Movie trailers

Movie trailers have been produced as marketing material in the film industry since 1913. Originally, trailers followed the film -- thus the term "trailer -- as advertising of films coming soon to the theater. Trailers were used to position films within the marketplace, not just a string of the best scenes. As trailers became more commonplace, certain attempts to shake up the aesthetics of trailers have emerged in each decade.

Directors featured in trailers

One engaging technique that emerged in the 1940s and continued through the 1970s was directors featuring themselves within trailers to market their own film. These directors would take on a personality or reenact a personality that audiences were already aware of. This direct marketing, often breaking the fourth wall of the camera, was a refreshing take on trailer form.

Cecil B. DeMille

DeMille and Mount Sinai painting in The Ten Commandments trailer

By the 1950s, Cecil B. DeMille was a household name and the equivalent of an important star. To market his grand epic The Ten Commandments (1956), DeMille released a 10-minute lecture to act as a trailer for the film. In the lecture, he sits in a room surrounded by art: statues, paintings, drawings. He teaches the audience about the importance of Michelangelo's statue of Moses, depicted with horns on his head, and connects these horns to original Hebrew descriptions in the Old Testament. He also maps out the path of Moses's exodus and connects a painted portrayal of Mount Sinai with the appropriately mapped angle of the sun at the time of Moses's arrival. DeMille argues that Moses's life is "the greatest adventure stories ever put between the pages of a book", and he defends his film as a well-research contribution to the study of Moses.

Orson Welles

When Orson Welles made his first film Citizen Kane (1941), he was new to filmmaking but he was already a successful radio personality. In order to market his film, Welles put on his radio persona to introduce the film. In the trailer opening for Citizen Kane, a boom mic flies into the camera from off in the distance and Welles' voice creates anticipation for the film from just off camera. Audiences certainly recognized Welles' voice, and thus were promised a familiar experience from a newcomer. Welles' clever intermedia strategy, merging radio with film, plays into Citizen Kane's theme of media domination.

Alfred Hitchcock

Perhaps the most famous director to incorporate himself into his films in cameos is Alfred Hitchcock. It is no surprise, then, that Hitchcock would often place himself in trailers for his films. Similar to Welles and DeMille, Hitchcock was a household name by the time he made these direct address trailers. By the 1960s he was described as a "marquee director", suggesting that just his name would be enough to sell tickets. Hitchcock's style in these trailers was quite humorous. To market The Birds (1963), he gave a lecture on the history of bird's relationship to man, filled with obviously false information and personifying the birds by imbuing them with feelings of hatred, jealousy, and vengefulness. To market Psycho (1960), Hitchcock gave a 6-minute tour of the Bates Motel and house in a dead-pan manner, speaking about the locations as though horrible events had happened there long ago. He remarked at how "well preserved" the rooms are and described scenes from the film in the past tense. For one of his last films Frenzy (1972), Hitchcock introduces the film while floating down the Thames River, similar to the first, drowned victim in the film. Such dead-pan gimmicks were a departure from the standard trailer format, but especially for celebrity filmmakers they were effective ways of standing out from the increasingly crowded marketplace.

1960s ad-men recruited for trailers

In the 1960s, the art and business of trailers were reinvented. Trailers were competing with cutting-edge advertising campaigns, including TV commercials, coming out of New York's prestigious Madison Avenue firms. Though these firms did not take movie trailer advertising seriously, film directors and studio executives certainly paid attention to the advents of advertisers. Some directors lured graphic designers and commercial directors to their projects in order to enhance their film's marketing materials. The three most famous imports from the advertising world were Saul Bass, Pablo Ferro, and Andrew J. Kuehn.

Saul Bass

Saul Bass's background in advertising graphic design lent a new look to movie posters and opening title sequences. His unique style revolved around an emblematic image, often an abstracted one, that was immediately identifiable with the film. For The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), Bass developed a crooked vertical arm in reference to the broken life of the film's drug addict hero. For Vertigo (1958), Bass developed a spiraled, swirling vortex graphic that was repeated in both the poster and, in animated form, in the opening credits of the film. Following Bass's work, it became more acceptable for Hollywood films to recruit external graphic designers for marketing materials.

Pablo Ferro

Pablo Ferro's style in his commercials featured fast editing, and this style caught the eye of Stanley Kubrick, who brought Ferro in to the film world to work on movie trailers and title design. For the Dr. Strangelove (1964) trailer, Kubrick asked for something outrageous, something completely different from the standard 1950s trailer fare. Ferro developed a trailer that was fast-paced, heavy on graphic title cards, and humorous in its clips and its pacing. Ferro's hand-drawn title sequences became famous for their boldness and quirkiness.

Andrew J. Kuehn

After making trailers for French New Wave films, Andrew J. Kuehn was hired by MGM to produce ads and trailers in an era when MGM desperately needed help with its marketing. Kuehn's first project, which was hand-picked, was The Night of the Iguana (1964). He hired a largely unknown James Earl Jones for the narration rather than one of the actors of the film, which was standard practice. And Kuehn developed a new style of trailer editing, which came to be repeated by many others since the 1960s: one scene played out in full with short bursts of intrusion from short shots of other scenes. Using this technique sped up the delivery of narrative information and also created an interesting pacing as the chronology of the film became cut up and rearranged. Based on his wide success as a trailer producer, Kuehn started a boutique trailer house Kaleidoscope Films, Ltd. Soon, using boutique trailer houses, external to Hollywood studios, became the industry norm.

Counters to "tell-alls"

The Blockbuster era, starting in the 1980s, developed a particular trailer form that was consistently used by boutique trailer houses. Pressured by quarterly profit requirements, studios felt more need for films to be released with a box-office bang. The form that tested best amongst market research was a "tell-all" trailer that included scenes from all three acts and sometimes even gave away the third act's twists. Action adventure trailers showed off spectacles like explosions, high-wire car chases, and steamy romances, similar to the circus-type trailers of the 1950s. These trailers had enhanced color grading, faster editing, louder music and sound effects, and were generally more bombastic than the films themselves. By the 1990s, these "tell-alls" became interchangeable with little to distinguish one action film from the next. Starting in the early 2010s, a backlash to "tell-alls" created trailers that reserved plot points and focused more on a film's style than defining its acts.

Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The first trailer for Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) rejected the tradition of "tell-all" trailers by avoiding the plot of the film entirely. Instead, it provides a fast series of images cut to the beats of a Led Zeppelin "Immigrant Song" cover. Rather than focus on plot, the trailer evokes the energy of the film as its selling points: gritty, fast-paced, and ruthless. Though the plot was no mystery to fans of the Swedish novels, the trailer's intentional evasion created a new style of trailer, picked up by A24 the next year.

A24

The boutique distribution company A24 was created in order to "share movies from a distinctive point of view." Part of its unique attitude was investing in guerilla or DIY marketing campaigns. Part of their process of rethinking how a film is promoted involved taking on a mood-based trailer form where visuals are privileged over plot points. A24 trailers became known for giving glimpses into moments, often out of narrative order, to inform the audience of the film's characters, mood, or visual style. They avoided voice-over narration, only allowing for select dialogue clips. And this dialogue remained within the context of the clip, as opposed to the trailer tradition of one overarching voice-over explaining the film, with a montage of clips visualizing the narration. This A24 trailer pattern continues into their projects of the 2020s. For example, the trailer for Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) provided the audience with a basic setup of the multiverse scenario, but spent the majority of its runtime showing off the fast editing and highly stylized mise-en-scene of the film. In fact, the trailer spends so little time explaining the details of the film's plot that it doesn't even explain who the antagonist of the film is. Despite this lack of general setup, the trailer was highly successful in enticing audiences into theaters.