An ode to trailers, promos and ‘about last night...’: The lost art of anticipation
In the second feature on four arts non grata in the modern cinematic marketplace, I call on the art of the tease.
A single (terrifying) egg. Promotional artwork for Alien on Hollywood’s Egyptian Theater in 1979. Credit: 2 Warps to Neptune (2warpstoneptune.com).
Clicking fingers on a silent street mime striking matches as the Jets call on their cohort in a snippet sliced from West Side Story. Eight months later mischievous Lolita sucks a scarlet lollypop in scarlet sunglasses; a stocking on a stretched leg offers spectators a sneak peek of Mrs. Robinson in 1967. Puppet strings play with invisible toy victims in a poster for The Godfather while a pellucid puddle glows with gore beneath a full moon: An American Werewolf in London’s first trailer. “From the director of Animal House…” read the red letters at the roar of the beast, “A different kind of animal.”
Mating signals reign in the mammalian kingdom; in the movies lures consist of minimalist symbols. Ellipses looped Manhattan’s movie theaters when The Godfather expanded from a small selection of six screens to well over three hundred in March 1972. Security was summoned nine months later at a Broadway cinema to rein in rowdy ticket-buyers.
Social media would have appeared more than superfluous in such a landscape. “Under Coppola’s command… the players are such believably real Human beings, I felt like an eavesdropper,” One critic wrote. Pulsing on the door of a packed box office, pressed patrons sought to pry into the privileged world of espionage. Scripts of Star Wars Episode V: The Emperor Strikes Back failed to disclose Darth Vader was the father of Luke Skywalker – leading the cast and crew and audiences to wrest the information only after its premiere in 1980.
Hearsay was a hazy maze of muffled spoilers in the bygone days of crowded cinemas. Entrance alone was the excited exploration of a sooty vault: a darkened tunnel slowly laying bare the light. Sneaking in to chew forbidden fruit and previously purchased popcorn was an art form not dissimilar to prising invitations to a club or party. While adolescents Steve and Andrea arrived at a convenience store at night armed with the code “I’d like to exchange an egg” to snag a map to an underground rave in a 1991 episode of Beverly Hills, 90210, real teens exerted comparable efforts scattering from screen to screen to catch r-rated movies in a multiplex.
“Hard-to-get” these days is a phenomenon that’s paradoxically… hard to get. Before the boom of the immediate fix drug, SVOD (streaming and video on demand), screenings would sell out in the hundreds prior to a feature’s opening. Twelve years ago blockbuster Avatar could boast two hundred, fifty saturated auditoriums. Miniscule gaps between a movie’s cinematic rollout and its digital release began to tilt that trend until it tumbled off its axis. Warner Bros detonated any hope of theaters being able to sustain suspense when in December 2020 they announced their seventeen-film slate would simultaneously surface on the small and silver screens in 2021, sparking the ire of Christopher Nolan and dozens of others. “Straight-to-video meant something back in the day and straight-to-streaming means the same thing today,” insisted John Fithian, President of the National Association of Theatre Owners, only four years ago.
A 2003 episode of The West Wing echoes that sentiment. After C.J. rambles on about why she and college boyfriend Ben can’t reconcile (“‘cause we get on each other’s nerves. He has this thing where he - twirls his hair…” Deep inhalation. “Anyway, the bloom’s off the rose and… I don’t call as much and it’s the guilt and… cherchez la femme and ‘why didn’t it work out the first time?’ and it’s ten years till we talk again,”) pal Toby murmurs in contempt, “That was like a bad romantic comedy in… fifteen seconds.”
“Straight to video.” quips C.J.
Despite the indefatigable dominance of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and countless (unknown) others, it’s not been fifteen years since shuffling lines thronged, cheered and hooted to salute the mooring vessel that was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Twenty-six years previously a flight that carried canisters containing Dallas’ “Who Shot J.R.?” reveal had to be met by weapon-wielding guards at London’s Heathrow Airport to protect the secret till the episode was aired in the U.S.
Exclusivity has lost prestige in the abundant age of surplus information. Although a 2013 study found that people opted to postpone a free meal at an opulent French restaurant rather than feast on it forthwith, our movie marketing machine abides by other principles. Speaking out against the spoilers that too often storm his mailbox, critic Alan Sepinwall claimed in an Indiewire article in 2018, “I generally define spoilers the way Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defined pornography: I know it when I see it.”
The same could not be said for sultry offerings that scintillated scantily till their release throughout the eighties. In a culture void of sneak peeks and advance reviews and full-synopsis trailers smut could shun excoriation. 1996’s Crash – David Cronenberg’s enticing, wince-inducing study of fictitious car collision victims who conflate their trauma with taboo arousal – sold out at the London Film Festival some hours after tickets went on sale.
It likely helped that Britain’s Daily Mail and Evening Standard had been leading a campaign to ban the film. A 1986 Washington Post column teases 9 ½ Weeks’ “steaminess” and “strains of sadomasochism”: the twin traits had already made it one of that year’s most hyped movies.
Stigmatization was a turn-on if the source of scowls remained a secret. Few church communities sat down to watch The Exorcist in 1973 – and yet the film was totally non grata in a handful of locations in the U.S. where parishioners and pastors termed it “the embodiment of evil”. In the messy and miasmic era of the social media monarchy select groups would have surely stalled the movie’s cinematic journey. Its studio Warner Bros didn’t even preview it for critics. Yet this dose of devilish discretion prompted millions of filled seats to make it that year’s No. 1 Box Office film.
Sharks menaced U.S. shores in promos for the epic Jaws: the first small-screen campaign for an ambitious silver screen endeavor back in summer ‘75. Shot from the slaughterer’s perspective as its nose storms swaths of seaweed and eyes human legs to snap them up, the sixty-second spot showed only flashes of the menace. Stunting tourism, it drew the beach-shy in to multiplexes till the famished beast grossed two hundred, sixty million dollars just domestically that year.
Pop-up ads predictably succeed their siblings on a movie site if a new movie flounders in the first weeks of its outing; blindingly bright colors caress reels of critics’ quotes. A once-marginal pursuit that plastered billboards on the Sunset Strip, “For Your Consideration” has become an omnipresent industry campaign at every turn of Hollywood’s awards season.
When 20th Century Fox’s Rocky Horror Picture show flopped in the seventies the answer wasn’t more exposure but significantly less. Espying a select clique of adoring fans compressed outside Waverly Theater in the offbeat Greenwich Village, junior executive Tim Deegan stripped the showtimes down to nothing more than midnight slots on weekends.
Months sluggishly went by until the niche had nestled frequently enough to summon supplementary outcasts. Costumed like the movie’s characters, they came decked out in fishnet stockings; drenched in garish rouge. Selective distribution made the specialty stand out: it surfaced only in two hundred, thirty cinemas across the country only at the stroke of midnight and on weekends. Showing by showing, decade by decade it became the eighth most-grossing movie musical in history.
Cat and mouse is scarcely unfamiliar in the arthouse – and a rabble of free treats can tire even the tenacious tabby. Lost amidst lowbrow comedy American Pie, 1999’s Drop Dead Gorgeous suffered rancid receipts until VHS made it a cult hit. An equal fate had met a similar black dramedy in Heathers ten years earlier when it had come out next to the more mass-appeal, less convoluted Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Only on video (and at a cost of $89,95) was it subjected to the chasing claws of febrile followers.
A 2014 piece in Forbes highlights the indispensable “niche markets” on which movie studios will have to hedge their bets. Mystery is what is lacking in the current climate nonetheless. Showered by slews of YouTube ads, our minds are stupefied to read a 1990 statement by then president of Buena Vista, Richard Cook, who nixed commercials prior to the studio’s movies because “it was really an insult to the patron, who is not going out to experience the mundane.”
In a world aspiring to be post-pandemic the mundane prevails unstoppably – but not just on account of masks, moronic ads and dogged distancing. Excess has infiltrated previews of our motion pictures. Slivers of fluorescent green asprawl a semi-obscured egg sufficed to market 1979’s Alien together with the fearful words “In space no one can hear you scream.” A blackened cradle sits before a silhouette of Mia Farrow’s head amidst an olive-green abyss: “Pray for Rosemary’s Baby.” commands the 1967 horror movie poster.
Surrealism swept the trailers of our past. Curlicues of girlish handwriting in white are spread across a title card to start the trailer for The Virgin Suicides (1999). “there are times when…” It begins. The Lisbon sisters saunter down a high school hallway. “Mystery…” the message reemerges. Cursive writing clusters around glossy snapshots in Cecilia’s diary. Blonde Lux picks golden petals off a flower. “and Beauty...” A close-up of Lux in the eyes of sixteen-year-old Tripp. “find you…” Elusive shots continue interleafing words. “touch you… haunt you… Moments you never forget... Questions you never answer.”
Cryptic teasers tested viewers’ patience even in the mid-2000s. The reflection of a rainbow curves across a baseball cap-clad paper boy atop his bike as he distributes that day’s issue to surrounding homes in UK Channel 4’s 2005 taste of Desperate Housewives. Rolled-up missiles fire at the characters as tepid cadences sound a significantly slowed-down “Que Sera Sera”. Hypnotic is the voice of singer China Forbes from Pink Martini as a frilly, lime green Bree tends to her rosebush; in a pale pink girdle Edie Britt bends over and the paper smacks her rear; Gabrielle’s blows up her lawnmower while Susan – in a tangerine silk gown and faux fur stole - collects the page and reads the headline: “Mysterious Suicide on Wisteria Lane.” Fantasy eclipses the suburban series’ loose reality. No scene from it is shown in this expressly subtle clip.
Misleading bait was the true marker of a hit in days gone by. Waltz-like music raced to showcase Alfred Hitchcock as he advertised the now notorious Bates Motel in Psycho’s trailer: “Good afternoon…” came the austere announcement. “Here we have… a quiet little motel. Tucked away off the main highway. And as you see, perfectly harmless-looking – when in fact, it has now become known as… the scene of a crime.” Only after several shots of innocent interiors does the scene jump cut to screechy violins and Janet Leigh’s immobilizing scream.
The Blair Witch Project famously went further with its launch. Sharing missing persons’ leaflets that implied the characters of its false documentary were real, it labeled the protagonists as “missing – presumed dead” on each of their respective pages in the 1999 IMDb. The said “Blair Witch” was rumored to reside in Maryland, where the enquiring students had mysteriously vanished back in 1994. “Interviews” with parents of the teenagers were published on its blurry webpages to lend an aura of the personal. A full-page advert in Variety read merely, “blairwitch.com: 21,222,589 hits to date.” The number grew with each successive issue.
Complicity in an unspoken knowledge has historically designed the key to movie marketing. “Garbo laughs.” reads a poster for 1939’s Ninotchka. “He’s Tootsie… She’s Dustin Hoffman,” ran the 1982 comedy’s ad. Implicit understanding didn’t merely call to mind the stars or their reported idiosyncrasies but timely trends like Clueless’s short slogan back in 1995: “Sex. Clothes. Popularity. Whatever.”
Brands of music legends banked on a ubiquitous familiarity. A black screen shivers as white slanted letters spell out: “WE DON’T NEED NO EDUCATION / WE DON’T NEED NO THOUGHT CONTROL”: the lyrics of the Pink Floyd hit in 1982’s occult spot for The Wall. Eminem’s moniker appears onscreen long after somber keyboard chords precede the pulsing beats and thrumming riff of “Lose Yourself” to introduce 8 Mile (2002).
Chock-full of needless references are modern servings of a music film’s promotion. Throbbing beats of “We Will Rock You” splice arpeggios from “Bohemian Rhapsody” along a trailer for the Freddie Mercury biopic of the same name. It spotlights a reflecting silver door, somebody’s waking head, travelling trunks and female feet across cats eating from their bowls before stumbling on Mercury’s signature sunglasses. Overloaded yet obscure, the spot stops short of Queen’s uniqueness.
Namelessness is the mark of insurmountable success: one relished by a handful of pop culture finds. “You know the name. You know the number.” reads the slogan for GoldenEye (1995). Bending blocks of bright red letters surface in a spot promoting the fourth season of the famed Sopranos. Clambering across their height and width, the camera crawls across its logo as dim drones of Alabama 3’s “Woke Up This Morning” – the show’s theme song – beat behind the antihero’s voice: “You know why we’re here – so if you have any doubts or reservation, now’s the time to say so. ‘Cause once you enter this family… there’s no gettin’ out.” Viewers will recognize these words from Christopher’s initiation ceremony: the finger-pricking moment that pronounced him a “made man” within the Mafia. Strangers will feel left out.
And that’s the point.
“Winter Is Coming.” Spelt out in ice crystals, the slogan was suffusely splayed across a navy backdrop on a UK billboard advertising Game of Thrones’ awaited seventh season.
The show’s title wasn’t.
Scrambling strings and solemn statements must work hard to highlight faux hits of today. “People like us – we’re different.” Damian Lewis’ Bobby avers at the start of a trailer for Billions’ fifth season. Four years of steady ratings haven’t quenched the channel Showtime’s urge to showcase every major character against the hurried sound of vicious violins. In case potential viewers can’t yet gauge the scandal of the series, its protagonist explains: “We need power. We need it to feel alive…” Insufferable exposition vanquishes the promo’s slim veneer of intrigue.
Overbated breath can lead to suffocation. In a trailer for the Netflix show The One - a series about DNA experiments determining our soulmates – treadmill sprinting leads the heroine to lose her breath. The moment caps a promo that begins with her proclaiming in what seems to be a TED talk, “I have a secret that I want to share with you.” That line alone could prompt a YouTube browser to approach the Skip Ad button.
FBI Agents once discovered they possessed a common guilty pleasure with the mafia of the Five Boroughs. Eavesdropping on a wiretap one morning, they were stunned to hear the mobsters arguing about the same Sopranos themes they had discussed less than an hour earlier.
The symbiosis couldn’t be coincidental. But the era of compulsive binge-watching can only banish these most useful links. People gulp series down at their own leisure while appointment viewing is consigned almost exclusively to sports. A 2017 study discovered that overconsumption was far from a pleasure-enhancing experience. Participants who spent six hours watching a tv series remembered and cared less about the show than those served daily doses or just one installment weekly.
Perhaps that might explain why The Queen’s Gambit – Netflix’s darling of a miniseries – was apparently relished by sixty-two million but followed by merely six thousand on Twitter. Early in its run its handle asked the fans to vote in answer to the question, “Do you think the @netflix series stayed faithful to the Walter Tevis novel?”
Almost a year has passed. A grand total of three have replied.
Reese’s Pieces once upon a time were all the rage. Spurred on by ET’s offering of gold and orange candies, children consumed oodles and its sales went up by sixty-five per cent in 1982. Such a confectionery offshoot comes across as unimaginable in the current movie scene.
Lucky samples sustain greatness nonetheless. Slow notes of an arpeggio surface to accompany a dismal New York City skyline at the start of 2019’s Joker trailer. Rocking steadily behind them are the two beats of a drone on timpani in Hildur Guðnadóttir’s haunting score. Cerulean facades of towering apartments and swift slots depicting Arthur Fleck’s indomitable need to laugh, his strained bid to confide in his reluctant counselor and bullies hounding him disseminate the music to make way for violins col legno (played with the bow’s wood). Scampering like screeching rats in a graffittied downtown subway, they race rampantly; seeking admission to a kind of liberty as Arthur mulls, emotionless: “All I have… are negative thoughts.”
Overtaken by one note that shimmers with a teasing tremolo, the music follows Arthur as he meets his quest to bring down deprecating stand-up comic Murray Franklin. Annihilation is the object of the antihero. Yet the trailer’s long-withheld explosion of triumphant violins and brass conjoining in a climbing theme appeals to any sense of feeling ostracized, misunderstood or ill at ease: a spiritual loosing of one’s inner shackles.
Hallucinations may have been the cheering crowds and praising packs in Joker’s wild imagination – and the same could be expressed about the clashing lines that once mobbed movie theaters. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” one manager told The San Francisco Chronicle about the opening of the first Star Wars in 1977. “Old people, young people, children, Hare Krishna groups. They bring cards to play in line. We have checker players, we have chess players; people with paint and sequins on their faces. Fruit eaters like I’ve never seen before, people loaded on grass and LSD. At least one guy’s been here every day.”
Franchises weren’t the sole films reeling in the rebels. Co-screenwriter of The Graduate Buck Henry recalled visiting screens where the patrons would sit on the steps, “breaking the fire laws”.
Removing movies from their rightful habitat curtails such scenes. Denied immediate access to a film, consumers remain undeterred nevertheless. Jeopardized by threats of multiple mass shootings, Joker’s debut in cinemas was prefaced by a warning from the theater chain Alamo Drafthouse: “It’s not for kids, and they won’t like it anyway.”
And yet the movie managed to amass over a billion dollars and became the first r-rated feat to do so. Canceled showings merely redirected eager moviegoers to another theater. Critics’ denigration fueled a lofty IMDb user score.
Hype lives. Served in a shotglass rather than the overflowing troughs conveying today’s features, it could live a little better.