Trailers as a promotional tool

Trailers have been used as a promotional tool since 1913, which is considered 'Year Zero' for the movie trailers by historians, in an American theatre advertising 'The Pleasure Seekers', a Broadway play, created by Nils Granlund. It included actual rehearsal footage and was a huge success, leading to Granlund being the first to introduce trailer material for an upcoming motion picture, using a slide technique to promote an upcoming film featuring Charlie Chaplin at Loew's Seventh Avenue Theatre in Harlem in 1914.

Nils Granlund

Meanwhile in Chicago, Colonel William Selig introduced another way to get audiences back to the cinemas. He took the idea of print serials, and went to the Chicago Tribune, proposing the idea to turn a print serial into a short film. This gave rise to "The Adventure of Kathlyn", and each short episode would end in a cliffhanger in order to entice their audience to come again. This is arguably where the idea of the film trailer was formed.

Print Serials

In 1919, started by Herman Robbins, the National Screen Service opened in New York, taking movie stills, spliced in titles, then selling these trailers to movie theatres directly. They didn't ask permission from the studios, but this didn't stop many studios from signing deals. During the 1940s the NSS branched out into poster and paper advertising, whilst signing deals with all the major Hollywood studios.

Up until the late 1950s trailers were mostly created by the National Screen Service and all had a similar style: consisting of a key scene from the film with large descriptive text telling the audience the storyline.

This style changed in the 1960s when textless montage trailers and quick editing became more popular. This influence was made by a new generation of directors such as Alfred Hitchcock.

Alred Hitchcock

However, as the 1970s and 80s came around, film theatres started to move away from NSS and more toward multiplexes with multiple screens, leaving even less space for poster advertising. The monopolistic service of the NSS began to disintegrate and film studios and production companies reasserted their control over promotion.

Jaws was the first successful film to see wide release, being shown in 464 theatres on June 25th 1975, which then expanded to 675 a month later. The success was obvious when Jaws saw $7 million in the first weekend alone in the box offices, with an ultimate run of $470 million worldwide. This was the birth of the blockbuster strategy, where huge investments are made, and then the banking on the title making it big to cover the costs.

The introduction of the internet has immediate global distribution that it provides has almost made film trailers a genre in itself, with editing houses, such as BLT Communications, focusing solely on creating the perfect trailer to distribute.

What with the developing world introducing more advanced video games that fight films for their essential resource, their audience's time and money, the movie trailer has to be a complete and accurate representation of the film, without giving away the whole storyline, that can easily be shown as a preview to the film or as content that is simple to distribute to the consumers on social media.

RESEARCH:

• http://filmmakeriq.com/2014/03/the-history-of-the-movie-trailer/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailer_(promotion)