‘Prada’ trailer is no tease

When it came time to put together a trailer for the new movie “The Devil Wears Prada,” the marketing folks at 20th Century Fox were initially stumped.

“To be honest, we were struggling to find a trailer we thought did justice to the movie,” said Pamela Levine, the studio’s co-president of marketing.

The film -- which opens June 30 and is based on the novel by Lauren Weisberger -- stars Anne Hathaway as Andy Sachs, the put-upon young assistant of a powerful fashion magazine editor played by Meryl Streep. A fashion novice, Andy must quickly learn the ins and outs of the industry to survive in her new job.

When the marketing department set about piecing together the traditional montage of scenes for a trailer, Levine said it quickly became apparent that such an approach made it seem simply like “a makeover movie.”

“The film is so fresh and clever and fun and smart, and it was hard to do something that didn’t reduce it to less than that,” she said.

It was Tom Rothman, co-chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, who came up with the idea: Why not just show audiences the opening scene of the movie, in which a naive Andy arrives at the magazine offices to apply for the job?

“It tells you everything you need to know about the movie without giving anything away, which is pretty unusual,” Levine said.

Not everyone was initially convinced the approach would work. “At one of our internal meetings, people said, ‘It’s great, but it’s not a trailer -- what are people going to say?’ ” Levine recalled. In the end, the trailer ended up being a trimmed-down version of the movie’s first five minutes.

Still, when it began playing in theaters in early May, “we were a little nervous,” Levine admitted. “Was everyone going to get it? But we kept hearing, ‘It’s playing through the roof.’ ”