The 75th Annual Academy Awards is a milestone—a diamond jubilee for the motion picture industry and a collusion of business, money, media, politics and celebrity. Still, after three-quarters of a century, isn’t there anything, anything at all that can be done about the Oscars?

This, remember, is that august body that never gave Alfred Hitchcock a trophy for Best Director. Here’s a groundbreaking idea….

Why not add a new category like, say, Best Motion Picture Trailer? Of course this won’t fix the problem with the old-school Academy. However, particularly in this instance, it will award talent that, like Hitchcock, has been grossly overlooked. So, for your consideration, these are the nominees:

“The Scorpion King”—Without the Rock this movie would be a trailer.
“Spider-Man”—You KNOW it’s really a cartoon but, dammit, it’s SPIDER-MAN!
“Road to Perdition”—It’s like Sergio Leone…but not.
“The Mothman Prophecies”—An example of why a film should remain a novel.
“Signs”—The real surprise? It’s an 80-minute movie with a 2-hour running time.

(Oops! I think I gave away the winner.)

Imagine…you see the first one coming at you, leaping off the screen. It’s a heart-stopping elevator fly-by of hybrid images rushing together in a cinematic blur. And then with excited joy you see the next one chasing after the same glory.

You’re now fifteen, maybe twenty minutes into Coming Attractions. By this time the last preview is fascinating, sure; but riddled with quick cuts and battered by the numbing noise and abundance of exclamation-point attitude, you’re ready to yell, “ENOUGH!”

A movie trailer is Godzilla bred in Hollywood, a stop-gap between art and commerce, if ever there was one, and a film’s one clear chance to earn the public’s admiration. These select sequences clipped off a movie absorb the viewer with surprising panache, a tight little world developing with authority into an elegant pastiche serving up a bowl of visual candy.

While never allowing the whole to equal the sum of its parts, this predetermined peek through the lens of the camera is generally more disconcerting than illuminating, sometimes even ruinous, but always blurring art into artifice.

Just as a poster is more idea than movie, its tagline more hope than promise, the trailer is that playfully pejorative gremlin on the hamster wheel with a knack to inspire enough moviegoers to flock into theaters and, who knows, maybe have the studio score a slam-dunk by declaring the film a weekend box office champ.

If, however, according to box office receipts the studio smells opposition to a film then consequences are due. Another version of the trailer—rethought and repackaged—is launched like a ballistic missile with all the importance of a second thought, even multiple versions to scratch some other movie-going itch.

You get one chance to make a first impression, but in Hollywood that’s only a theory where you make as many as it takes to keep the film from slipping out of the top five before next weekend.

Showing no loss of faith (though that’s not entirely clear) alternate montages by turn emphasize conflict or romance or humor or the star…or whatever hogs our attention enough to dragoon us into the theater.

Shots are magically re-arranged without taking away the breath of the movie when suddenly that go-for-broke dark energy of a “guy” movie is transmogrified into the softer abuse of a “date” movie in the spirit of unrelenting self-celebration (or unbridled desperation).

Add to this the knowledge that the studio might be giving up some of the film’s better moments—and, if all else fails, even some of its secrets—the pandering to commerce is not an artistic sellout so much as “re-thinking” is the bourgeois dictates of commercial moviemaking.

There’s no shame, really; rather it’s any amount of nuzzling by this sublime cinematic succubus to get us into the theater. If the feature film has dopey dialogue and marginal acting, then the trailer has likeable characters and snappy repartee.

Getting by on novelty, this furiously amplified package of visual flairs is busy getting down to those key elements of, say, sudden death or a spectacular escape. It leaves us clueless yet miraculously feeling obsessive about something we know absolutely nothing about.

By not being the movie but rather reflecting the movie (while preaching the gospel for the movie) those inscrutably rapid-cutting images can be a decision making experience for any filmgoer; and for the studio, it’s a way of blowing away the competition, at least on opening weekend.

Unquestionably, the dynamic melding of moving pictures and Dolby sound coheres to that skyrocketing Hollywood reality: No matter what, nothing gets in the way of the action—a jeremiad ultimately more compliment than complaint.

You virtually feel the movie without depending upon intellectual intuition, sensuous perception or any degree of imagination. No sex, of course, only violence (or maudlin hokum) with dubious comic relief, it’s really how the visuals cut that gives the trailer its dramatic action.

Owning up to the fact that this short film advertisement with ferocious conviction has no Shakespearean heft, because acting isn’t really a part of this fast-moving deal, what this collage of film clips is basically saying: “There’s an audience out there for this flick.”

The sheer pluckiness of the modern-day movie preview, notwithstanding critics who may suggest otherwise, can salvage the limited assets of a sturdy if mediocre film. But under no circumstance will the greatest movie trailer in the world save a hackneyed, sorry debacle.

In other words, if the trailer sucks don’t go see that movie.

What’s the worst case scenario? You have a studio who knows it has a box office loser, but that’s not important. What is important is that they have to save this potential turkey or risk losing a small fortune in production costs.

So rather than dash all commercial expectations, it’s pretty much left up to the marketing department. And the marketing department, not exclusively but predominately, relies upon the trailer to deliver the intended audience.

Okay, here’s how it works….

We’re surfing that 500-channel universe of cable TV (or the world-wide web) when suddenly all the air is being sucked out of the room! An image-driven juggernaut is offering up small glimpses in nanoseconds of sharply honed images; a quicksilver release of flash edits with the music-driven gigantism of special effects.

Quite literally it’s a micro-movie; that is to say we’ve come across what the studio is calling a “teaser” flouting an avidly awaited motion picture trailer “premiering” a few weeks (nay, a few MONTHS) ahead of the film’s release.

One scene defiantly tumbles into another, luridly jumbled together with an odd consistency of tone. It really takes us into the movie. A (male) voice-over with the fast-talking delivery of an auctioneer minimizes players and plots while offering no substance or even a nucleus to suggest a smart movie or even a dumb one.

It’s not the movie but the moment, that temporary thrill ride and quick guide pointing to an expensive star or some other glitz. Whether it’s the product of lazy imagination or a trajectory of cinematic genius, in the span of a commercial break our eyes are glued to the screen.

What we are presented with is masterfully rendered, dense and finely wrought, while promising a big surprise behind a smart-ass title, the objective of this presage is to find an appreciative audience while effectively obfuscating the storyline. The trailer is thereby gloriously overstuffed with the usual staging of hubbub and nonsense, followed by a hurtling action sequence before that obligatory glamour shot of a movie star (a real one) delivering a smart-alecky line.

The star is cool but the action rules, shaping character and conflict into a slick, glittering web with this strange, sticky hold on us. Our curiosity is whetted but without being afforded any satisfaction. It’s phenomenal. There’s nothing here to steer us. What we see is given loose abandon, utterly incoherent and exiled from any perceivable plot.

What we know is that the movie won’t be at all like this. Because, if the trailer is nothing else, it’s FAST! The pace, the pulse, the rhythm…nothing comes in under the radar. We can’t help but to think: “Wow! What an adrenalin rush…man, it’s terrific!”

And since we’re impulsive about going to the movies, which means we don’t bother to read movie reviews, we’re going to go see this film because we like the trailer. That’s it…no conversation.

So we clear our schedules, go into the local bijou or Cineplex and plunk down our money. But once we’re in the dark, ten minutes into the witless, malingering plot, the film is starting to drag down the majesty of the trailer. It’s hardly what we had hoped.

We sink into a deep funk, easily bored and completely unprepared, digging in our heels to stay put. Squirming in our seats we’re looking around, wondering if anybody else knows what time it is…because we do and that doesn’t bode well.

There’s a lot of second-guessing going on, especially when the story starts to go south before the 3rd Act, enfeebled by lapses in the narrative logic. But that sort of thing is what bothers people like Roger Ebert. What bothers us is something far worse:

”Hey,”—we say, talking mainly to ourselves—“that’s not how the scene played in the trailer! What about that other shot? (because there’s always that other shot.) It’s the one, you know…the one that got us to come see this damn thing in the first place—where is it? What happened? You mean to say it didn’t make the final cut?”

Is this false advertising or merely caveat emptor? There’s no simple answer beyond looking for that bristling action sequence—those few transitory, exuberant seconds craftily edited and clearly the most exhilarating part of the trailer. It never appears in the film. Do the two actually share any DNA?

As it soon becomes clear that hope has given way to wistful resignation, no one told us when we bought our tickets that we may be required to mourn. The difference between the trailer and what’s up there on the screen is bowdlerizing…so tragic it’s heartbreaking. We know sadly in our hearts that this is not the movie that we came to see. That movie couldn’t possibly exist. It’s a trailer. And somehow that’s a shame.

Now, having given up two hours of our lives (that we’ll never get back) who among us believes that this flick doesn’t deserve to die at the box office? Raise your hand.

Oh, sure, we don’t like this crap, but we’re not that conglomerate-owned studio out to make enough money on opening weekend to satisfy some shareholders. No, we’re just those chumps, remember, who laid a fool’s bet in this game of Hollywood roulette.

Our friends and family ask us: “Is it any good?”

We answer, “No…but wait until you see the trailer.”

All films are made in the editing room; no less is this true of that slender achievement known as the motion picture trailer. Fundamentally, the cinematic manner by which footage is combined into montage constitutes what makes a movie…a movie.

Often these nimble images arrive in a scant seven seconds, a film composition freighted with that wonderfully laudable enterprise of reinvention and split-second timing. All right, it’s just a movie trailer and doesn’t qualify as philosophy. But you have to admire the audacity. I mean, you just have to.

Say all you want about the deception; it’s an incredible feat of organization and efficacy. If it’s any good, that is to say if it’s done well with wit and muscular ingenuity, in my opinion such brilliant craftsmanship certainly is worthy of an Academy Award.

Oh…which reminds me, the Oscar goes to “The Scorpion King” of course. Agree or disagree, you can’t avoid the fact that the most popular movie trailer is hardly ever an Academy Award-winning film. And I can prove it. What movie do you suppose has the best trailer of all time? A special award (like the one they gave Hitchcock) would go to “Cliffhanger” hands down.

Now guess what movie had that missing action sequence.

I know, I know…but you just don’t get over a heartbreaker like that.

By Frederick Louis Richardson
Edited by Beverly Richardson
March 6, 2003
© Copyright 2003 DreaMerchant. All Rights Reserved.