Great Trailer, Shame About The Film!

If you want to know what makes a perfect movie trailer, you need look no further than the 2005 adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  The film itself isn’t really much cop, but the trailer is a perfect illustration of a highly successful formula. Better still, it explains the formula as it goes along, in the fruity tones of Stephen Fry.

“The goal is to create a piece of advertising that is original and exciting, intelligent and provocative,” he twinkles. “In other words, lots of things blowing up, occasionally interrupted by a girl in a bikini. Finally, there is a final montage, often set to rock music, that is designed simply to blow away whatever synapses you have left in your brain.”

We’ve all seen the Hitchhiker’s formula a thousand times, but it is the trailers that break the mould – like Brian De Palma’s fast forwarded promo for Femme Fatale, or the Watchmen teaser scored to the Smashing Pumpkins, that really stick in the imagination.  First and foremost, these are amazing feats of editing. All the trailer maker has to work with is the material from the film itself, but that footage can be twisted into whatever shape they might please.

It has become a fad among film students to create trailer mash-ups from existing films, rebranding The Shining as a romantic comedy, say, or The Incredibles as J-horror. It’s astonishing how a well known movie like Jaws can be transformed into a love affair between a man and a shark with a few careful cuts and some soppy music.

These mash-ups illustrate the true power of the trailer as a tool for driving audiences into the multiplex. Even if the director has delivered an incoherent, agonisingly slow and rankly uncommerical movie, a good trailer can sell it as whatever punters will pay for. A Peter Greenaway arthouse extravaganza can become an erotic thriller, a foreign language drama can become an English gross-out comedy, a musical can become, well, not a musical. See the Sweeney Todd trailer for that particular trick.

Best of all, really bad movies often have absolutely stunning trailers. Because, let’s face it, they need them...