Sgt. Angle Reporting for Duty!

At ease, new recruits.

This past weekend, I shared a movie experience with a fellow officer. There were toys, and there was a story about an escape of sorts, but I don’t recall the title. How’s that for a laugh?

Before the movie, my fellow viewer and I had a deep discussion about “the previews,” aka “trailers” for upcoming films. He argued that he prefers to see movies fresh, with knowing as little about them as possible, while yours truly argued that some of the fun of seeing the current movie is the trailer for an upcoming movie, and that the point of the trailer is to get your ass in the seats in the near future. Here now is a brief history of trailers — their role in the past, the present, and the future.

Trailers were named as such because they used to be attached to the very end of the credits of the film playing in the theater. This was a practice dropped very quickly after the invention and integration of these promotional pieces, and “trailers” became “previews”, wherein short scenes from an upcoming production would be inter-cut with a narrator and a text description of the story of the film.

Yippity-do-dah, and we scoot to the 1960s, when the New Hollywood Era began kicking in — fast cutting, montage editing, and the always cheerful Stanley Kubrick pieced together trailers that were as much an art as his feature films.

Then came big blockbuster films and a need for the studios to blow their loads on any movie by replicating three-act-structure and, in some ways, blowing the whole film before we have a chance to purchase a ticket.

Beyond that, you should have learned by now that trailers are built by marketing companies and specialty editing folks who often use rushes, or dailies, in order to piece together something enticing to look at before a foot of film is pieced together by editors. Thus you’ll end up with a shot of Spider-Man’s web between the Twin Towers in the trailer, but then notice it absent from the final product (okay, bad example, but you get my point).

Or, you simply get spoiled by the trailer.

These days, companies like Ant Farm, The Cimarron Group, and Trailer Park, build trailers for all the big-shot studios. But each of these companies was created by a person or persons who put in their time at one major trailer company born out of the 1960s: Andrew J. Kuehn’s Kaleidescope Films (along with Dan Davis). Kuehn built his empire, and the future of trailer-making, on his self-produced trailer for the John Huston picture Night of the Iguana.

Kuehn helped re-invent movie advertising overall, and paved the way for the massive amounts of trailers, TV Promos, and Teasers we now see today.

For instance, check out this little bitty teaser trailer, in the truest sense of the concept, for David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s “facebook movie,” The Social Network.

Always be watching, always enjoy the little things between each movie you see. If you have a favorite trailer, post it below. We’ll revisit the best of the best in the weeks to come, including a look at: Viral marketing and teaser trailers, fan-made trailers, and trailer rehashes that seem to be all the rage these days.

Dismissed!

Sgt. Angle