Photo Illustration by Steve Caplin; F. Carter Smith/Polaris
The Hollywood Reporter’s Key Art Awards are to the Oscars as film trailers are to films: short and sweet. There’s free popcorn and soda, speeches are brief, and the ceremony consists mostly of high-impact montages featuring the best trailers, TV spots, and Internet campaigns Hollywood marketing has to offer. For those still smarting from The Social Network’s Best Picture loss to The King’s Speech, the Oct. 19 ceremony provided a measure of redemption when Mark Woollen won the Grand Key Art Award for his trailer to The Social Network. You might remember it: The two-and-a-half-minute affair showed almost as much footage of actual social networking as it did of the movie itself. The boys’ choir that covered Radiohead’s Creep for the trailer landed a record deal.
With movie marketers desperate to grab the increasingly fractured attention of audiences (and fight declining theater attendance), trailers such as Woollen’s are fast becoming the standard. Heavy-handed voice-over has given way to subtler presentation, and the same overused cues are being replaced by more eclectic music selection. Trailers have begun to resemble tone poems selling a taste of how a film will feel rather than showing audiences everything they will see. They’ve found their medium on the Internet, proving to be snack-size events in their own right.
Trailers have been around almost as long as movies themselves; initially they followed a film’s end card to drive audiences out of theaters between showings (hence “trailers”). Until only a few years ago, a tight-knit world of fewer than 100 editors created the lion’s share of Hollywood trailers. Now these large houses face an expanding market of independent editors working on their own, facilitated by lower-cost editing software such as Final Cut Pro.
Woollen’s hip, modern Santa Monica (Calif.) office belies the stereotype of editors as cloistered, Gollum-like creatures, surfacing from dark rooms only to pick up Chinese takeout. Contrary to Tinseltown custom, Woollen, 40, doesn’t decorate his offices with posters of the films he’s worked on—among them Where the Wild Things Are, The Tree of Life, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo—in the belief it stifles creativity: “We’re always trying to do something that honors the unique films we work on,” he says. “What we felt from the movie, that’s the big thing, and seeing if we can communicate that in two minutes.” Woollen relies heavily on sound design and music selection to find the shape of a piece, always listening to his iPod for cues that may one day come in handy: “I’d say music is 90 percent of the work we do; it establishes the rhythm.” The finished product ideally leaves the audience wanting more: “One of the things to figure out is at what point do we leave off, where you’ve ramped up the anticipation enough to do that.”
Studios spend a premium to create that anticipation. Although Hollywood is loath to relinquish marketing costs, it’s generally acknowledged that Prints & Advertising budgets can regularly swell to over half a film’s production cost. (A single trailer can cost anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000, though the most lucrative contracts encompass multiple versions of the trailer.) Of all the ways to hype a movie these days—billboards, talk show interviews, junkets, viral campaigns—trailers continue to be the cornerstone of film marketing. Marc Weinstock, president of worldwide marketing for Sony Pictures, says exit surveys consistently show trailers are the most influential driver of audience interest—generating 50 percent, compared with 30 percent for TV spots. With movie attendance at its lowest level since 1997, the pressure increasingly is on trailers to cut through the cultural white noise. “Our biggest fear is being average,” says Weinstock. “We don’t want people to think, ‘Maybe I’ll see that movie the second weekend.’ We want that trailer where people go, ‘I have to see that movie now!’?”
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