The Background Scoop on Movie Trailers

We see them at the beginning of movies now, but the post-feature term movie "trailer,"  was coined in the 1920s. The name comes from originally being shown at the end of a film screening. However, theater owners and film studios quickly discovered patrons leaving before the trailers played, so they were shifted to the beginning of the show. Film Trailers would be more accurately described as previews or coming attractions. Although no longer used as originally intended, the old school name stuck.

The most basic definition of a trailer is a short film shown, along with the main cinema feature, to advertise the content, place, and time of an upcoming movie.

Austin Powers 2: The Spy Who Shagged Me 

The Alliance of Women Film Journalists (AWFJ) critics see good trailers as shorts that, "take key points from the film, edit them together sharply, with the right music... [but] don‘t show too much." Good trailers will also create excitement about the film in a general audience, yet still appeal to the genre's fan base. That's quite a bit to accomplish in the typical two minute length.

Trailers are very popular to select audiences, and have merit as a collectible art form.  Speaking to the continuing interest in them, AWFJ said in 2009 that movie trailers became the third ranking most downloaded type of Internet video (first are news clips, number two are user-created videos). One  critic compares trailers to full-length movies as being like a haiku is in relation to a novel; stripped down to only the most essential images and narrative content. An added bonus for movie memorabilia collectors and film genre fans is that trailers will often have scenes and dialogue that were not included in the original release.

Trailers even have their own "Oscar"-style recognition coming from The Golden Trailer Awards. The awards rely on audience opinion, with those participating voting for traditional categories such as, "Best Action," "Best Romance," and "Best Horror" trailers. Categories unique to the awards include, "The Golden Fleece Award" for best trailer for a bad movie, and "Trashiest" or most exploitive trailer.

Although some trailers end-up being better than the movie, from the studios' and exhibitors' perspectives their marketing function is primary. Critics don't like too much plot to be given away by the coming attraction, but studio research shows that more detail is better for getting audiences back to the theater to see a new film. Spoilers in trailers don't seem to matter, probably because most audiences don't give the trailer their full attention, or don't have good recall of a one-time viewing of a trailer. Individual movie-goers remember one or two of the most appealing details.

Studios will also produce a series of trailers for a single film cut to appeal to a specific demographic in the audience. Trailers for a female audience coming to see a chick-flick will emphasize relationship. Trailers for the same movie that are pitched to male audiences will show lots of action and skin. Trailers are also cut to reflect the age appropriateness for the audience in the theater at the time by dialing up or down on the explicit material.

Critics believe that trailers can have quite a bit of economic clout. Although they are not a quick fix for badly made movies, well placed-trailers can bring attention to lesser known films, possibly even making or breaking a movie's success. For recent indie productions like "Juno" and "Little Miss Sunshine," trailers did much to sell the films to larger audiences.


Info from Wiki & AWFJ (2008-05-09)

Salsa Dip Recipe for Chips While Watching Movies

Every movie lover knows popcorn is the number one treat to get when at a theater but at home it's salsa and chips that wins the day. Here are the easy "rules" for making great salsa in a hurry...

The key here is to use whatever you have on hand. Everyone usually has this stuff around the house. Choose one of each:

Tomato-y stuff:  a can of crushed tomato (or diced tomato with can juices, or whole plum tomato that you squish with your hands plus juice in same can, or fresh cut up tomatoes)

Sour acidy stuff:  splash of vinegar or bottled lemon juice, or squeeze of lemon or lime juice (grate the yellow or green skin in there too -- don't get any of the white pith -- if you have the fresh stuff)

Aromatic stuff (meaning the onion/garlic family):  grated or chopped onion and/or garlic, or onion and/or garlic powder, or onion/garlic salt (don't add any other salt if you do this).  Onions can be white or green with the green tops included.

Oily stuff:  olive, vegetable, or canola oil, etc.

Hot stuff:  Canned/jarred/fresh jalapenos cut up (throw away the white seeds before you chop them if don't want it to be super hot), or a few dashes of Tabasco or other bottled hot sauce.  Red pepper flakes or powdered cayenne will also do.

Seasoning adjustment:  salt if none has gone in before, and a little sugar to balance the oily, salty, and acidic tastes.

Above is the minimum.  Start with a little bit of everything in with the tomato and then start tasting with bits of chips to see if it needs to be more spicy, or salty, etc.

Add-ins, if available:  finely chopped celery, finely chopped green or red pepper. Chopped up chipotle chiles in adobo from a can (people will ask to marry you if you use some of this, or you can also use some chipotle powder instead. If you go with the chipotle powder, use a little maple syrup instead of sugar as a sweetener). Fresh chopped cilantro (if you have fresh lime along with the cilantro, people will also start following you around).

Be daring and swap out the tomatoes for something else, like diced ripe fresh peaches or diced ripe mangoes. But if you do this, you will have to get an unlisted phone number.

As you can see, we take salsa very seriously here at MovieFanCollectibles.

How to Be a Movie Still Photographer

Movie Fan Collectible's guest blogger is Glen K. Richards, a 2010 graduate of film school in Pittsburgh, with a degree in cinematography. Glen was kind enough to give us his perspective on what it was like to be a movie stills photographer on some of his recent film shoots. Movie still photographers take publicity photos while the film is in production for use in later film promotions and movie marketing. Original vintage movie stills from Hollywood studio press kits are now highly collectible. Glen's blog will be of interest to stills collectors and aspiring movie film unit photographers. Click this line to check out our inventory of vintage movie stills.

I hate being that guy who is in everyone's way all the time! That is how I feel when I am doing production stills. As the on-set still photographer, I need and want, to be where the action is, right there next to the camera or standing over the director's shoulder. As the director, this can be very annoying, especially during one of the many stressful moments during the shoot. But I can't get that perfect picture by staying out of the way.

There are two really difficult things about being the on-set still photographer. The first is that I really want to capture the action from the actors. What is so hard about this is that it is often impossible to snap a picture during a take. The extremely powerful and sensitive microphones that are used on film sets will almost always pick up the shutter noise.

The second part of on-set still photography that can be difficult or frustrating is that I often feel as though I am in the way. There is a lot of stress on the set of a film, no matter how well things are going, and the still photographer's job is usually looked at by the rest of the crew as the least important. I'm not saying that my job is the most important, but it is not expendable. I frequently find myself standing between a grip and the stand that he is trying to move.

The two kinds of behind the scenes photos that are considered "good" by the film world, are ones that show the crew working very hard, or ones that mimic the shot that the cinematographer has created for the film. The first of these is the easier shot to get. There are so many opportunities to snap pictures of the crew working hard. Right before the director calls action, or right after he/she calls cut, is a perfect opportunity to get great crew captures.

It is much harder to see through the cinematographer’s lens. Unless they are not recording sound, I cannot snap a picture during a take. So I have to interrupt the shoot to get the actors to pose as they are going through the scene. The best way to get this shot is when the director is having his final rehearsal before the first take. I will set up right next to the cinematographer and mimic his angle and lens choice as much as possible, or sometimes I will sit right in front of the cinematographer’s camera.

While shooting on-set stills I have used both film and digital. Although I prefer film when I shoot other things, I use digital almost entirely for production stills. The main reason is because of the ISO capabilities. Digital camera manufacturers have made a lot of progress in the last few years with their high ISO performance. 1600 ISO with my digital camera looks way better than 1600 ISO film. Although the scene is usually very well lit and looks beautiful if the cinematographer has done his job, the area where the crew is located is generally not nearly as well lit and requires the much higher ISO to get the appropriate exposure.

Zombie Movies: The Film Genre that won't Die

Ours' is just a zombie kind of world. These brain-chomping bogeymen and women are at the saturation point in every media form extant, from live action films, animated cartoons, video games, comics, to literary publishing mash-ups with Jane Austen. What's up with this? Where in the Sam Hill did it all come from? Why do we love the re-animated so?

Academics and other smarty-pants--yes, there is such a thing as zombie scholarship--would have us think that the living dead help us process our feelings about the apocalyptic end of our fragile world brought on by inevitable disease pandemics (for more of this, check in with Kim Paffenroth, Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero's Visions of Hell on Earth. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006). The '50s and '60s were about apocalypse-by-nukes nightmares. Now, WMD's include frightening and potentially zombie-producing pathogens, unless the cooties come from outer space, or jump species from our feathered friends. Definitely get the avian flu shots so chickens won't turn us into zombies. More on the economics of this later, or "there's gold in them thar fears!"

Okay. Sure. Helping us process our feelings is definitely a major motivator for studios, film distributors, and theaters to keep producing and showing the zombie oeuvre, right? Maybe not so much. Critics talking about the violently sexual fetish subtexts of seminal zombie flicks of the 40s and 50s, like "White Zombie" and "I Walked with a Zombie," probably have a better idea about the lurid bondage "lite" that fooled early Hays Commission censors, yet still got titillated viewers into the movie house. Post-modern, post-colonial theorist Edna Aizenberg deserves credit for being honest about these early zombie films. She pinpointed their erotic brew of exotic slavery-steeped Caribbean settings and passive beautiful white female sex slaves concocted by ingesting the voodoo version of puffer-fish neurotoxin roofies. This was some hot fantasy fodder for your great-grandfather down at the Bijou.

Zombie films continued pretty much in the same sex fetish vein, with the occasional undead fiend showing up in a Sci-Fi B-movie, until Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" in 1968 exploded the zombie genre virus everywhere.  Romero and his former colleague, writer John Russo, spawned a number of similar zombie apocalypse productions after Night went through the roof.

What Romero did to cause the genre to explode was that he scared his matinee and drive-in kiddie and teenie-bopper audiences in a new way. Instead of the campy Frankenstein-meets-Dracula scream fest the kids were anticipating, Romero frightened  his young viewers into whimpering silence, according to the grindingly ubiquitous, but nonetheless present Sun-Times reviewer, Roger Ebert.

Revolutionary as Romero's magnum opus may have been, Night's uniqueness wasn't enough to propel zombies to the top of the contemporary horror heap. Turns out there is an economy to it if you "follow the money." Kevin Heffernan (Inner-City Exhibition and the Genre Film: Distributing "Night of the Living Dead") discovered that "nabe house" (neighborhood theaters) declining revenues in the late 60s caused their owners to find a new product that would put butts in the seats during the early autumn slowdown between summer vacation and the holidays. Romero's creepy undead arrived at the right time to fill the Halloween movie doldrums. Cinematic zombie apocalypse filled a major marketing void. Like the Energizer bunny, zombies just keep going and going.

Fun Zombie Factoids (verbatim from Wiki):

1.Romero's Night made no reference to the creatures as "zombies". In the film they are referred as "ghouls" on the TV news reports. However, the word zombie is used continually by Romero in his 1978 script for "Dawn of the Dead," including once in dialog. This "retroactively fits (the creatures) with an invisible Haitian/African prehistory, formally introducing the zombie as a new archetype."

2. The early 1980s was notable for the introduction of zombies into Chinese and other Asian films, often martial arts/horror crossover films, that featured zombies as thralls animated by magic for purposes of battle. Though the idea never had large enough appeal to become a sub-genre, zombies are still used as martial-arts villains in some films today.

3. "Return of the Living Dead" took a more comedic approach than Romero's films; Return was the first film to feature zombies which hungered specifically for brains instead of all human flesh (this included the vocalization of "Brains!" as a part of zombie vocabulary), and is the source of the now-familiar cliché of brain-devouring zombies seen elsewhere.

4. "Zombie" may be related to the Congolese term for deity, "nzambi."

Creature Features and Rubber Suit Monsters

Invasion of the Saucer Men

Godzilla.  The Creature from the Black Lagoon. We're talkin' rubber suit monster or "man-in-a-suit" horror and sci-fi vintage special effects. They are cheesy, squidgy, and interfere fatally with the willful suspension of disbelief.  So if these wiggly, campy, F/X misfires are such a disaster, then why do they remain perennial cinema and movie memorabilia favorites?  Well, to quote the man, "It's complicated, baby."

The obvious answer to why we saw them over and over again for decades was that they worked well within typical schlock-house and straight-to-drive-in B-movie budget constraints.  This is indeed how we got Godzilla.  The original monster maestro of Japan, Eiji Tsuburaya, wanted to do our now internationally beloved 'zilla-monster in stop motion a la Ray Harryhausen's King Kong.  But when Eiji told his studio that it would take years to film the special effects for the scenes needed, they told him to find another way.  Voila, the rubber suit.  Necessity was the mother of the first, and best, rubber suit monster ever.

Sci-fi and horror movie fans worth their salt also know that our favorite gummy gargoyle rubber suit Godzilla fulfills a primal human need for monsters, which by definition are mythic embodiments of our fears about the dysfunction (natural or man-made) in our everyday lives.  In Godzilla's case, that would be post World War II pop culture processing Japanese communal fears about the return of the H-bomb.  That's enough nickel psychology.

Swamp Thing battles the Arcane Monster

Why else do we keep our devotion to rubber suit monsters in the age of CG!?  According to A-list creature directors like Steven Spielberg, it all comes down to the film goers' experience.  Although Spielberg eventually worked extensively with CGI monsters, he thinks the best performances from his actors come from playing off of animatronic or puppeteer-filled rubber sharks and dinosaurs.  In other words, in order to thrill you in the theater, Spielberg claims he needed to scare the living crap out of his non-creature actors with live action rubber monsters.

This live action versus digital debate describes an important outlook in Rochester, NY where our e-commerce company, Movie Fan Collectibles, is located.  Our city is also home to Kodak and the George Eastman House Museum's Selznick School of Film Preservation.  Curators of the film library and archive wholeheartedly uplift the experience of pre-digital film technologies and special effects for their intense and visceral simulated reality.  They assert that film and live-action reaches us in a way that digital technology, at the moment, can not.  Eastman House Museum's archive and Dryden Theater are dedicated to preserving and showing original film in all its formats.  Eastman is particularly proud of their collection's live action rubber-suit creature features, including a number of 3-D prints.  For the true cinephile, we recommend a visit.

The Gill Man in Revenge of the Creature

Critics like Aussie Sci-Fi maven Robin Pen go further by saying that if these charmingly fake filmic rubber apparitions don't reach you, then it is really more of a problem with the viewer than it is with the hokey production.  Rubber suit monsters are a pleasure best partaken with a group watching in large projection format.  In a darkened theater like Rochester's Dryden, Hollywood's seminal rubber suit monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, will be weird enough to scare the young-in's and sufficiently outlandish to make the adults belly-laugh.  This multi-generational thrill is not lost on contemporary film makers as evidenced by the currently on going decades-long development of a contemporary Creature From the Black Lagoon remake.

Fun factoids:  Bill Paxton was the last actor signed to play the lead in The Creature from the Black Lagoon, 2012. 

Eye Creature with Babes

Original Black Lagoon producer, William Alland, played the reporter character in Citizen Kane. At a dinner party during the Kane production, Alland got the idea for the Black Lagoon creature from an old Mexican folk tale that cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa told at the party that evening.


Special thanks to Robin Pen, Wiki, and the New Yorker Magazine for their rubber suit monster reporting.

Question of the week:  Paxton is out of the Black Lagoon remake, so who should play the lead in CFTBL?  I'm thinking Brendan Fraser could carry it off the way he did with The Mummy movies.  Especially since the script is supposed to be a pre-quel to the original with Victorian explorers poking around in the Amazon when they encounter the latest gill-man swamp thing.