In 1916, Paramount became the first motion picture company to hire an in-house team of trailer makers. They saw great potential in splicing together the best scenes of their films to promote upcoming movies. However, most movie houses outsourced the job to a group of NY ad executives at the National Screening Service. As a result, many trailers from the twenties through the sixties are very similar to one another. In the sixties, more movie producers deviated from the structured NSS formula and sought to create their own divisions of trailers clips producers. Richard Kahn of Columbia House explained, “It’s like the ebb and flow of the ocean: The whole question of whether someone should do these in-house or job them out varies with the attitudes of those in charge.”
Don LaFontaine was one of the early innovators in movie trailer history. With 750,000 TV spots and 5,000 films under his belt, it’s no wonder he’s been nicknamed “the voice of God” and “Trailer King.” A parody of LaFontaine appears in a preview for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which says a narrator should “employ a deep voice that sounds like a seven-foot-tall man who has been smoking cigarettes since childhood.” Another nickname for LaFontaine is “Thunder Throat.” He’s best known for his line “In a world far away” and his work on trailers for top movies like Terminator, Terminator II, The Land Before Time, Fatal Attraction, Cast Away, Batman Returns, Tomb Raider – Underworld, the South Park Movie and Dr. Strangelove.
Andrew J. Kuehn was an innovator in modern movie trailers production. In 1964, he released independently-produced trailer for Night of the Iguana that used fast-paced editing, high-contrast photography and suspenseful narration. When he realized the potential for this format, he partnered with Dan Davis to manufacture trailers for some of the biggest names and top movies — including Stanley Kubricks’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, James Cameron’s Aliens and George Lucas’s Star Wars. ”He came into the world of previews when they were done very conventionally, and he reinvented them,” said Bob Harper, vice chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment. ”He pioneered the idea of previews as a stand-alone piece of entertainment.”
With the use of digital editing programs like Avid, there will likely be even more innovations in the movie trailer. David Sameth, a trailers clips producer for DreamWorks, explains: “The basis of how you create a trailer, the thinking, might still be the same as it was when we cut on film, but it’s a whole different world when you go, ‘Should we try this? Well, it’ll take a day an a half,’ as opposed to, ‘Should we try this? Well, it’ll take 30 minutes.’” Additionally, the makers of trailers understand they have a range of formats available to them — TV, theater, social networking sites and DVDs — so they have the flexibility to create several different styles.
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