Psycho (1960): Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins and Martin Balsam. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Screenplay by Joseph Stefano, based on the novel by Robert Bloch.

Over the years, movie trailers have undergone an evolution. While they were once just a collection of scenes and title cards aimed at "selling" the movie to audience members who may have been a bit early (or decided to stay between features, as trailers once followed the feature, hence the name), with the advent of in-your-face advertising and the internet, these shorts — sometimes grand pieces of filmmaking in their own right — have come to be once aspect of many that a film is initially judged on. Bad trailer = poor turn-out at the boxoffice and your movie is dead. Good trailer = good opening weekend and it doesn't even matter if your movie is good or not.

Kind of sad how things have changed.

Fortunately, if you love trailers (as I do), then it means, at least, that sometimes you get a bonus out of a clunker of a movie, and there's more than one example of this in these 12 trailers I'll be posting here.

Anyway, back to the way things were. Trailers used to be something that could be missed. You didn't rush out to see a movie just because a certain trailer was attached to it, but that changed in 1960. Alfred Hitchcock was already the master filmmaker of the day and each of his new films was eagerly anticipated by the movie-going public. As was the trend with popular entertainers and directors, they would actually make an appearance in the trailer itself, introducing the clips with their own endorsement and urge the public to buy a ticket or two. For his new film, "Psycho", the story and plot of which had been shrouded in mystery (at Hitch's own urging), the famous director took the movie preview art-form a step further by showing no clips from the film whatsoever. Instead, he offers a whimsically dark tour around the set of the Bates Motel, dutifully throwing the prospective audience off the trail of the surprise ending, even to the point of having a shot of Vera Miles (not Janet Leigh) in a wig at the end of the trailer in what is a representation of what has become the most famous scene from the film.

Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964): Peter Sellers, Sterling Hayden and Slim Pickens. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George.

Leave it to Kubrick to elevate the trailer to an art-form. For his satirical film, "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" he knew that he couldn't just go with the same format that films had tried and tested over the years previous. "Strangelove" was neither fully a comedy nor fully dramatic. It was a new kind of animal that just wouldn't fit into any traditional kind of mold.

The director approached Pablo Ferro, who was making a splash with ground-breaking avant-garde television ads. His inspiration for the "Strangelove" trailer was an award-winning Canadian short called "Very Nice, Very Nice" by Arthur Lipsett (which I studied frame-by-frame in film school in Canada) and worked in a subversive way to get Kubrick's message across as clearly as the film did. The times were a-changing and so were trailers:

A Clockwork Orange (1971): Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee and Michael Bates. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel by Anthony Burgess.

Pablo Ferro's format for the trailer for Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" was so successful, the director toyed with the same format to advertise several of his other films that followed, most notably, "A Clockwork Orange", once again a case of a film where a "standard" trailer just wouldn't be suitable. By now, Kubrick was cutting his own trailers and managed to refine Ferro's style past the point of being avant-garde for avant-garde's sake, to shamelessly exploiting the fact that very little could be shown of this shocking film, and it works brilliantly.

This style has made a bit of a comeback in recent years. After Kubrick's death, it was more or less resurrected for the trailer for "Eyes Wide Shut", but just saying "Cruise - Kidman - Kubrick" over and over didn't have the same impact as Kubrick's previous works. The recent trailer for "Funny Games" stole the format too slightly better effect than the "Eyes Wide Shut" attempt, but still, can't even begin to scratch the surface of Kubrick's originality:

Superman: The Movie (1978): Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder and Gene Hackman. Directed by Richard Donner, Screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman, Leslie Newman & Robert Benton, based on the comic book character created by Jerry Siegel and Joel Schuster.

By 1977, movie trailers were no longer just throwaway visual time-killers, they had become must-see entertainment in their own right. I know, from my own experience, growing up in the seventies, that missing the trailers, either at the drive-in or the cinema was absolutely unheard of. It was part of the whole "going to the movies" thing.

With the huge success of "Star Wars", producers of the star-laden "Superman" movie, appropriately-titled, "Superman: The Movie" knew that if the hype was right, they could have audience line-ups around the block the same way George Lucas' film was currently doing. Unfortunately, producers Alexander Salkind, Pierre Spengler and Warner Brothers did not want to give too much away about this, the first big-screen adaptation of the comic book legend since the black and white serials in the 1940's. So, what could they do for a trailer? Well, their biggest asset was the cast and the title, so ...

I do recall seeing this when it was originally broadcast back in late 1977, early 1978 and I know that it gave me goosebumps. Seems a bit lame today, but you have to remember, this was a time when no one had actually attempted a serious filmic version of a superhero story, and we were all promised that via state-of-the-art special effects, "you will believe a man can fly."

The Empire Strikes Back (1980): Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford. Directed by Irvin Kershner, Screenplay by Leigh Brackett & Lawrence Kasdan, based on a story by George Lucas.

1977 — 1980 was a really bad time for parents. A previous generation forced to help feed the sci-fi fantasy needs of the next generation, or so I was told. The bulk of my allowance usually went to whatever the latest "Star Wars" merchandise was, and there were certainly enough imitators (the TV version of "Battlestar Galactica" which actually made it to the big screen in Canada at least) to fill out every weekend's movie excursion.

Case in point was the 1978 re-release of "Star Wars". I'd already seen it countless times the year before, why would I need to see it again? Especially since, where I lived, it required a family trip to the drive-in because it wasn't playing indoors anywhere. Well, as if I needed another reason, Starlog magazine promised that after the credits there would be a "teaser" trailer (which was a pretty new concept at the time, although, the trailer for "Superman: The Movie" certainly qualifies as one since it doesn't actually show anything of the actual movie) for the eagerly-awaited sequel to "Star Wars".

Well, my family agreed to the drive-in trip, but certainly didn't want to stay til the end of the credits (and, frankly, didn't even believe me that there'd be a trailer after the movie), so I had to see this one as we were driving away from the screen. It was years before I even got to hear what the narrator was saying on the soundtrack. Frankly, after hearing how cheesy it is, I'm pretty glad about that ...

The Shining (1980): Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick & Diane Johnson, based on the novel by Stephen King.

The longest gap between films was occurring for Stanley Kubrick after the release of "Barry Lyndon" and prior to the release of "The Shining". The world was now eagerly-awaiting what was probably going to be the greatest horror film ever made. I mean, the world's greatest film director making a film based on a novel by the hottest horror writer at the time (Stephen King). So, if you're in Kubrick's shoes, what do you do for a trailer? You've already broken new ground with unique trailers for "Dr. Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" and "A Clockwork Orange". How do you simply get across "Stanley Kubrick horror film" in a new way?

Update on Monday, July 20, 2009 at 8:57AM by Doug Lentz

The teaser trailer for Roland Emmerich's "2012" directly rips off this trailer on a large scale. It uses the same music and involves a sweeping tidal wave instead of a flood of blood, but I think somehow misses the point of these elements working perfectly together in the Kubrick original.

Alien (1979): Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Veronica Cartwright and Yaphet Kotto. Directed by Ridley Scott, Screenplay by Dan O'Bannon, Story by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett.

Following in the footsteps of great directors like Hitchcock an Kubrick, Ridley Scott directly over-saw the advertising campaign for his new way-out sci-film "Alien". Extremely simple concept: an egg (literally a household egg) cracks open, illuminating something unimaginably horrific inside, interspersed with glimpses of the film.

I recall vividly the TV version of this trailer, which was just the egg shots on their own. Being both a horror/sci-fi and general filmmaking buff, I knew this was something that I wanted to see. I mean, I could have made that trailer myself, on super8 in my bedroom, but is still works amazingly well.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984): Harrison Ford, Kate Capshaw and Jonathan Ke Quan. Directed by Steven Spielberg, Screenplay by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, based on a story by George Lucas.

Not one of the most innovative trailers ever made, in fact, pretty straightforward by today's standards, the trailer for "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" holds some fondness for me because I vividly recall the anticipation surrounding this, the second installment in the Indiana Jones saga. Paramount really pulled out all the stops for this one, as far as "teasing" was concerned. You couldn't turn a corner in the months before this was released without seeing the simple "Trust him" posters plastered everywhere.

This theatrical trailer, was preceded, a couple of months earlier, by a fairly slim teaser trailer (along the same lines as the teaser trailer for "Superman: The Movie") that basically just showed a plane traveling across a map to the various locations in the new film. Pretty similar to some early James Bond teasers, in fact, which is appropriate, as Spielberg and Lucas set out to make a new James Bond with their archaeologist-adventurer.

This theatrical trailer also represents a time when the template was pretty much set for how you got an audience into the theater that would be followed and copied for years to come: 1) mysterious opening, 2) title reveal, 3) bunch of quick cut action, 4) gag ending.

Godzilla (1998): Matthew Broderick, Jean Reno and Maria Pitillo. Directed by Roland Emmerich, Screenplay by Dean Devlin & Roland Emmerich, based on a story by Ted Elliot, Terry Rossio, Dean Devlin & Rolanmd Emmerich.

With a little help from the internet, trailers were once again becoming something that you would buy a ticket for a movie you didn't particularly want to see just because you'd heard such-and-such had a trailer on before it. Roland Emmerich's re-imagining of "Godzilla" is a good case in point, even if it didn't turn out to be a very good film.

Two teasers were released in conjunction with the film, which were both hugely talked about by film geeks at the time. The first, wholly constructed for the sake of teasing an audience (below), the second, a bit of a rehash of footage that would appear in the film after the over-the-top reception of the first teaser.

Emmerich continues, today, to construct teaser trailers like this for his films which frequently do not include the main actors, only showcase images and visual effects ("10,000 BC" being a recent exception as there were no main actors only showcase image and visual effects). Maybe he should get his own category for future generations?

X-Files: Fight the Future (1998): David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson and John Neville. Directed by Rob Bowman, Screenplay by Chris Carter, based on a story by Chris Carter & Frank Spotniz.

Trailers because huge around the turn of the century (1999—2000 that is) thanks, in great part, to the internet and the brilliant idea of studios to start releasing promotional material simultaneously with theatrical release. "Lord of the Rings" (still several years away from completion) and "Star Wars Episode 1" are obvious examples. Things to show to your friends over and over again more for the sheer amazement that you'd downloaded a good quality video on your PC more than anything else.

It was really a heyday for trailers. "Austin Powers" spoofed both "Star Wars Episode 1" and "Goldeneye" for its sequel, there was a new movie coming out called "The Matrix" that no one could make head or tail of from its trailer images, but looked really cool, and Quicktime was getting better and better at encoding these things for high quality and instant download.

I do recall, with fondness, this trailer, for yet another movie that proved to be disappointing after the initial thrill wore off. It was tacked onto the start of "Alien Resurrection" where I was living at the time and the fresh audience had no idea what the trailer was for until, on black, a voice said ... "Mulder?"

The audience went nuts. Unfortunately for Fox (the studio and the character), the same can't be said for the most recent TV-show-turned-movie installment.

Spider-Man (2002): Tobey McGuire, Willem Dafoe and Kirsten Dunst. Directed by Sam Raimi, Screenplay by David Koepp, based on the comic book character created by Stan Lee & Steve Ditko.

An excellent teaser concept for a hugely anticipated movie which unfortunately didn't quite get the long run (the teaser, not the movie) it deserved because of world events. Pulled buy the studio shortly after 9/11, "Spider-Man" ran for a long time largely on word-of-mouth from people who had actually seen this mythical trailer.

From what I could gauge from audiences at the time, no one expected this movie could be pulled off at all, let alone be the huge benchmark success that it was. Maybe if pays to have your teaser trailer seen by the smallest possible world audience.

Comedian (2002): Jerry Seinfeld. Directed by Christian Charles.

 

No, not the "Watchmen" character. I have yet to meet anyone who has actually seen this documentary of Jerry Seinfeld's comedy tour shortly after the completion of TV's ground-breaking "Seinfeld", but I don't think I've met anyone who hasn't seen the trailer. Which is strange. As far as I know, the trailer has only ever been available on Apple's website (until recently) in the lowest Quicktime format available, but that hasn't stopped half the world from watching it more than once, often several times in a row.

I think, frankly, it's the best trailer that's ever been made, even if it doesn't make me want to see the movie at all (I'd actually rather see something else made by the people who put the trailer together). "In a world..." was tagged, once and for all, as comic territory following this trailer, and it put Hal Douglas on the map, even if he wasn't the true "voice" of trailers.