Triumph of the Trailers

By Jess Cagle

The movie industry is about to honor some of its biggest flimflam artists--and we're not just talking about the Oscar ceremony on March 24. The Third Annual Golden Trailer Awards are scheduled to be handed out this week at Hollywood's grand old El Capitan Theatre. A panel of judges (including Ben Stiller) will cast their votes for last year's best trailers: those 2 1/2-minute theatrical reels, 30-second TV spots and eye-grabbing teasers. Some contenders made bad movies look good (Pearl Harbor); some helped B movies open big (The Fast and the Furious); all of them "leave you wanting more," says Evelyn Brady, a co-founder of the awards show. She believes trailers "are the best part of going to the movies."

Not everyone would agree, but trailers have entered a kind of Golden Age, propelled by new matrix-style editing technology, which can make even lackluster footage seem positively zippy, and the Internet, where dozens of sites are devoted to viewing and dissecting trailers as if they were significant works of art. A trailer for Resident Evil, a horror movie opening this week, has been viewed on the Web more than 2 million times, and Internet critics have been madly buzzing about a trailer for the upcoming Spider-Man that aired during the Super Bowl.

Trailers are tested, polished and targeted to audiences almost as carefully as the movies they advertise. Studios typically spend up to $600,000 on trailer production and prints, and buying TV spots accounts for more than half of the studios' marketing budgets, which rose 13% last year. In 2001 the average studio movie cost $47.7 million to make and an additional $31 million to market.

Trailers for big-event movies, which can appear in theaters up to a year before release, have become big events themselves. The new trailer for George Lucas' Star Wars: Episode II--Attack of the Clones, is scheduled to unreel in theaters this week after a premiere on television. The Fox network (sibling of the movie studio releasing the film in May) slated the trailer's broadcast between The X-Files and Malcolm in the Middle on March 10, thereby luring Star Wars devotees to the network just to catch it.

To be sure, "a lot of trailers still fall into a very formulaic voice-of-God technique, saying 'In a world of terror and chaos comes a hero,'" says Jim Ward, Lucasfilm's vice president of marketing. "But there's a lot of progress. People are pushing the envelope." They have to. Audiences, particularly those reared on video games, want their trailers to be like their movies: fast and furious. "We're able to take a movie that has hardly any camera movement and speed it up to appeal to a younger audience," says David Schneiderman, a partner in Seismic Productions, an independent production company in Los Angeles that makes trailers.

A 30-second TV spot Seismic created for Robert Altman's Oscar-nominated Gosford Park begins with a vintage Rolls-Royce zooming across the screen--in the actual movie the car rolls along rather leisurely--and showcases the youngest members of the cast (Clive Owen, Ryan Phillippe and Emily Watson) in whooshing high-tech cuts. "The movie is no longer sacred, because filmmakers have loosened the reins," says Schneiderman. "They know in order to make their next film, they've got to sell this one."

All this technology and targeting has made sleight of hand even more prevalent in movie advertising. Several marketing executives who didn't want their names used told TIME that bait-and-switch trailer tactics are as integral a part of the movie business as Oscar parties and backstabbing. Trailers often have music that is not in the movie, and older actors are banished from spots destined for MTV. Studios will use several production houses to make different trailers for different audiences by emphasizing only a part of the movie. "They'll tell one company to sell it as a romantic comedy," says a trailer producer. "Another will make it look like a music video."

In TV spots for In the Bedroom, Miramax sells the domestic drama as a thriller through dynamic editing and by focusing on a few carefully chosen scenes. "It's all a question of degree," says an executive at a rival studio. "In the case of In the Bedroom, even if they cheated to get you in, chances are you still liked the movie." Indeed, moviegoers usually don't complain about obfuscation in trailers; they do complain that trailers give too much away. There's a reason for this, and studios have the test results to prove it. When trailers are market-tested with focus groups, says Seismic's Schneiderman, "the No. 1 criticism people have is 'I don't know enough about it; I don't understand the story.'" Tweaking ensues; more plot is revealed.

Once a trailer gets to theaters, positioning is crucial: the studio wants it to play close to the start of the feature, after the audience has settled down. Deals are struck to get trailers in front of big movies. Last year Sony paid exhibitors to put a trailer for its movie The Animal in front of Universal's The Mummy Returns, which promised to be a hit. Fearing a dangerous precedent, other studios complained, and Sony promised not to do it again. And after a dispute with New Line, theater chain Regal Cinemas threatened to pull trailers for the studio's The Lord of the Rings. "It's a dirty, horrible part of the business," says a marketing executive. "It's about elbow grease and relationships."

Although studios send most of their trailers to theaters on individual reels, they are allowed to put one of their own trailers on each print of their movies. Just last month Warner Bros. generated considerable buzz for its summer release Eight Legged Freaks--a knowingly schlocky movie about giant spiders--by attaching its hilarious, action-packed trailer to the vampire flick Queen of the Damned. Audiences were cheering, though not for the main attraction; in this case, the trailer really was the best part of going to the movies.