The Great Movie Come-On : In This Summer’s Hot Box Office, Trailers Are What Pulls ‘Em In

Filmgoers know them as “previews of coming attractions.” To film makers, they’re “trailers”--and they’ve helped make this the biggest-grossing movie summer ever.

Because there are so many blockbusters on the screen now--and so many people in the theaters--trailer producers are trying to build even ordinary upcoming films into must-see events.

The pressure then shifts to theater owners, who are often required to choose between studios in order to find screen time to play the flood of trailers. They must also clear space in their lobbies to display the bundles of advertising posters, marquees and standees that the studios are shipping to them.

“The movie business is a three-day retail sale, like a white sale at a department store,” said Michael Kaiser, co-creative director of Los Angeles-based Seiniger Advertising and Film Services, which creates trailers for studios. “The whole advertising and promotional blitz is to blast audiences and get them in on the first weekend, because rarely does the second weekend go up.”

The word of mouth generated by Warner Bros.’ dark, alluring “Batman” trailers affirmed that a good film trailer is one of the best ways to open big--a record $42 million in three days, in the case of “Batman.”

To film distributors, trailers offer a significant advantage over scatter-shot television ads or roadside billboards. Emerging after the theater lights go down and before the opening credits come up, film trailers speak directly to the theater audiences for whom they were intended.

“Television reaches a larger audience, but film trailers are more important because they play to a theatergoing audience,” said Rolan Mesa, vice president of creative marketing at 20th Century Fox. “They provide people with first-time exposure to a new movie in the best possible environment.”

Fox is currently mining theaters with an explosive trailer for its $50-million underwater epic “The Abyss.” The three-minute trailer--about twice the length of most--opens like a documentary to demonstrate the rigors of the film’s shoot, which took place inside two abandoned nuclear-reactor tanks filled with water. Although film makers usually do not get involved in the making of trailers, director James Cameron lent his hand in assembling the action sequences at the end of the trailer.

“The Abyss” trailer is designed to build momentum for a late-summer film entry (it opens Wednesday) that could suffer in the wake of three underwater thrillers that washed away earlier this year: “Deep Star Six,” “Leviathan” and “Lords of the Deep.”

“The qualities of ‘The Abyss’ are a bit elusive,” one industry source said. “They require a little more time and patience to present to the audience. The studio has to be very careful to show the audience that this film is special, that it’s not one of these underwater potboilers.”

Instead of showing its scope, some trailers try to sell a film by concentrating only on one scene. The more outrageous the scene, the stronger the pitch. Seiniger’s trailer for “Throw Momma From the Train” featured a bit with Danny DeVito conking Billy Crystal over the head with a frying pan. The Kanew Co. in New York cut a “Lethal Weapon” teaser that caught Danny Glover with his pants down, squatting precariously on a toilet seat while his partner Mel Gibson tried to figure out how to defuse a bomb planted underneath him.

Columbia’s one-scene trailer for “When Harry Met Sally . . .” caused a stir in theaters when Meg Ryan proved to Billy Crystal, quite convincingly, that women can indeed fake an orgasm, even while lunching in a crowded deli. The trailer was handcuffed with a restricted rating by the Motion Picture Assn. of America, meaning that it could only play to R- or X-rated film audiences.

“We didn’t feel it was suitable for general audiences,” said MPAA director of advertising administration Bethlyn Hand. Of the more than 500 trailers approved last year, fewer than 10 received an R rating.

“If you have a hard-hitting film, or an adult film, and you want to show some of the scenes to that film, then you show a restricted trailer,” she said. “A general-audience trailer really has to be sanitized so that it can be seen with any G-rated film.”

Despite its rating, or maybe because of it, the trailer for “When Harry Met Sally . . .” caused a sensation--the scene has been trumpeted by many critics as the funniest of the year--and helped propel the film to an $8.8 million weekend take when it opened nationally.

With so many top-grossing movies currently playing, studios are concerned that, in some theaters, their trailers are being bumped off the screen.

“A lot of times studios may have requests, but there’s only so many we can respond to,” one theater manager said.

“When you have a summer like this, theaters often cut down on trailers because they need as much time as possible between screenings to turn out the crowds and give people time at the concession stand,” Seiniger’s Kaiser said. “Which trailers get played depends on what kind of film is screening, what the theater has booked next, what is playing on another screen in the same complex, and what kind of relationship that chain has with the studios.”

Studios often set up monitoring systems to make sure their trailers are playing--and playing well--in theaters. If a trailer is receiving a poor audience response, the studio might pull it and create a new version.

“The only audience reaction you can easily gauge is laughter,” Fox’s Mesa said. “If we show a trailer for ‘Out of Africa,’ people obviously are not going to stand up and cheer. But you can tell if they’re paying attention. You listen for that ‘buzz’ in the theater after a trailer plays. That’s good.”

Film trailers, which can cost $25,000 to $100,000, date back almost to the inception of the film industry. In the 1920s, a company called National Screen Service used photo stills--without the studios’ permission--and transferred them to film to create crude advertisements for feature films. National Screen then sold those to exhibitors to run at the end of their feature films--thus, the term trailer .

The studios became involved when they realized what trailers could do for them. They started supplying their film footage, which was spliced together in a long-running newsreel format. National Screen worked together with studio publicity departments and produced all studio trailers until the 1960s, when Kaleidoscope Films in Los Angeles introduced competition into the market.

“The history of the trailer took a major left-hand turn in the late ‘60s and switched from a hard-sell, bombastic, greatest-show-on-Earth style, to become more of an art form and genre unto itself,” said trailer producer Bob Israel, president of Aspect Ratio.

Teaser trailers--which by MPAA standards must run no longer than 90 seconds and be approved for general audiences--begin to appear in theaters three to six months before a film opens. Teasers are often limited to graphics, special shoots or a single scene because many times the film is still in production and there is limited footage available. Sometimes scenes are included that will be cut from the final version of the film.

The momentum begins to build about two months before a film opens, when studios follow up teasers with a full trailer that discloses more of the film and has no time restrictions. A rule of thumb: the bigger the film, the longer the trailer. In 1981, Paramount distributed a four-minute trailer for Warren Beatty’s epic “Reds.”

“When MTV first came out, trailers became shorter and started emulating that quick, fast-paced style,” Seiniger’s Kaiser said. “Now, we’re seeing a move toward more naturalistic trailers that flow and develop, and allow the movie to speak for itself.

“Movie audiences are getting more sophisticated. They know that you can take the biggest stiff in the world, lift 90 seconds from it and make it look good. You can take three jokes from a comedy--maybe the only three good jokes in the whole movie--and make it look like a sensation.”

As the box office continues to shed old records like summer clothing, new trailer distribution formats are arriving on the scene, such as the cable channel Movietime, which scoops up trailers to fill its programming.

Erwin Koti is president of Videcam in New York, a company that runs nonstop movie trailers on 27-inch TV monitors above theater concession stands.

“I figured that people standing in line . . . present a strong advertising possibility,” he said. “You have 8 or 12 screens at multiplex theaters today. If you were to play all the trailers from every studio, overlapping them and cross-plugging them, that would take forever.”

His dream: to install Vidcam screens at theme parks across the country, where the lines sometimes seem to take forever.