chowhound
It doesn't surprise me that the trailers are done before the films completed. Both are complex tasks that need to be done simultaneously, and it seems the trailer is often released early to drum up interest. I'm not at all clear as to how much the Director has to do with the trailer, he may not be involved in any significant way, it could be mostly "ad men" (and women) and marketers that develop the storyboards and style for the trailers. You mentioned the French language version, - were there also Spanish, Japanese, German, etc? It would seem logical, but maybe not.
Musically I can understand the use of Newman's score for the trailer because it is the kind of piece that can stand alone and be cut into segments of different lengths and still retain it's identity. Santaolalla's score, as beautiful as it is, was unknown before the movie release and may not have worked well being cut and edited by others, or maybe he had an agreement that prohibited it's use in such applications. Trailers are such a brief "look" at a film which are played (and viewed) in such diverse environments, maybe Ang wanted to "save" those haunting Santaolalla chords for when people were safely locked in their seats, in the dark, watching the film. Though those opening chords of Brokeback are so evocative it would seem they alone could have been used at the introduction of the trailer too.
Language variations - I remember reading chams comments years ago about the poor translation of the French version. I can barely figure out English, let alone French, huh? But I did listen to the French language version on the DVD once, which was very interesting. One thing that I noticed right away was during the FNIT scene, a remarkable difference between the sound effects used. You might think that sounds effects, being just that, would be pretty universal. Nope. What I noticed was the difference when Ennis "with the help of the clear slick and a little spit" spits in his hand. This spitting sound effect, which is quite pronounced in the English version, was almost inaudible in the French version. Huh? Seemed like an important element of the scene to leave out, but maybe there is a cultural aspect of spitting that makes it very undesirable in France. It is also interesting reading the English subtitles while watching the French language, quite a discrepancy here to, the English subtitles frequently don't match the actual English dialogue. I remember discussing this once with a friend who is "in the business" and they indicated that this subtitle/translation is a HUGE business handled by hundreds sitting around monitors doing the translations, and is rarely proofed for accuracy or train of thought.
Wish I knew where to look to find out more about the creation of these trailers, if I come up with any ideas I'll let you know.
Hi Jackster,
I've just found this 2005 article from The Guardian which deals with the topic of trailler making. I thought you might find it of interest. I should have some free time tomorrow to search further. If I come up with any thing of interest on this topic, I'll let you know:
The modern cinema trailer is Don Lafontaine's fault. You know Don, even if you think you don't: his is the reverberating, honey-and-gravel voice that has accompanied approximately 4,000 trailers since 1963, a troublingly large proportion of which seem to have begun with the phrase: "In a world ... " In a world beyond time, one man has nowhere to run.
Since he wrote many of his own scripts, too, the 64-year-old Lafontaine can justifiably be held responsible for some of the most exhausted cliches in the history of the movies, a fact about which he is affably defensive. "The irony of the thing is, any place but a movie theatre, that's a joke," he says. "But if you sit in a theatre and hear 'In a world', you don't hear laughter." This, Lafontaine believes, is partly because we have come to accept the cliches of the film trailer as an unavoidable form of narrative shorthand. And partly it's because they're great.
It is not, as is sometimes argued, a form of wilful perversity to say that the trailers are the best bit of a trip to the cinema. That this is true ought to be obvious: take a $100m blockbuster, remove all the bad acting and the jokes that didn't work, boil the best bits down to two-and-a-half minutes - the longest a trailer can be, under US industry regulations - and of course you'll be left with the best.
"We are often asked to make silk purses out of sow's ears," Lafontaine concedes. "But it's our job. And even the worst movie in the world is going to be somebody's favourite movie." A few weeks ago, in her smoky office in London's Soho, Mary McGrane, an editor who put together the trailers for the second Bridget Jones film, echoed Lafontaine's sentiments. "Friends see films I've done trailers for and say I only put in the best bits," she said. "Of course I only put in the best bits. If I'd put in all the *beep* bits, you wouldn't have gone to see it."
There are few more cynical forms of art, or of advertising. A trailer can make a boneheaded film look intelligent (The Stepford Wives) or a tiresome one look well-paced (Independence Day); it can make a quirky film look like any other mass-market romantic comedy ("What if you had a second chance," asks the voiceover on the trailer for Before Sunset, "with the one that got away?"). It can contain scenes that have been cut from the movie (The Incredibles), or, as a result of time constraints, simply omit many of the film's central ideas (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). "Trailers are full of deception," says Mike Shapiro, a veteran Hollywood trailer-maker now working on a documentary history of the form. "Because what they want you to do is to see the movie they want you to see, not the movie that it is. The only way to see the movie that it is is to go see the movie."
As the commercial success of any film is dictated, more and more, by its performance on its opening weekend, trailers have never been more important in packing in the crowds, and trailer-makers find themselves in a position of curious power and freedom. If Sainsbury's, say, were to lie to you repeatedly in its television advertising, you'd eventually figure out what was happening, and you'd stop shopping at Sainsbury's. But what are you going to do when you discover you were deceived by a trailer? There's no real risk of you withdrawing your custom from the studio that made the film in question: we simply don't tend to associate movies with their studios in this fashion. Stopping going to the cinema completely is hardly a serious option either, so the producers of trailers have little to lose. Besides, audiences find watching them too much fun. "What we've learned is that trailers are unique in advertising: they're a free sample," Shapiro says. "That's not true of virtually any other form of advertising. A commercial for aspirin isn't a free sample of aspirin. A car advertisement isn't a free test drive. But with a movie trailer, you actually get to see some of the movie you're being asked to plunk down money for."
The industry's dependence on trailers, and their popularity with cinemagoers, is all the more extraordinary when you consider how much of their content is dictated by necessity: as often as not, the film itself is nowhere near finished - or, in many cases, not even under way - and alternative footage must be cobbled together. The Christmas 2004 trailer for the Tom Cruise vehicle War of the Worlds, due out this year, showed fearful families gathering in the streets to look up at lights in the sky, looks of foreboding on their faces. ("No sign of aliens," says David Hughes, of the Picture Production Company, the leading British maker of trailers. "They were still in production.") The trailer for Alien 3 used an expensively created image of the Earth; this time, the voiceover warned, the aliens would be targeting our planet. By the time the finished film was in cinemas, the aliens, due to radical changes in the production, were doing nothing of the sort.
Then there are the restrictions imposed by the censors - specifically, and most influentially, the Motion Picture Association of America's code for what may or may not appear in a trailer shown prior to a PG-rated film. Ted Demme, the director of Blow, about a cocaine dealer, summed up the restrictions. "No excessive violence - close-up shootings, stabbings, hackings with axes, etc; no blood in general-audience trailers," he wrote in a 2001 article. "If guns are fired, no close-ups where bullets hit the body (cut to the body on the ground); no exposed breasts or genitals; no bed scenes with any action; no sexually connotative words, no blasphemous language ("hell" and "damn" alone are OK); and - here's the big one - no references to drugs or drug paraphernalia. Remember my title? Medellin, we have a problem."
But by far the oddest practices in the world of trailers concern the music that accompanies them. Film scores tend to be completed so late in the production process that most trailer editors can't use the correct music even if they want to; normally, however, they don't. Deploying the music from a successful older film to advertise a new one must be about as close to subliminal advertising as it's legally possible to get: the makers of the trailers for the recent movie Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, starring Jim Carrey, knew the movie they wanted viewers to be reminded of - Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands - and so they bought the rights to its score.
This would appear to be the way to make your millions as a composer for the cinema: Hans Zimmer, who wrote the score for the 1995 film Crimson Tide, is estimated to have made at least 50 times more from its subsequent exploitation - in trailers for Armageddon, The Devil's Own, Independence Day, Mulholland Falls and others - than from its original use.
But the current record, according to the website Soundtrack.net, is held by the composer Randy Edelman. You may not have seen Come See the Paradise, Alan Parker's 1991 film about the wartime romance of an Irish-American man and a Japanese-American woman. But the score proved so useful for trailer-makers that it has been used in the advertising for no fewer than 24 films, including Clear and Present Danger, Cry, The Beloved Country, Devil in a Blue Dress, Donnie Brasco, A Few Good Men, The Joy Luck Club, Patriot Games, Philadelphia, The Sum of All Fears, Swing Kids and Thirteen Days. Edelman, a former pop songwriter, is now a wealthy man.
Trailers didn't used to matter this much. Mike Shapiro's research has uncovered what was probably the earliest example of the form - a text-only trailer for a silent serial called What Happened to Mary, which would have been shown after ("trailing", in other words) the main feature. But for decades after the birth of commercial cinema, trailers were disdained: during the second world war, silver from the prints was even stripped and used for the military effort. The original 1942 cinema trailer for Casablanca may be fun to watch, because it reminds us of the film, but by any other standard, it's awful: a screaming succession of disjointed frames and hyperventilating promises that feels more like an advertisment for a cheap mortgage. "If you are looking for adventure ... you will find it ... in Casablanca!" it runs. "City of hope and despair, located in French Morocco in North Africa, the meeting-place of adventurers! Fugitives! Criminals! Refugees! ... Humphrey Bogart - the most dangerous man in the world's most dangerous city! ... Ingrid Bergman - fighting the strange fascination that draws her closer and closer to him!"
The 1940s did see some improvements. "You could say that Orson Welles's trailer for Citizen Kane marked perhaps the first time that you see somebody really creatively trying to make a trailer a film in itself, something unique and artful," Shapiro says. "But only marginally so."
Compared to any of these, the well-known trailer for the 1996 film Independence Day is a thing of beauty. Compacting the standard-issue plot into a timeframe of less than three minutes forces a special discipline; the voiceover, delivered in the second person, feels intensely personal. "It is morning. You wake up ... " it runs, as we see Will Smith wake up. "You greet your loved ones. You grab the morning paper." It's quiet - too quiet. "And although it seems like any ordinary day, it isn't."
If it were a trailer for a comedy, this would be the point to introduce the "rug pull", the point at which the tone suddenly changes from mock-serious to unashamedly goofy; it is often accompanied on the soundtrack by the sound of a stylus being hurriedly removed from a record turntable. "There is a whole generation, raised on cassettes and CDs, for whom that sound has absolutely no meaning," Don Lafontaine points out. "And yet they continue to use it."
But back to Independence Day: within seconds, the Empire State building has been zapped and is collapsing in flames - one of the film's most impressive scenes. The military response gets under way. Men in suits shout at each other. "You're looking at worldwide destruction in the next 36 hours!" someone yells. But the fight soon turns in the good guys' direction. "We're going to survive! We're going to survive!" someone else yells. And before you know it, Smith and Vivica Fox are kissing, silhouetted against the embers of a not-fully-destroyed planet, leaving just a couple of seconds for Smith to end with a self-referential sci-fi movie wisecrack: "Now that's what I call a close encounter!"
You finish watching with the feeling that you don't really need to see the film at all. If you were to act on that feeling, of course, that would make the trailer a commercial failure. But spoiler trailers do have their market. "My mum, who goes to the cinema very irregularly, is the absolute target market for a film like Evelyn [starring Pierce Brosnan]," says David Hughes at the Picture Production Company. "It's about a man fighting to get custody of his children. Now, my personal philosophy is that you never give away the ending - unless you're targeting a market that needs to be told there's a happy ending. Because if you don't have a shot of Pierce Brosnan on the steps of the courthouse, throwing his legal papers up in the air and being reunited with his children, that market will not go and see that movie. They'd be worried that it might be depressing."
Indeed, there's an argument - made by David Lynch, among others - that seeing any trailer automatically ruins the experience of the film to which it relates, because once you've seen the highlights, you'll be subsconsciously checking off the scenes that were featured in it as you watch the full-length movie. That's an extreme position, perhaps - but many directors are notorious for being disparaging of the effort to boil their masterworks down to two-and-a-half marketable minutes. Hughes's company has made trailers for five of Mike Leigh's films, for example; the highest praise he can recall is: "Well, if that's the trailer for my movie, I'm not going to jump off Waterloo bridge." And why should they be any more glowing? "You wouldn't say to Leonardo da Vinci, yeah, great painting, but we're just going to take this one part - the smile's the main bit, so we're just going to take the smile and put it on the tube ads," Hughes points out. (Of course, the level of offence depends on the quality of the original. The Mona Lisa's smile is nothing without the context, whereas Mona Lisa Smile, on the other hand, is a hell of a lot better in trailer form.)
All in all, trailers might seem a difficult thing to love. They lie and deceive, and when they're not lying or deceiving, they're being too honest, revealing the plot. They're nakedly focused on selling a product, intent on convincing us every movie is the greatest ever made when most cannot possibly be. And yet they remain irresistible. As Don Lafontaine might put it, in a world of short attention spans - in a time when the entire movie industry is hopelessly commercially compromised anyway - only one part of a trip to the cinema remains a guaranteed pleasure. And if a particular trailer fails to deliver? No problem: it'll be finished soon anyway. Very soon. Even the trailers for Dances With Wolves and Alexander were over within two-and-a-half minutes.
