An epic history of the movie trailer

hopesandfears.com

For as long as there have been movies, there have been attempts to get people into movie theaters. From

barkers on street corners to teasers, TV spots, and trailers littering the special features of your Matrix DVD,

movie marketing has evolved to let you know when and where Iron Man would be throwing a robot through

a skyscraper as loudly and frequently as possible.

Looking at the history of the movie trailer gives some insight to how it has changed. As viewership grew in

number, so do advertisements. But how did the modern movie trailer come to be?

The birth of the movie trailer, ads

Before movie trailers appeared ahead of your feature presentation, two components had to be in place: movie

theaters and filmed advertisements.

On November 1, 1895, Max and Emil Skladanowsky, a pair of German inventors, brought their short films to

The Berlin Wintergarten theater and turned it into the first official movie theater in history. In those days,

since there werent other movies to show, aside from short clips of a man sneezing, theater owners decided to

run commercials to help fill time and make some money.

Advertisements as the first features, trailers:

The first filmed advertisement appeared in 1897, with the Edison Manufacturing Companys

a phenomenally awkward attempt at easing racial tensions with a simple decree: We All Smoke. Here you

can see the first filmed advertisement, a spot for Admiral cigarettes.

Movies were about to hit mass audiences and make people lots of money. A growing number of city dwellers

were heading to nickelodeons and movie theaters to scream at reels of trains pulling into stationsor so the

legend goes. But trailers werent originally used as they are today. Paramount executive Lou Harris told the

Los Angeles Times in October of 1966 that the first trailer appeared in 1912 at the end of the serial The

Adventures of Kathlyn.

At the end of the reel, Kathlyn was thrown in the lion's den. After this "trailed" a piece of film that asked in

text "Does she escape the lion's pit? See next week's thrilling chapter!"

The idea of luring customers back to the theater was the birth of modern movie marketing. Serials opened

the door to previewing other pieces of entertainment. In November of 1913, Nil Granlund, an advertising

manager for Loews Theaters, devised and shot an ad for the Broadway musical The Pleasure Seekers, which

was playing at the Winter Garden theater in New York. Granlunds trailer caught the attention of Loews

owner, Marcus Loew, who set about having Granlund make more of these short advertisements. By 1914, he

was making trailers for Charlie Chaplin, then one of the worlds biggest stars and a marketing revolution

began.

Like all great things, Granlunds innovation would soon be stripped away from him and taken by a faceless

corporation. In 1919, the National Screen Service (NSS) started in New York and began a four-decade

monopoly over the creation and distribution of movie trailers and promotional materials. Finally, the

floodgates were open.

Movie trailers of the silent era aimed to give you the most bang for your buck. In the absence of sound, they

put the cast and crew upfront, along with some sizzling ad copy. In the trailer for Charles Hines The Live

Wire (1926), the spot promises the Crackling Sparks of Fun and a Flash of Its High Voltage Thrills, before a

montage of the films most extraordinary stunts. A tightrope walk across telephone lines, a car racing a train

and men scaling tall buildings without a harness were the space ships crashing into buildings of the 1920s.

These early previews revolved around text and visceral action scenes. The trailer for Colleen

Moors Irene promises Dazzling costumes! Brilliant Musical Comedy. It delivers with scenes of dancing,

music, modeling, and comical misunderstandings. Editors of the silent era did what they could to get the

word out without getting a word out. They wouldnt have to work around this for long, though.