Trailers: Critiquing the Mini-Movies About Movies

I don’t know about you, but moviegoing isn’t quite complete for me without that roundup of coming attractions. It’s not popcorn but trailers that I miss most when I haven’t been inside a regular theater for a while.

Their craft has gotten terribly polished. The old trailers were put together virtually in sequence, so if you had any sense at all you could figure out a whole movie from the snippets flashing by you. You could piece together who lived, who got bumped off and what that movie’s best wisecracks were--before they echoed up and down the school cafeteria.

A fully packed, juicy trailer not only whetted your appetite for Jimmy Cagney’s or Cary Grant’s or Jennifer Jones’s latest, but in a strange way, it almost gave you a sense of complicity with that movie.

There was the homeyness of the supporting actors, too. When you saw Joan Blondell or Jimmy Gleason or Charles Bickford or Jane Darwell you knew what you were going to get--and you were never disappointed. They didn’t cast these pungent character actors against type; they cast them for recognizability and for the sense of continuity they brought. Anne Revere was never going to be shoehorned into bias-cut crepe to play someone’s rich aunt, any more than Walter Brennan was going to turn up as a Madison Avenue ad executive.

They make trailers with a little more sophistication these days, or at least they try to--I’m not sure they always succeed. What’s amazing is the power that can come from these three or four minutes of film. Consider the trailer for “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” which I suspect single-handedly steered the lively Toon characters into the public’s hearts.

It wasn’t that “Roger Rabbit” wasn’t promoted anywhere else. Not since “The Right Stuff,” or the worldwide blitzkrieg of Cher magazine covers at “Moonstruck” time, has word about one movie popped up in so many places. (Everywhere but Field & Stream, and I may just have missed that.) But it wasn’t the Newsweek cover story or Bob Hoskins’ spots on television that you heard people discussing--it was that wizardly trailer.

People talked about it with absolute astonishment. I must have seen that trailer in four different theaters, and each time it was applauded. It was a phenomenon, proof that this crazy experiment really might fly, after all. (For some, the memory of “Howard the Duck” dies hard. Although it was another technique entirely, coming as it did with George Lucas’ almost magical imprimatur, Howard didn’t exactly smooth the way for Roger or for the Touchstone/Amblin gang.)

But most of all, like those beloved previews of the past, “Roger Rabbit’s” trailer not only made believers out of skeptics, it created an aura of good will for its movie, and I can’t recall too many trailers that have done that recently.

There have been a few. In releasing the very interesting “Permanent Record,” dealing with teen-age suicide, Paramount made a very daring choice in its trailer. In a series of punchy, declarative sentences, it faced the story head-on. Here was a high school senior with everything to live for, it said: friends, family, a recognized talent and a loving girlfriend. Suddenly he kills himself, “and his friends want to know why.” The buzz from that trailer made the film a real must-see, particularly among its target age group. It was supported by very strong reviews, but unfortunately, “Permanent Record” became one of those films that vanished before it found its audience.

“A World Apart” has an extremely moving trailer, built with an almost overwhelming combination of images and music. While it mentions newcomer Jodhi May, it’s centered around Barbara Hershey’s more identifiable presence. What that means for audiences is an additional layer of discovery, when they find that two-thirds of the story is seen from the point of view of the exceptional young May.

The wonder is how good films survive bum trailers. No power on earth would have gotten me into “Big” based on its trailer. None of its sweet, special flavor is in evidence; none of what director Penny Marshall has done with what might have been the dozenth rehash of the switched identity plot. Mercifully, the measurable appeal of Tom Hanks was enough of a draw to get audiences in initially. After that, word-of-mouth and a flurry of television spots began to turn the tide. By now, I think everyone has seen Hanks and Robert Loggia do their irresistible “big piano” duet enough times to dance along at home.

Trailer-making remains a delicate balancing act, the art of capturing a film’s essence without destroying its mystery--or its best gags.

A canvass of current trailers turns up one of every kind: The newest “ ‘Crocodile’ Dundee” is a dire example of gag-spilling; see it and you’re spared the film. “The Moderns” concentrates on the story’s sexual triangle and less on the movie’s singular ‘20s ambiance, while, somehow, “Bagdad Cafe’s” trailer has magically preserved all that movie’s off-center, indefinable charm. Although not a second of “Die Hard’s” noisy athleticism is ignored in its trailer, there’s nothing to suggest that the movie’s strong point--such as it is--is a sense of humor. “Someone to Love” has a trailer so tiresome, so overstated and so long that you almost forget what movie you’ve come to see while writhing in its self-indulgent clutches.

For most of us a trailer is crucial; more than written words or thumbs up or down, it’s the place where we decide yes or no about a movie. It’s strange to discover for the most part that a trailer, which should be a movie’s best friend, has become a mini-movie of its own, fast-paced, glitzy and a least-dependable guide to the film at hand.