, thrillers can be diluted into plane-friendly romps, and the sea cannot come between true love.

Another excellent example of this type of memory reordering is a series of “pre-makes” made by YouTube user whoiseyevan. Whoiseyevan recuts footage from a series of film to adhere to the narrative of a more contemporary film. ‘Premakes’ Ghostbusters 1954 is one such example, exploring what Ghostbusters would look like if it were shot in 1954 rather than 1984. The video mimics a generalised style of trailers in the 1950s, using text that asks questions of the audience, as well as re-casting the lead roles with iconic comedians of the 1940s and 1950s. Footage of Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin and Fred MacMurray from a suite of films is situated within the world of Ghostbusters.

These trailers demonstrate a complex temporal relationship to memory: on the one hand, they require us to revisit our knowledge of a recent past film such as Up! or Raiders of the Lost Ark, while also turning upon any knowledge the viewer may have of the older films being evoked. The pastness present in the recuts, spanning over several decades, is a mediated past that may not have been directly experienced. They playfully see the past in a new, playful and non-linear way.
What the multitude of recut trailers on YouTube demonstrate is not only a willingness to engage with cinematic memories, but also that there is a specific joy in revisiting our memories of a film through the form of a film trailer. We choose to play out these imaginary films through the rhetorical attractions of a trailer. With its anticipatory appeals (Kernan 2004), trailers seek to sell a film to an audience on the film’s potential – on what we can imagine between the 
frames of the montage. By taking the misleading characteristics of trailers to their illogical excess, recut trailers simultaneously flatten out and accelerate cinematic history, ensuring that any film can be resurrected and made to appear again ‘this summer’.
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Kernan, Lisa 2004, Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers. Austin: University of Texas Press.


Tryon, Chuck 2009, Reinventing cinema: Movies in the age of media convergence. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

 
Dr Kathleen Williams is a lecturer in media studies at the University of Tasmania, Australia. She recently completed her doctoral study on recut film trailers at the University of New South Wales in which she looked at recut trailers in relation to anticipation, nostalgia and networks. Her work on recuts appears in Transformative Works and Cultures, M/C Journal and edited collections. Her research is preoccupied with the ways that media technologies can be co-opted from their intended uses and technological nostalgia.
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