E-Book Overview
The audience's first exposure to a new movie is often in the form of a "coming attraction" trailer, and short previews are also a vanguard for emerging technology and visual techniques. This book demonstrates how the trailer has educated audiences in new film technologies such as synchronized sound, widescreen and 3-D, tracing the trailer's status as a trailblazer on to new media screens and outlets such as television, the Internet, and the iPod. The impact and use of new technologies and the evolution of trailers beyond the big screen is followed into the digital era.
E-Book Content
Coming Soon
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Coming Soon Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology KEITH M. JOHNSTON
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
Elements of chapters one and two appeared in the Journal of Popular Film and Television 36, 3 (Fall 2008). An earlier version of chapter four appeared in Convergence 14, 2 (May 2008), pp. 145–160.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Johnston, Keith M., 1973– Coming soon : film trailers and the selling of Hollywood technology / Keith M. Johnston. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-4432-8 softcover : 50# alkaline paper 1. Film trailers. 2. Advertising — Motion pictures. I. Title. PN1995.9.T68J64 2009 384'.83 — dc22 2009021312 British Library cataloguing data are available ©2009 Keith M. Johnston. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover image ©2009 RubberBall Productions. Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com
To Beccy, for believing
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Acknowledgments My interest in trailers was first sparked when I spent a year abroad studying film at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In Chuck Wolfe’s 101B: History of Cinema class, I saw a print of the first synchronized sound trailer, for The Jazz Singer (1927). Although trailers had always been a part of my cinema-going experience, watching that first Vitaphone trailer made me aware of the format as a historical entity in its own right, and one that seemed indivisible from the technologies that informed the production, distribution and exhibition practices of cinema. Inspired by this to write “something about trailers and film history,” I produced a series of undergraduate film history essays, with support from Chuck Wolfe and Mike Cormack at the University of Stirling. After a break from academia I returned to the topic of trailers for my Masters and doctoral research, supervised by Aylish Wood at the University of Kent. A superb sounding board over those four years, Aylish’s advice, suggestions, and critical eye never failed to improve my notion of what this book could cover and what I was capable of producing. I would like to thank the United Kingdom Arts & Humanities Research Council, whose decision to fund a doctoral project on trailers made the subsequent pages possible. I am also grateful to the University of Kent’s ColyerFerguson fund, which awarded me a foreign travel grant in 2005. Without access to archives in Britain and the U.S. the historical end of this project would be sadly lacking. Special thanks therefore to Barbara Hall (AMPAS Margaret Herrick Library); Hayden Guest (USC/Warner Bros. Archive); Lauren Buisson and Julie Graham (UCLA Arts Library-Special Collections); David F. Miller (20th Century–Fox Legal Files); Mark Quigley (UCLA Film & Television Archive); Kathleen Dickson (NFTVA Viewi