After careful analysis of the many ways in which movie previews manage to be awful, investigative reporter Joe Queenan exposes a shocking conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of the federal government.
_______________________________________
It is widely known that the unwieldy "QWERTY" arrangement of letters on most American type-writers is no accident. In the early days of typewriting, typists' fingers flew across the keyboard so rapidly that the keys got stuck together. The "QWERTY" configuration was concocted to slow down typists and prevent inadvertent mechanical sabotage, and it remains in place today, having long since outlived its usefulness in this age of computers. Why? There are numerous theories, but the most persuasive is that the aging white men who run this society are half-assed nitwits who hate to admit they are wrong.
A similar, but by no means identical, situation exists in the world of cinema. For many years, people have been asking themselves what function movie previews serve, since they are obviously not designed to make people want to see motion pictures. Loud, obvious and largely interchangeable, contemporary trailers are almost universally detested not only because they are loud, obvious and largely inter-changeable but because they invariably give away the entire plot of the film, making it unnecessary and in some cases incredibly annoy-ing to actually go and see the movies.
Since trailers are so horrible, the obvious question is why Hollywood doesn't do something to improve them. To answer this, we must examine the history of the motion picture preview, with particular attention to those produced in the last 20 years. In the early days of cinema, trailers were designed to make bad movies seem bet-ter and good movies seem great. This was achieved in large pan by selective editing, by deceptive advertising and by never, ever having people like Pauly Shore in them. In rhe 1960s, trailers became more enigmatic and arty, partly because everyone in America was influenced by directors from Europe but mostly because everyone was doing far too many drugs--some of them supplied by directors from Europe--and it seemed that making a coherent, intelligible trailer would have been pointless and completely out of step with the times. The next major development in the evolution of trailers occurred in the early 1980s with the birth of music videos. Because rock stars are young and exciting and blessed with great hair, and people like Robin Williams arc not, the éminences grises who run Hollywood decided that it would be a good idea to start using rock music in trailers as camouflage for bland, uninteresting movies. Thus was born the trailer filled with loud, viscerally engaging music that is never actually heard at any point in the Andie MacDowell movie being previewed.
The single most revolutionary development in the history of trail-ers occurred in 1982. With the country mired in a deep recession and interest rates spiraling out of control, the president's Council of Economic Advisers noticed that far too many people were going to the movies. Even though the films of that time were not particularly good, the trailers promoting them were so ingeniously crafted that everyone in America was desperate to see every single movie that got released. Even the ones with John Denver in them. The immense amount of time the public spent at the movies was exerting a crippling effect on the economy. Not to mention the culture. To combat this crisis, the Reagan administration offered the motion picture industry covert annual subsidies in the $12 billion to $20 billion range in exchange for the promise to keep movie audiences at manageable sizes. Initially, Hollywood tried to do this by making very bad films. This did not work, any more than serving bad food prevents Americans from patronizing fast-food chains. Then a marketing genius who will remain nameless seized upon the brilliant idea of releasing film previews that would make good movies seem bad and bad movies seem even worse. This would not affect those dyed-in-the-wool film fans who would go to see anything, but it would severely curtail ticket sales to casual movie enthusiasts.
The rest is history. Though film industry revenues continued to grow, the increase was mostly attributable to steadily escalating ticket prices. Today, the people who go to see a large number of movies even after watching cretinous trailers arc the kinds of people who would never have a productive role in this economy even if they had jobs: alcoholics, drug addicts, Trekkies. This is perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Reagan administration.
There is one other dynamic that must be dis-cussed in order to fully understand why movie trailers are so pitiful. Despite the currently robust state of the American economy, the United States government continues to subsidize the motion picture industry, fearful that a mass public resurgence in moviegoing could have a sclerotic effect on national productivity. Stared as bluntly as possible, the federal government does not want productive members of the labor force watch-ing movies during normal working hours or on weeknights, but it doesn't care what they do on the weekend. And this is where the true genius of the trailer becomes manifest. Yes, trailers are designed to discourage the public from going to see movies at movie theaters. But they are not designed to discourage the public from ever seeing them. The ultimate function of contemporary trailers--their very raison d'etre--is to allow the moviegoer to quickly and expeditiously decide whether the movie being previewed is a rental or a movie to be watched when it comes on cable or a movie to be avoided at all costs. According to data from the General Accounting Office that has come into my possession through contacts in the State Department, the judicious use of trailers as a cultural disincentive saves the United States economy $356 billion a year by subliminally cajoling most Americans into watching movies at home on the weekend when they're already passed out drunk or zonked on weed anyway. Besides preserving their productive capabilities, this makes ordinary people far less likely to get into their cars and kill smart people who are out having a night on the town.
With more intellectually gifted Americans, the system works a bit differently. In the good old days of unregulated moviegoing, the powers-that-be would have gone out of their way to make the latest Martin Lawrence movie seem interesting and entertaining. Today the attitude is: the sooner intelligent people realize that this is just another dumb-ass Martin Lawrence movie, the sooner they can get back to designing software programs or dreaming up an alternative to fossil fuels. In this sense, movie trailers have a powerful social role to play. If trailers were any better, this society would be even worse.
Anyone who has been to the movies recently knows that we are living through a golden age of pathetic movie trailers. Yet it is a mistake to believe that all trailers arc pathetic in exactly the same way. When I have explained the vital socioeconomic role played by the shadowy artisans in the manufacture and distribution of bad trailers, enlightened critics and moviegoers alike may reconsider their previous snideness and accord trailer-makers the huzzahs and kudos they so richly deserve. Though frankly, knowing what I know about critics and the public, I kind of doubt it.
To prepare this study, I recently spent one solid week looking at trailers for 20 upcoming movies. The films were of all sizes and genres; the only unifying element in my rigorously scientific cross section was that most of the movies being previewed sucked beyond belief". Operating on the assumption that movie trailers are designed with but one purpose in mind--to keep people our of movie theaters--I can happily report that the trailers I viewed generally fulfilled their stated mission. Not for a nanosecond did I give any thought to seeing Body Shots or Happy, Texas or Crazy in Alabama. Not for an instant did I entertain a thought of actually forking over any of my hard-earned money to see Jakob the Liar or Plunkett & Macleane. If it had been the last movie ever made in the entire history of mankind, I would not have shelled out nine bucks to see Blue Streak. Or eight bucks. Or one buck. The trailer made it look that bad.
Yet, horrendous as these trailers were, they were not the ones that most impressed me. That's because it's really no great accomplish-ment to make a bad trailer about a bad movie. Take Jakob the Liar, In a shameless attempt to parlay the mind-boggling success of last year's schmaltzy, Holocaust-denying Life Is Beautiful into a trend, Robin Williams plays a spunky Jew trapped in a Polish ghetto in 1944. Jakob cheers up his seemingly doomed compatriots by pretending to have a radio and manufacturing bogus news reports about the imminent arrival of the Soviet Army. Yes, Mork manages to put a little bounce in everyone's step and make the single worst event in the history of the human race seem just a wee bit less depressing. It is obvious just from watching the trailer that Jakob the Liar is one of the worst movies of the year, and certainly one of the most exploitative, a Holocaust-era There's No Business Like Shoah Business. Making a bad trailer out of a film as transparently stupid as this is not exactly like swimming across the Atlantic in the dead of winter with a famished baracuda stapled to your groin.
The same can be said of the trailer for Blue Streak, in which the disarmingly unappealing Martin Lawrence plays a criminal who gets out of jail, finds that his buried loot is now concealed inside a spanking-new office building owned by the Los Angeles Police Department, disguises himself as a police officer and--bet you won't see this one coming--is immediately mistaken for a member of the LAPD's dreaded Internal Affairs unit! As with Jakob the Liar, the trailer for Blue Streak faithfully captures how thoroughly unwatchable the movie is, even by the abysmal standards of le cinema Martin Lawrence, Yet one is hardly bedazzled by the trailer-maker's efforts, for this one was a layup, a can of corn, a piece of cake. Only an editing genius could devise a trailer that would make a Martin Lawrence film seem good. A child could come up with a trailer making it look bad. For all I know, it was a child who made the trailer.
The previews that most clamor for our respect are the ones where the trailer maker did not have as much raw material to work with but still succeeded in making the coming attraction seem dreadful. A good example is the trailer from the twentysomething coming-of-age, why-can't-any-of-us-ever-get-laid film Body Shots, which does not star anyone as repellent as Robin Williams or Martin Lawrence. In the hands of a lesser trailer maker, the preview would simply have presented an uninteresting montage of actors you've never heard of deal-ing with problems you can't imagine having in cities that are sup-posed to be New York or L.A. but look like Pittsburgh or Toronto. That's where the trailer from Body Shots throws the moviegoer a curve. Rather than allowing the uninteresting images to speak for themselves, they helped us out by plastering a quote from non-critic Jane Pratt of Jane magazine across the screen, praising the film. This is the studio's way of saying: "This movie is so bad we couldn't even get one of the usual quote-whores to go down on it."
The point I am trying to make here is that most movies do not require an especially bad trailer to apprise the public of how awful they are. Usually, they rely on a sort of cultural shorthand: it's a Melanie Griffith movie, get the picture? But movies lacking a Jean-Claude Van Damme or a Jon Lovitz must resort to more esoteric approaches. One such strategy is the use of dire warnings like the one in the trailer from My Son the Fanatic, which reads: "The most satisfying movie of the Telluride Film Festival." if that doesn't put the fear of God into you, I don't know what will. Of course, in some instances, the title of the movie alone has done the job. This is definitely the way I felt when I saw the trailer for a film called Plunkett & Macleane. From what I could deduce from the trailer itself, the film is a rowdy period piece about swashbuckling highwaymen with a conscience, sort of a cross between Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid and The Scarlet Pimpernel. But it really wasn't necessary to watch the trailer of a film called Plunkett & Macleane to figure out that this film was not worth paying for. Not since To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar had a movie title so effortlessly made an accompanying trailer seem completely irrelevant.
At this point, a pertinent question poses itself: If movie trail-ers are, almost without exception, horrendous, why does any-body ever bother to go to the movies? To answer this question, we must carefully examine the public's often cryptic reasons for watching movies in theaters. True, many members of the moviegoing public venture out to the theater with some regular-ity because they honestly expect to be entertained. These are the people who go to see films like Runaway Bride and anything star-ring Hugh Grant. Nothing contained in or omitted from a trailer could possibly induce these people not to see films like Runaway Bride or anything starring Hugh Grant, because these individuals are culturally predisposed toward such motion pictures, and are completely impervious to previews, reviews, word of mouth or common sense. These people are, for lack of a better term, best described as our mothers. But mothers make up only a small percentage of the moviegoing public, as do children, another Cartesianly challenged demographic group which is not easily discouraged from going to movie theaters. The truth is, in our irony-minded society, roughly 62% of the habitual moviegoing public consists of people who are there purely to see if the film could possibly be anywhere near as had as the trailer has made it out to be. Let me say, without a moment's hesitation, that I proudly include myself in this irony-fueled coterie. There was a time, true, when I went to see movies in order to be enthralled, inspired, challenged and amazed. But then I turned nine. Today I go to see movies purely for the joy of finding out if Luc Besson's The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (or, Every Witch Way But Loose) could possibly be as pretentious and nutty as the trailer makes it out to be. Or for that matter, as nutty as Joan of Arc actually was. I go to see movies like Stir of Echoes to find out if it is exactly like The Sixth Sense, or if there are slight variations. And when I see a trailer for Being John Malkovich in which a bunch of people find a secret way into John Malkovich's brain, and then find none other than John Malkovich waiting for them in there, I cannot resist going to see the film. The day it gets released. No trailer on the face of the earth could stand in my way. It is the curse of the cynic; there are some things we simply have to do.
By admitting this, am I not in fact accusing some trailers of failing in their sacred mission, of inadvertently creating a desire on the part of the audience to pay full price to see a film? Yes. Not all trailers are equally successful. For exam-ple, the trailer for Random Hearts, the latest Harrison Ford vehicle, effectively gives away the entire story--flatfoot Ford discovers that his dead wife was having an affair with the husband of a congresswoman whom he subsequently falls for--thereby making it pointless to see the film. But I will go see it anyway because of the faint chance that Kristin Scott Thomas will revive her fabulous lipstick lesbian act from the finale of Bitter Moon. For nine dollars, it's worth a shot. For similar reasons, I have every intention of queuing up to see Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley. The other-wise drab trailer informed me that the charac-ter Matt plays is capable of impersonating "anyone" and I'm dying to find out how Matt Damon could possibly impersonate anyone who looks like John Turturro or Wesley Snipes or who stands more than five-foot-eight.
Before concluding this essay, I would like to mention one other socially beneficial feature of movie trailers. For several years, I have amused myself periodically by going to movie theaters and, right in the second or so of complete silence following the trailer, shouting out "Rental!" just to see how other patrons respond. During my seven-day survey of trail-ers, I was reassured that I am not the only moviegoer with this harmless foible. After the trailer for American Beauty, which sought to discourage its potential audience through the tactical use of bad rock'n roll, one impromptu critic in the theater yelled out, "The Who suck!" When I yelled out "Rental!" after the trailers for Stigmata and_ Happy, Texas_, I could tell that most of the audience agreed. The trailer for The Insider was one that seemed to fail completely: it left me and most of the audience determined to see the film at a theater. But the previews for Crazy in Alabama and My Life So Far were extremely effective-- folks were only going to watch them if they came on cable. My favorite reaction to a movie preview was uttered after I responded to the trailer of Body Shots by hissing, "This isn't even a rental!" From a few rows ahead, a young woman chimed in, "That is so not even a rental!"
She was, like, so totally right.
_______________________________________
Joe Queenan wrote about teen movies for the October issue of Movieline.