BOB ISRAEL / TRAILER TITAN
Enjoy the previews of coming attractions more than the movies that follow? Thank Bob Israel, 44, who in 1978 with former partner Ron Moler co-founded Aspect Ratio, the first and still largest independent company working with studios to hone a film’s images into teasers, trailers and ads. To paraphrase the “Godzilla” campaign he’s been working on, in this business, brevity matters.
BUSINESS IS UP: “As studios look toward event movies as the tent pole of their release schedule, it becomes more critical that through trailers and advertising you ‘event-ize’ the movie.”
TOO MUCH INFORMATION: “One thing we hear is, ‘How can you give away the best jokes?’ The fact is, the studio has an average investment of $50 [million] to $60 million. If you don’t pull out all the stops, then you don’t get people in the seats the first weekend. And then it’s very hard for the movie to build to a successful level.”
INNOVATIONS: “We credit ourselves with ‘the button.’ Just when you think the trailer is over and you go to title and credits, you come back for one more ba-dump-bump. An early one was for ‘Bachelor Party’--it ends and you come back to Tom Hanks hitting the tennis ball into the head of his future father-in-law.”
RECOGNITION: “When [“Titanic” co-producer] Jon Landau accepted the Oscar, he rattled off 30 or 40 names. And the last was the company who produced the trailers. I was in Hawaii, nodding off, and I heard my competitor’s name and was startled awake. As much as I resented the fact that it wasn’t me,
I thought it was pretty cool.”
IMAGE-CONSCIOUS: “Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, the creators of ‘Independence Day’ and ‘Godzilla,’ have an intuitive sense of the icons that you can build your campaign around. Witness the White House blowing up and the UFO casting its shadow. And in ‘Godzilla,’ it’s just Godzilla stepping down in the middle of Manhattan.”
MAKE OUR DAY: “Lines becoming part of the vernacular is from the advertising as much as the movie. ‘Show me the money’ was used in the ‘Jerry Maguire’ TV spot that people saw over and over again. And from ‘Ace Ventura’ we used ‘All righty then.’ So we’re making a contribution to American pop culture with every trailer we cut.”
PREVIEW PREVIEWS: “ ‘The Mummy’ at Universal will be a juicy one, and we’re excited about the ‘Stuart Little’ project at Sony, and ‘The X-Files’ campaign we’re working on. And, of course, the ‘Star Wars’ prequel campaign.”