If my paranoid suspicions are correct, Hollywood has embarked on a 12-year plan regarding the public consumption of trailers. The plan, which has become fully apparent to me over the past year, will come to fruition in the year 2000, and its basic goal, as I see it, is to turn movies themselves into full-fledged commercials that people will pay money to see.
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Already there are many alarming consequences to this trend. Many of the best things to be found in this year’s movies–such as Brando’s performance in The Freshman and Eastwood’s in White Hunter, Black Heart; the intricacies of plot and character in Enemies, a Love Story, Rembrandt Laughing, Twister, Miami Blues, The Plot Against Harry, Pump Up the Volume, The Icicle Thief, and The Russia House; the play-within-the-film in Jesus of Montreal; the extended hommage to Tati’s Playtime in The Exorcist III (a very lengthy take in a hospital corridor); the play with philosophical ideas in Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound; the leisurely uses of landscape in Quigley Down Under and Dances With Wolves; the slow camera movements in The Raggedy Rawney–are impossible to represent in any adequate way within the telegraphic punchiness of trailers, especially current ones, because these things have little or nothing to do with speed and instant intelligibility. Many people I know stayed away from these films either because they had no trailers to represent them or–more often–because the trailers they did have were misrepresentative turnoffs that offered not the slightest clue to what was good about them.
Then as now, most trailers were made while the features themselves were still in production, and most were put together by publicity people at the studios rather than the films’ directors. (An occasional consequence of this practice is that some scenes in trailers do not appear in the final films.) But there were exceptions to this rule, and some of them are quite memorable: Orson Welles directed his own trailer for Citizen Kane, at the urging of his cinematographer Gregg Toland, and the result (available on the Criterion deluxe edition of the film on laserdisc) is a delightful short film in its own right. In keeping with his radio persona of that period, Welles narrates offscreen and never appears; the other actors are introduced by him in street clothes on RKO soundstages, surrounded by the film’s props. Not a single shot in the trailer comes from the film itself, but apart from its avoidance of the film’s gloomier aspects, it is an honest piece of ballyhoo that gave audiences some notion of what to expect while skillfully piquing their curiosity. (Sadly, when Welles put together another trailer for the U.S. release of his F for Fake in 1974–another enjoyable autonomous work, this one about 12 minutes long–his outraged distributor refused to process it; this gem survives today only on an undistributed videotape preserved by one of Welles’s associates.) Alfred Hitchcock’s trailer for Psycho, another gem (also available on laserdisc), has the Master conducting the viewer through a guided tour of the film’s major locations.
Other, more recent films incorporate paid-for plugs just as prominently. At a recent promotional screening for Home Alone in Chicago, a spokesperson for a product-placement agency proudly called attention to an extended plug for Budget Rent a Car worked into the plot via John Candy, and added that Candy makes a point of pushing Budget in several of his movies. And if one adds to this the ads for products that are now routinely tacked onto the beginnings of features, both in theaters and on videos, and the multiple spin-offs of sales items that accompany the release of films from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Dick Tracy to Godfather III, the degree to which multinationals are now hawking their products through their own movies–or else renting out ad space inside someone else’s–makes the notion of feature-length ads in theaters seem a lot closer than it once did.
