A trailer (or preview) is an advertisement/commercial for a feature film that will be shown in the future at the cinema. The term "trailer" originates from originally being shown at the end of a film screening, however, now trailers are shown before the film starts.
The History of the Film Trailer
The first film theatre in 1910 only had one screen. Patrons would pay an admission fee and could sit for as long as they wanted to in the cinema, watching films and cartoons on loops, meaning there were no set times for films. There were no trailers for advertising.
However, 1913 became "Year 0" for the film trailer. Nils Gralund made a promotional video for "The Pleasure Seekers", a broadway musical, and used rehearsal footage. It proved to be a big success for cinema owners.
Meanwhile in Chicago, Colonel William Selig made another way to get audiences back to the cinemas. He took the idea of print serials, and went to the Chicago Tribune, proposing the idea to turn a print serial into a short film. This gave birth to "The Adventure of Kathlyn", and each short episode would end in a cliffhanger so audiences would return the following week to view the next installment. This is arguably where the idea of the film trailer was formed. Cinemas began to show promotional videos at the ends of the films, and these first forms of
film trailer were basic. They consisted of clips from the films with text over the top introducing things such as the cast of stars. It took a small group of business men to realise how they could make money from the trailer industry that had yet to take shape. Distributing films through promotional videos was a nightmare for studios until the National Screen Service (NSS) was set up in 1919 by Herman Robbins. The group took film stills, spliced in titles and then sold them to theatres. This didn't actually bother any studios, in fact many liked the idea so much they signed deals to submit their films to the NSS to produce trailers. By the 1940s, the NSS had branched out to poster and paper advertising, and had contracts with all the major film studios. These studios signed contracts with the NSS to make trailers week by week. Between the 1920s and 1960s, the NSS dominated the trailer making industry. These trailers were simplistic, with stylistic features like screen wipes and fly in text, as can be seen in the trailer for Casablanca (1942):
In the 1960s, a new generation off star directors redefined the trailer. Alfred Hitchcock used his gallows humour to tour the audience around the setting of Psycho rather than using the film clips.
The re-emergence of cubism in film and commercial art in the 1960s was not lost either by Stanley Kubrick. His trailer for Dr Strangelove is considerably bold and different.
Trailers began to feature antiheroes, such as in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and there was more emphasis on the music used, as visible in the Simon and Garfunkel score from The Graduate.
The cookie-cutter style trailer of the NSS was being moved away from, especially as multiplex cinemas began to rise, meaning there was less space for posters. Film studios and production companies took control over their promotion again, and by the 1970s the film system landscape had changed.
Jaws was the first successful film to see the wide release. It was shown in 464 theatres on the 25th of June 1975, but was shown in 675 cinemas by July the same year, proving itself to be the largest simultaneous film distribution. Out of the $1.8 million budget, the Universal Group gambled $700,000 in national television advertising. This in turn resulted in huge opening box office numbers, gaining $7 million in the opening weekend, and $470 million worldwide. Thus, the blockbuster strategy was born, with trailers being at the heart of this, with big, bold visuals for big films. Don LaFontaine became "the voice" for these blockbuster trailers, his iconic line being "In a world..."
The trailer has adapted with the MTV fast paced edits of today's society, and has become almost a genre in itself, with boutique editing houses focusing solely on movie advertising.
