Movie Talk: The Sneaky Tricks Of Movie Trailers (How Trailers Make Bad Movies Look Good)

It's happened to you many times, I know, just like it's happened to me... you see a trailer for some upcoming release. You think that based on what you saw it looks like a strong contender for movie of the year, you go see the movie and it's horrible. How can there be such a discrepancy between what you saw in that trailer and the finished movie? Well, let's not forget that movie trailers are commercials, after all, and just like regular commercials they have a whole list of sneaky little tricks they use to put the best possible face on what they're selling. Here are just a few of the many clever little tactics they use.

ONLY THE BEST PARTS. This, of course, is the most widely known, but it's still one you have to be careful of. Even with the worst movie, it's not difficult to find, say, two minutes of good material scattered over the course of a two hour movie. Put it all together in one trailer, the movie looks great... then when you see it you realize that all the good stuff was in that two minutes. That's what makes the very best trailer I've ever seen so great: Steve Martin's "The Jerk" (1979) had a trailer that was supposedly intended for theatre owners only that got slipped onto a regular real by mistake. Martin addresses the theatre owners telling them that not only are they going to use only the best parts of the movie, they're going to use scenes from OTHER movies, "And by the time they realize they've been tricked we'll have their money and be on the beach down in Cancun!" A rare moment of honesty.(By the way, the same trick can be used to make it look like the movie is a completely different kind of film than it actually is.)

SCENES THAT AREN'T EVEN IN THE MOVIE. There are two kinds of these: (1) Some movies actually film scenes just for the trailers that they know will never be in the movie. "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" (1988), Starring Michael Caine and Steve Martin (hmm... him again) is a case in point, with thousands of people going to the movie eager to see that hysterical scene they used in the trailers and getting really ticked off when it wasn't there. Then there's (2) scenes that are edited out of the movie before its release. Some trailers have to be in theatres months in advance of the film, and by the time the movie is out, a scene from the trailer may no longer be there. But are they going to remove it from the trailer? Of course not... it might bring in more customers.

ELEMENTS PUT TOGETHER IN THE TRAILER THAT AREN'T TOGETHER IN THE FILM. You'll see what appears to be a fierce confrontation between two characters, you think it looks really intense, and you look forward to seeing how it comes off in the film. Then it turns out that what the trailer did was to edit together lines of dialogue from different parts of the movie into what LOOKS LIKE a confrontation, and those two characters never actually meet! Clever, isn't it? (Well, that's ONE word for it!) In the same general area is the line of dialogue from one part of the movie that's inserted over a scene where the dialogue isn't actually used, in order to make the dialogue look like a commentary on the scene (a rather bland line can look snappy and clever if they do this the "right" way).

MUSIC FOR THE TRAILER THAT ISN'T USED IN THE FILM. Again, trailers often have to be in theatres months before the release of the movie, and sometimes the musical score is one of the last things added. So what do they do? A lot of the time, they'll want to make you unconsciously conjure up images of some other movie of the same general type (often a better one than the one they're selling) so they'll use the musical score of some other movie instead (mighty close to what Steve Martin was talking about in that trailer for "The Jerk", isn't it?). For example, "Rocket Boys" (1999), a biofilm of a future NASA scientist, needed some music that brought up visions of the space program, which wouldn't seem to be easy to come by. What did they use? James Horner's score from "Apollo 13". And both "Little Big League" and "Rookie of The Year", two baseball movies from 1991, used Randy Newman's score from "The Natural" in their trailers (which made it mighty funny when you saw both trailers back to back and heard the same music in both).

THE OLD "OSCAR-NOMINATED"; PLOY. I've seen more than one Ben Affleck movie where the announcer will be touting the Oscar credits of its cast and saying things like "Oscar nominee Samuel L. Jackson... Oscar winner Gwyneth Paltrow... Oscar winner Ben Affleck". Naturally, the audience doesn't remember what movie Affleck won the Oscar for starring in, but still you figure this has to be a powerhouse of acting talent, right? What they neglect to mention is that Affleck won for co-writing the script for "Good Will Hunting", not for his acting, and he isn't writing any of the movies that tout his Oscar win. And he's far from the only performer who has benefited from this ever-so-slightly-deceptive mention of their award winning past.

However, one thing probably does need to be mentioned here, just in case you think trailers can never be trusted or relied upon. It is true that when a trailer makes a movie look really sensational, it might really be but there's also just as good a chance that it's the complete opposite. However, if a trailer makes a movie look absolutely hideously bad (as in the current trailer for the upcoming Mel Gibson/Jodie Foster movie "The Beaver") then it almost certainly IS bad. I mean, with the ability to put together only the very best two minutes or so of the movie into one neat little package, and to use all the other tricks described here... if, after all of that, the best they could come up with is a trailer that makes you want to run screaming from the theatre so you don't even have to watch the rest of the TRAILER, much less the actual movie... then you can pretty much count on it that the movie is a turkey. Sometimes, then, trailers really can be trusted.

Isn't that encouraging?