Coming Soon
“In a world…”You’re a screenwriter, so here’s an easy image to conjure. There’s a 20-something writer alone in a small room, tapping away at his keyboard. Awful posture. He’s doing his best to write a screenplay that will sell, but in the end, he’s not sure any of it’s going to work.
From that point in time, it’s easy to project out a hundred different fates for this guy and his script, and most of them end in failure. This time, though, let’s be generous. Let’s follow that one magical strand forward, watching along the way as he sells his script. A star and director are attached. The movie gets the green light. It’s filmed, and now the only thing left is the release. As we reach the end of this timeline, we find ourselves in a very familiar spot.
Another 20-something writer is alone in a small room, tapping away at his keyboard. Even worse posture. He’s doing his best to write some ad copy that will sell the first guy’s movie, but in the end, he’s not sure any of it’s going to work.
I’ve been both of those guys.
To be sure, there are plenty of writers who just don’t care if their movies find a large audience. All they want to do is write a good story they can be happy with, and damn the rest of America and the world if it’s not a hit. I, on the other hand, due to either weakness or vanity, have this irrepressible desire to write movies that lots of people see. Since I started out as someone who sold movies, I have a certain insight into the totality of the process. It’s seductive to think that it’s the studio’s problem, but the reality is that you can build marketing success into your screenplay…or lay the seeds of your own marketing doom.
In 1994, I became a marketing executive for Buena Vista Pictures, which is Disney’s distribution arm. I wrote poster lines and trailer copy and all the words for the annoying television ad announcers. I wrote and produced marketing campaigns for Touchstone Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures and the now happily defunct Hollywood Pictures. Some of the campaigns were can’t-misses for big movies like Crimson Tide (“Danger Runs Deep”, I thought, and lo, a poster was born). Some were for movies that we in the marketing department really elevated to a big opening weekend, like The Santa Clause (“This Christmas, The Snow Hits The Fan” I thought, and moms and kids thought, “Okay, I’ll give that a shot”).
Some we just muffed. And others, well…there were some we just couldn’t do anything with.
During my two years in marketing, I found that there were certain elements that were necessary for a successful marketing campaign. The funny thing about those elements was that they were either there in the beginning, i.e. the screenplay…or they weren’t.
Please don’t view this as some horrendous method of commercializing your wonderful art. I’m sure your screenplay defies all that come before it, and you would never consider marring it with base concerns like the content of the television commercials and trailers and posters that will attempt to attract patrons to it.
Still, if you’re at all interested in having your movie seen by the largest audience possible, here are a few things to at least consider before you send your script off to be made into a film.
A Great Title
As brilliant as it was, not many people went to the theater to see The Shawshank Redemption. If you think it’s because of a lack of big stars or subject matter, I could cite ten hits that would prove you wrong.
It was the title. What the hell is a Shawshank Redemption? The movie sounds like bible study or perhaps an instructional film on how to prepare lamb.
Look, Stephen King is a genius. Far be it from me to second guess his title choices. I’ll go one step further. Frank Darabont is twice the screenwriter I’ll ever be. It’s possible that they knew the title would give them trouble, but they just didn’t care. I can accept that.
Can you? Think carefully about your title. Does it evoke a feeling? Does it communicate the genre of the film? Does it worm through your brain a little?
If it needs to be punchy, is it short? If it needs to be epic, is it cool?
Show me a horror movie trailer that ends with the title Saw, and I learn a lot. Someone is going to saw through a human at some point. That’s a given. And at three letters, it’s kind of hard to forget. Even better, if someone says, “Saw, what’s that about?” and I say, “It’s a horror film,” they’re going to go, “Oooh, gross,” without any other information given.
Which is what you want.
Let’s talk about the other end of the spectrum. You can do a big epic title if you need to, but it really has to sell something interesting. It was very smart of Disney to call their swashbuckler Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Sure, it’s long, but “Pirates of the Caribbean” is a ride. We’ve all ridden the ride.
A million times.
“Curse of the Black Pearl” says, “Forget the ride. There’s more. And there’s a curse, so that means the supernatural will be involved…and that means this movie won’t be the boring men-in-stockings sword orgy you were probably expecting.”
Exceed Expectations
Good trailer movies have a “twist”, and by that, I don’t mean the oh-my-god-Verbal-Kint-is-Keyser-Soze sort. I’m talking about the twist that elevates your story from the expected to the unexpected.
Mass audiences love genre films. They love horror movies, they love cop movies, they love action thrillers, they love romantic comedies.
On the one hand, that means they’re already inclined to see your genre film. On the other hand, they won’t be if they feel like they’ve seen it already…and they’ve seen a lot.
If you’re writing a cookie-cutter concept, it’s going to be very hard to sell. It may be reeeeeally good, but when it’s run through the two minute and thirty second duck press of the theatrical trailer, it’s not going to be distinguishable from everything else on the shelf at Blockbuster.
Conversely, your movie may be crap, but if it takes a familiar genre and then turns it on its head or exceeds it in some interesting way, trailer audiences will take notice.
Intelligent people may argue over whether or not Underworld is a good film. From a marketing point of view, however, it’s a dream come true. Genre audiences have seen vampire movies. They’ve seen werewolf movies. They’ve seen the Matrix films. And they’ve seen Romeo & Juliet stories. How about vampires and werewolves beating the shit out of each other Matrix style, while star-crossed lovers from opposite sides try and stop the war?
Well, that would defy my expecations of a typical monster flick. The movie nearly earned its production cost back in gross receipts its opening weekend.
Let’s take my favorite example (this is mostly because I like sucking up to Ted and Terry, but also because they make it easy). Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl appeared to be an expected genre film. Pirates. Seas. Swords. Bosoms and wigs. But then…well…
Create Trailer Moments
…the pirates turned into walking skeletons.
Exceeding expectations is wonderful. But more than anything else, a good trailer moment will help sell your film.
Trailer moments are those magical little snippets of film that just grab people by their imaginations. They’re typically dialogue-free (we’ll discuss dialogue in a moment), and by their very nature, they require no context to be impressive.
Allow me to remove my lips from Ted and Terry’s butts and instead, kiss my own ass for a bit. Say what you will about Scary Movie 3, but the trailer for the movie was one of the best I’ve ever seen (kudos to the Dimension marketing department). It was so good, it’s one of the only movie trailers Entertainment Weekly ever put on their “Must See” list.
As of this date, this second-sequel-with-no-big-stars still holds the record for the biggest opening weekend in October box office history. 48 million bucks on a sleepy pre-Halloween weekend. And why?
The reveal of Michael Jackson screaming like a little girl.
It’s a great trailer moment, and it told the audience everything they needed to know about the film.
When you’re writing your screenplay, ask yourself if there’s one indelible image that a marketer can just drop into a trailer. Something no one’s seen before. Something that will crack them up or shock them or make them say “Cool!”. Pirates become walking skeletons, a man offers a woman a diamond ring and then snaps the box shut on her fingers, a hand comes out of the back of a woman’s head, a bridge is seen exploding in a rear view mirror as Dakota Fanning shrieks…
Trailers don’t have time to place your scenes in context. Think of a great trailer moment that fits your screenplay…and write it.
Physical Humor
If comedy trailers seem like an endless parade of kicks to the crotch, understand that there’s a reason for this.
Dialogue jokes play okay in trailers.
Physical comedy plays great in trailers (especially overseas).
Sure, kicks to the crotch are done to death. If you’re writing a comedy, make sure there’s at least one great moment of physical comedy, because the marketers are going to need it. Old School had a lot of good jokes, but that tranquilizer dart going into Will Ferrell’s neck sealed the deal for a lot of moviegoers.
One Great Line
This is the hardest thing to pull off when writing. I debated whether or not to even mention this, because trying to write a great line is a sure-fire way to ensure that you write crap.
Still, a great, short line of dialogue can really help sell a film. One of my favorite movies of all time is Unforgiven. It’s a morally complex film with men of ambiguous natures committing crimes in the name of honor and law.
None of that sort of thing matters when you’re cutting a trailer. Movie advertising is reductive in nature; a great line of dialogue may sell the audience on a character, even if the pitch is, well, misleading.
Having a character say, “You just shot an unarmed man,” and then hearing Clint Eastwood respond “He should’ve armed himself” is definitely going to give audiences the wrong idea. It’s out of context, it’s not what his character is really about…and it’s perfect for a trailer. There’s a reason the trailer announcer never says things like, “In a time of moral quandry, one man was indecisive about how violent he should actually be…”
Who the hell’s gonna see that?
Here’s another movie that would have otherwise seemed like homework: The Last Of The Mohicans. A period piece that would have otherwise done okay business with the Merchant-Ivory crowd, the movie’s marketing materials practically boiled down the entire story to one simple line:
“You stay alive, no matter what occurs! I will find you.”
Swooning ensued. The fact that Daniel Day-Lewis appeared to be standing under a waterfall as he spoke this line didn’t hurt.
The marketing for this period piece romance with sub A level stars was good enough to open the film at nearly 11 million dollars (in 1992) in only 1500 theaters, and that was enough to send the total domestic gross into the 70 million dollar range.
Compare that to Howards End, a film that opened just a few months earlier, was also a period piece romance with similar level stars (you could make a good argument that Anthony Hopkins was actually a bigger star than Day-Lewis). Howards End was, by most accounts, a better film than Mohicans.
Yet, without a great heart-pounding line or trailer moment, the movie mustered only 25 million or so for its theatrical run.
If your screenplay isn’t particularly visual in nature, ask yourself if there’s one great line that might captivate a trailer audience. It doesn’t have to be shocking or hysterical, but it must contain one very important thing…
A Promise
All good trailers and television spots for movies are nothing more than promises. The marketers can’t show you the entire movie. They can’t give you the experience of the unfolding narrative, nor can they exploit the quiet moments that are only earned after watching what leads up to them.
Think about it. Marlin picking up an apparently-dead Nemo and flashing back to a memory of his son as the “egg that survived” is only a tear-jerker if you’ve seen the rest of the film. As a trailer moment, that would be an absurd dud.
No, all a good trailer can do is give the audience the promise of a good film. Some concepts have a good promise inherent to them (shark in the water!!!). Some do not (like whatever the hell Last of the Mohicans is about…sorry, never read the book).
That’s fine. Your job is to make sure that somewhere in your screenplay, there’s a moment that crystallizes the promise of your story, the possibilities of the adventure your hero will undertake. It can be a line, a moment, a joke…anything. People don’t go to the movies because they know they will be entertained.
They go because they expect they will be entertained.
They formulate those expectations based on stars and subject matter and reviews…but a good trailer and television campaign can do wonders. Don’t obsess over it or mangle your work in anticipation of it. Given the reality of this business, odds are the time won’t ever come.
But just in case it does, please ruminate for just a while on your counterpart, the lonely studio marketer. If he could talk to you, he’d probably quote one of those great trailer lines.
“Help me help you.”
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Craig-
Great post, as usual. The first thing that came to mind as I was reading this was Princess Bride. I’m too young to recall the theatrical release of the movie, but on the DVD commentary William Goldman mentions that when the movie was being released, the studio had no idea how to advertise it. They had a messy trailer that was more confusing than anything. The movie did poorly in theaters and then became a VHS smash hit.
And frankly, I think they were trying too damn hard to fit it into a niche. There were more than enough scenes in that movie that are perfect for a trailer, according to your trailer rubrick; swordfight between Inigo and Westley, Inigo’s famous father line, romance between Buttercup and Westley, comic relief from Fezzik and Vizzini, and so on. I think that movie is a perfect example of a bad trailer wrecking the success of a great movie.
For my part, I find that most of my story ideas start as mental trailers. While I’m formulating my outline, I really do create a little trailer for myself, feeling out the scenes I think work and blend together. Usually my trailers are more chronological than a normal trailer, but it helps me plot out pacing and scene placement very well. Plus it’s a ton of fun to sit there and watch part of your movie over and over again before it’s even on film.
Wow! Great post. Going to be a key piece in my next passes on two of my scripts.
Fantastic post, Craig. This site sets the bar for screenwriting blogs very high indeed. I’m going to print this post out and give it out at my writing group meeting this week. Just great advice all around. Thanks! WHL
The only reason I watched Scary Movie 3 was bc of the Michael Jackson scene (nice!, btw). (I never even saw Scary Movie or Scary Movie 2.) Howard’s End was better than Mohicans & I’m sorry most people didn’t see it. Phoenix’s take on Princess Bride is what I think happened with Austin Powers also, nothing in theaters, massive DVD rental & sales.
I did like King’s original title - Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption - I think if they’d have kept that it might have done better, rather than just Shawshank Redemption.
There are also those trailers that give out TOO much information, and as a result, for those of us sitting in the theatre, we wonder, they just showed us all three acts of the film, pay ten bucks to see it now?
Current trailer running that is guilty of this, for me, is the one for Stealth - I have no desire to see this film because I think I’ve gotten almost all the info from the trailer.
It’s another reason why I don’t think I’m going to see THE ISLAND (wait and rent it) - basically, what more about the story am I going to discover seeing the film that I haven’t discovered in the trailer?
A really brilliant trailer, I thought, was ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND - that’s something that made you want to know more about what was going on.
Just my two cents.
My vote for a terrible ineffective trailer has to be the remake of Flight of the Phoenix. I never saw the movie, but after watching the trailer, I felt I had seen everything except the final 30 seconds after their make-shift plane takes to the air.
On the flip, Batman Begins’ trailer alluded to a better movie than it actually turned out to be. The trailer ended at just the right place, leaving the audience to wonder how he’ll achieve his goals of purging Gotham of crime.
On the Shawshank DVD Darabont and Morgan Freeman discuss the fact that they argued about the title when the film was made. Freeman wanted to keep Stephen King’s original title. Personally, i don’t think that would have been better.
Shawshank is often given as an example of a title that hurt the film. The irony is the very thing that made it confusing in 1992, makes it totally memerable now. All you have to say is Shawshank and everyone knows exactly what you’re talking about.
Dave
I never ceased to be amazed by the generosity of those screenwriters who have made it to help those of us who are trying to get in.
Thank you Craig.
Shawshank came out in 94, not to be nitpicky, though I guess that it is - but I still think that had it been called Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption, it would have done better - I’m pretty sure someone in a suit probably argued that Rita Hayworth wasn’t in the movie, therefore she shouldn”t be in the title …
…or the poster on the wall would have garnered more attention early in the story and maybe telegraphed the ending?
I think Craig should add “psychic” to his credits, because everything he wrote, my co-writer and I were mulling over in relation to our new spec. Craig, thank you for putting it down on paper so clearly and eloquently.
PJ:
I knew you’d say that. ;)
I think the best trailer I ever saw was the trailer for The Matrix. It gave you a whole series of rapid-fire trailer moments (helicopter crashing, bullet-time fighting, etc) and then delivered Morpheus’s infamous line “You cannot be told what the Matrix is - you have to see it for yourself”. That sold it entirely.
So right on, I must give your ass a tiny smooch.
Craig,
The Shawshank Redemption failed because Columbia gave it a platform release. Had they marketed it properly and put it on the number of screens that it deserved, it would have been a smash hit in theaters, as opposed to just a smash hit on DVD.
The problem was, the studio distrib executives didn’t recognize the quality of the movie and shortchanged it. The problem was never the title—that’s a myth. Albeit a popular one. The movie failed because of an incompetent distribution decision.
I suppose I can only speak for myself here, but I don’t decide which movies I want to see based on titles. At all. I go by the subject matter, first of all, the trailer, and who the director, writer and cast are.
Ben:
I disagree. Platform releases are tried-and-true methods of breaking out smaller movies with big critical buzz. It’s worked so many times (Sideways is the latest example), and Shawshank is precisely the kind of movie you need to platform.
Hey Craig, fascinating post as usual, though this one I hope you’re up for some dissenting dialogue on. The last thing I can do, when I sit down to create, is come up with a trailer moment, or a brilliant title. But when I sit down to spin a character to meet their worst nightmare, or need a word to sum up the mood/feeling of a script that might have more than one meaning, that’s when I come up with a great trailer moment, and a great title. I can’t work from the outside in as a writer, it screws with my creative mind so severely it shuts it down. I have to always work from the inside out, and doing that, suddenly, am overflowing with compelling images and dramatic moments. Perhaps it’s semantics, as in the end what you’re talking about I can write, and is meaningful not just to selling the movie, but to have a script compelling enough to get made into a movie to begin with. In a meeting I had last Friday for a production re-write, I pitched the “trailer moment” for the lead, and it went over big. But I came up with it worlking purely from character, and making the hero the worst person for the adventure she was abouut to set out on. Point being: I believe you always have to start from inside yourself, inside the character, and then play (or twist in misery depending on how in flow you are that day). And that’s when you’re handed that exotic thing you need. And hopefully some poor stoooped over twenty something genius will then be inspired to write a great copy line and cut that trailer for it. FYI: Your faux trailer VO for Unforgiven made me laugh out loud.
You call that dissent? FEH!
I agree with most everything you said. :)
The idea isn’t to write good trailer moments, but to look back after you’ve written, and ask yourself if you’ve found any. If not…why?
After all, a trailer moment is nothing more than an extremely evocative piece of cinematic storytelling.
Now, as for the title, everyone has to think of the title, and since the title is reductive in nature to begin with, I’m all in favor of being calculating about it.
However you arrive at those trailer moments, I say “well done”. Everyone’s got their process. Mine is pretty much the same as yours.
Ben-
Your reasons for choosing what movies to see are informed, noble, and completely at odds with how the movie-going public-at-large picks their movies. Vast majority of movie-goers don’t give a crap who the director or, especially, writer are, unless it’s Spielberg. Big stars matter, of course, but the very first thing that sells a ticket-buyer is the trailer. And the end of the trailer has to have a worthwhile payoff; that’s the title.
I like to think people aren’t so quick to judge, but they undeniably are. For example, the new Disney golf movie, The Greatest Game Ever Played; terrible title, just horrid. I’ve seen it in theaters a few times, and without fail several people in the audience pipe up about what a stupid title it has. Those people will almost certainly not see the movie, in no small part because the title isn’t a proper payoff to the trailer setup. They think “if these guys can’t even come up with a good title, it’s gotta suck”.
Not to mention, I think the right title helps get a spec script read and generate interest. An appropriate, catchy title is just another piece of the getting-sold puzzle, in my very humble opinion.
A lot of great advice there, Craig! A couple of things I’d like to add from my own perspective —
For one, I believe that when marketing people put together a trailer (and correct me if I’m mistaken about this), they look to include moments from the movie that will sway people who “normally don’t go to this kind of thing.”
That is, they ask themselves, “What are the biggest potential turn-offs about this movie for some audiences?” Then they try to put together a trailer that tells that audience, “Check it out, though, this movie’s different, you’ll like this one.”
Readiest example: the trailer for ERIN BROCKOVICH. That season, there were two high-powered star-driven based-on-a-true-story movies about big environmental cases, ERIN BROCKOVICH and A CIVIL ACTION. I really liked ERIN BROCKOVICH; I have yet to see A CIVIL ACTION. I can pinpoint the moment from the trailer — which they also made sure to include in every TV commercial, radio spot, etc. — that got me to go:
Woman: Are you a lawyer? Julia Roberts: God no, I hate lawyers, I just work for ‘em.
THAT made that movie a hit, because it told everybody in the audience that this movie was not going to be another boring-ass “lawyer” movie. (In fact, I believe there are only two brief courtroom scenes in the entire film, one of which is about Erin’s car accident, not hexavalent chromium.)
I’d also add that Night Shyamalan kept marketing and trailer moments very much in mind when he wrote THE SIXTH SENSE. He’d been burned in the past writing deeply personal movies that nobody could figure out how to market, and carefully designed a story that was just as personal to him but delivered enough shocks and genre moments to fit a certain well-worn marketing groove.
And lastly, I want to chime in that “trailer moments” shouldn’t be first and foremost in your mind as your crafting your movie, but once you’ve written something solid it can help to imagine what the trailer would be — and if you can’t, then you’ve probably got a problem.
I mean come on: are there really NO memorable lines of dialog that crystallize a big moment? NO huge self-contained laughs, no sweeping kisses, no breathless jumps? Forget the trailer, that could be a problem with the script itself….
Bill
Bill,
Good point. I was just telling my brother the exact same thing. He’s got a completed script but is lacking those “trailer moments.” So I think he’s going to consider this as he works through a rewrite.
The first time I heard about trailer moments was about a year ago on Dinner For Five. Jon Favreau had the cast of Daredevil on and I think it was Jennifer Garner that mentioned something about all movies needing five trailer moments. If you haven’t seen this episode it’s worth it just for the Kevin Smith - Ben Affleck banter.It is hilarious. I think I actually had tears in my eyes.
I’m going to get to work on an adaptation of the Pottery Barn catalogue.
i’m going to get to work on a men-in-stockings sword orgy.
Hey Craig -
Great post. I’m semi-torn on this. While I know the role of a trailer is to put butts in theatre seats, part of me also wants to see a trailer that reflects what the movie is really about, warts and all.
Off the top of my head, I remember ‘Neighbors’ with John Belushi And Dan Ackroyd. I think the studio knew they had a dark comedy on their hands that they didn’t know how to market it. So they show a shot of Ackroyd chasing a scrambling Belushi, call it slapstick, then edit it from the final cut.
I’m not saying that you should show every honest, brutal scene a movie has either, (although Nil by Mouth could’ve used a few more ‘happy moments’), but the trailer needs to accurately reflect the tone of the movie. Then the customer can decide for themselves.
Tangental to the discussion, but why do trailers also keep recycling the same sound tracks over and over? I know a studio probably owns certain titles already, but should the score to Shawshank really be used to hype other movies, ya’ know?
Wow, some of those characters went Russian in my post above. Sorry about that.
I was the VP of Lee Daniels Entertainment and when it came time to market The Woodsman, we knew we had a problem on our hands. I came up with the line, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” but I totally disagreed with the trailer that was cut. I really thought (and still do) that the specific subject matter of the film -pedophilia- should’ve been kept a secret. The trailer should’ve just shown Kevin Bacon out of jail, dealing with something. You don’t know what, but just…something. In my opinion, The Woodsman is a great film that nobody saw. Why? Because too much was given away in the trailer. And at the end of the day who wants to see a movie about a pedophile? Apparently, we got our answer.
A pretty good trailer for a film I had no interest in seeing is for the new remake of “THE FOG”. Not too bad, surprisingly. I personally had written this one of the day it was annunced they were remaking it. But, the trailer may make me see it…at least on DVD.
http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/635/635581p1.html
I pointed out earlier that I personally thought the trailer and relentless PR for THE ISLAND blew chunks, in that it gives away most of the major plot points of the film - interestingly enough, it didn’t do very well this weekend, or at least as well as was expected for a Michael Bay film with hot stars (I also personally don’t care for his films at all, though I’m a fan of Ewen MacGregor) - the big question is, did the trailer really kill the movie’s opening, or are people now getting wise to that type of picture? (All elements, little story). Thoughts?
The Island tracked pretty poorly although I recently just saw it. It’s not a bad movie at all nor can I explain why it did so poorly. The more I try and predict audience trends, the more they don’t make sense.
Oh and here’s 2 other harmful trailers:
The Man and Elizabethtown.
They both give so much away there’s truly no point in seeing the movie. The Man actually shows THE END of the movie with Sam Jackson and Eugene Levy saying their good-byes at an airport, a la Rush Hour.
And I LOVE Cameron Crowe. Too bad they gave every single plot point away in the trailer.
Oh well…
Let me just say it annoys me to no end when a trailer has a cool scene or clip that doesn’t end up in the movie. I can’t recall any examples off the top of my head, but I know there have been times where what I thought would be big moments in the movie, thanks to the trailer, never happen.
What is brought up here by Kevin, that is of interest to all of us, particularly for the business life of our projects, is how to show LESS in trailers and return to the idea of the tease, suspense and ‘less is more’. Is it possible? As has been posted here by other, I can add that I am endlessly shocked in the theater by how much I’m being shown of the film to come, to the point where I feel I’ve already seen it, or seen enough of it to decide I don’t have to/want to see it! Huge marketing error, don’t you think? Anything to be done guys - ? You’re in/been in this business!
Worst offenders in recent memory: the trailers for WHAT LIES BENEATH and THE NEGOTIATOR.
The trailer for WHAT LIES BENEATH showed Harrison Ford telling his wife he had an affair with the girl whose ghost has been coming back to haunt Michelle Pfeiffer. This is supposed to be a major reveal late in the story — the decision to include it in the trailer led many audiences to become incredibly impatient with the movie because they already knew what was going on, why are we wasting time watching all this oblivious buildup?
I was amazed that Robert Zemeckis actually defended the choice to give the game away in the trailers, telling a reporter that “Audiences today want to know everything that’s going to happen” before they see a movie. If that were true, then Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of PSYCHO should have outgrossed TITANIC, but okay Bob.
At least WHAT LIES BENEATH didn’t give away the ending in the trailer. When I saw the cinema previews for THE NEGOTIATOR, though — which felt like they were about seven minutes long — I couldn’t believe my eyes. They actually showed Kevin Spacey and Samuel Jackson teaming up at the end, with Spacey saying into his radio, “Now you’ll have to deal with BOTH of us.”
When the trailer faded to silence, I adopted a storybook voice and called out, “THE… END,” like I was tucking a baby into bed. It got such a nice laugh that now I do that whenever I see a trailer that seems to give away the entire movie.
Bill
I’d hate to be the person who had to come up with a trailer for ‘The Village’…
I felt the same about the trailer for THE TRUMAN SHOW, which shows Truman confronting his maker (Ed Harris) - they gave away the ending of the fucking film, for crying out loud.
A lot of films are doing this, have been for quite some time.
Current offender is the trailer for STEALTH, which basically gives up all three acts and every else except the last ten seconds. I’m not seeing it as a result.
I’ll see Stealth no matter what. W. D. Richter’s one of my favorite screenwriters, and I want to support him.
I thought that the trailer for the Village was actually pretty good. The trailer captured the atmosphere and the threat that was in the movie and left you wondering at what was going on. Now, it turned out that the atmospher and threat was a lot easier to sustain through a trailer than through 120 minutes.
This hints another thing that I have seen occaisionally with trailers. Every now and then, you see a movie where the guy who did the trailer had a better idea of what the movie was, or could have been, about than the screenwriter &/or director. Most often, I have seen this where the second act of a movie didn’t work, where the movie takes a turn away from the promising plot or character development. The trailer can pull out and highlight the promising moments. The movie has to sustain and fulfill upon the promise.
This is only tangentially related, but it’s too good not to share. If you like trailers, don’t miss 5 Men and a Limo, a 5-minute short film featuring a number of actors whose faces will be new but whose voices will be familiar. (Warning: that link goes directly to a quicktime movie of the film, so turn down the volume if you’re watching it from work and you’re not supposed to be watching movies.)
Oops—the link got stripped out. It’s http://www.donlafontaineonline.com/video/5men.mov
I agree with Phoenix about trailers that show scenes not in the final film. A couple examples off the top of my head:
PLANES, TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES — John Candy singing in the mirror; Steve Martin saying something like, “I was on my way home to see my family for Thanksgiving, and instead I’m in a motel bed with a stranger.”
REAL GENIUS — Val Kilmer floating up past a balcony in a lounge chair with large balloons attached. William Atherton says, “What are you doing out there?” “Floating, sir.”
I know why this happens (editing continues after marketing) but it’s frustrating when a scene sells you on the film and then doesn’t show up.
The worst offender:
JUNGLE FEVER — Wesley Snipes and Spike Lee are in a car. Nick Turturro is at the window, backed by his Italian friends. Turturro tells him to get out of the car. Snipes says, “I don’t want any trouble.” Turturro holds up his hands and with a sinister smile says, “I promise… Get out of the car.”
That moment sold me on the movie. Went to see it opening weekend. Where did it go?
So now that we have some insight into the studio level of marketing for your screenplay, let me take you across the tracks to the D2DVD world where marketing rules the roost.
In this realm, the D2DVD sells concept, concept and concept. Why? Because that’s all we have to sell with (besides the box art which I’ll get to in a moment. We don’t have “stars” for the most part - maybe some names in the larger D2DVDs - so people have to look at the box and immediately get the concept.
Once we have the concept, we create the title to sell that concept. This is where you can be really clever and engage the casual browser in the video store.
Then we create the artwork, distilling the concept down to a simple yet engaging image that will compete with the 20 copies of THE BIG STUDIO BLOCKBUSTER.
Finally we write the script, which is tailored for limited locations, budget and schedule. Along the way if anything about the story doesn’t reinforce the concept - which we know we can sell - then it’s eliminated.
It’s backwards from the way the studios seem to work, but it does work. Retailers don’t want to know the story, they want to hear the concept, the title and see the artwork. If those are good then they’ll buy. If you have a star name to go along, then that’s gravy.
To be honest, I imagine it’s similar to the way AIP worked in the good old days…
OMG! It may or may not be reality, but the scenario outlined in the last post is quite possibly the ugliest bit of business I have ever heard of. If that is the way it’s done, then I would rather sell insurance. Or become a prostitute…oh wait, THAT IS prostitution.
I think author know this theme.