PRODUCING A BOOK TRAILER (part I): No Footage Means Few Limits

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Frederick Greene

I’m producing a book trailer for a client who’s written an apocalyptic romantic thriller. Since I’m currently applying what I know about trailer making to the different circumstances of literary entertainment, I thought I would share the experience. I’ve written about book trailers before as a scholar, educator and consumer. But here is an opportunity to discuss them as a producer, faced with a variety of creative and business challenges.

In this post and those anticipated over the course of producing the book trailer, I will describe what I’ve done and what I’ve been obsessing about in preparation. Since I don’t yet have anything to present from the trailer I’m producing, I thought I’d offer the reader an example of clever and engaging work in the same field. The above video is a special shoot for a comic retelling of a Jane Austen Classic: Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters. The producer needed costumes, actors, dialogue and location, as well as a prop-house killer-squid and some special effects artistry. It’s an adorable trailer and shows what you can do with creativity and modest resources.

Back to me and my current project: My first step, was to put together a team. I’ve got a young talented editor with graphic design skills; I’ve got a digital visual artist with DP skills, who will supervise the editing and design process, and handle the cinematography for the day or so of special shooting we anticipate. Through a colleague, I was referred to a female voice over artist who educated me about how she works and provided me with rates to plug into my budget. She’ll provide me with an audition tape, for Client (the author and financier of the project) approval. I’ve got a composer with his own library of music cues from whom to obtain music cues. Lastly, there’s me, who’s undertaking management of the process, the copy exploration of scripts to use in the trailer, and who will be conducting the research for the right stock footage to integrate and negotiating with the owners for the best possible prices for licensing it.

This weekend I had a budget and creative direction meeting with the client to review the numbers, walk through the process and agree on approach, tone, language and story elements. With approval in hand, I alerted the team that we have a go and reached out to an actor friend who I wanted for special shoot we will do in order to cover subject matters that we can’t get from the stock house. Basically, we need someone to portray/represent the protagonist/heroine, but insofar as her representation is for a reading audience, we don’t need her face in the shots, since that would impinge on imaginative experience. I will probably ask her to read some lines of dialogue so we can lay those down over other images in order to advance the plot and/or explain complications. I also had to find a beautiful and dramatically gifted golden retriever. As it happens, one of my regular dog walking buddies, an actor himself who trained her, is the owner of just such an animal.

After writing a variety of scripts that come at the material from different angles and perspectives, I got client feedback to help me revise them. Then I began to obsess over how do I show and tell this story in a way that excites curiosity, elicits emotional investment. The setting of the story is the first order of business and I’m lucky that it’s a well known and well filmed place of spectacular scenic beauty. Next, there’s the context or situation in which the action takes place. Since, it’s the end of the world, we need natural disasters, extreme weather, alongside all the awful things that people do to one another. So, urban warfare and images of refugee camps, mass evacuations, riots, traffic jams, body-strewn streets, ought to do just fine. All that sort of thing, regrettably for our species, but happily for me as a producer, is readily available from stock houses.

Since I live in Hollywood, I can “cheat” the mountains behind Monaco and the spectacular Riviera coastline with local topographical assets. On trails in the Hollywood Hills, I can shoot our heroine hiking with her faithful retriever before the crisis and then show her stocking her shelter and backpacking to safety after it hits.

I’ve been going to bed and waking up thinking about how to piece together the story from “generic” footage, focused copy, V.O, music, graphic design and special shoot materials in a way that is visually exciting and emotionally compelling. I’ve got pages of ideas for the Editor to try over and above the creative visual storytelling talent I’ve hired him for.

We’re gonna storyboard it all first to see if it works on paper before we license the footage. We don’t have the time or the budget to make a lot of mistakes. The challenge, as I’ve indicated in my title, is that we are not limited by “what’s in the can” since there is nothing in the can.
Whatever we can imagine and create through words, voice over, music, dialogue, graphic design and–last but certainly not least–editorial is what we can pour into our :60 to :90 second film.

Our first team creative meeting is this week. I’m ready to go.

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movietrailers101 by Fred Greene is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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“WE CAN LIE LIKE NOBODY’S BUSINESS”: Is the world’s favorite advertising the world’s finest propaganda?

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Frederick Greene

The quote above comes from a taped interview that trailer pioneer Andrew J. Kuehn gave some years before the foundation he endowed financed a documentary history of audio-visual movie marketing. He concluded his wry boast with this qualification: “the trouble is, when we’ve really got something good, nobody believes us.”

I’ve never forgotten this insight, partly because Andy was a friend and the delivery is so characteristic; partly because it’s such an interesting acknowledgment. The double gesture of a trailer is that its deployment of advertising rhetoric is always, already acknowledged, and thus its truth claims are always already discounted. Though I have doubts, I do my fellow citizens and audiences members the honor of believing that they understand this explicitly, that they too know better than to believe everything they see and are told, whether by politicians, news anchors, muckraking journalists or advertisers of every stripe and medium.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, in preparation for an academic essay for a special edition of the cinema journal, Frames, devoted to promotion and marketing I’ve been researching the emergence of the movie trailer in the 1910’s as THE critical instrument in the tool kit of distributors seeking audiences for their films. Coincidentally (or not, as I’m trying to determine) that decade witnessed the application of theories of mass psychology developed earlier for purposes of social control and influence on a scale never before contemplated or attempted. (See, for example, The Assimilation/Americanization efforts promulgated by the National Association of Manufacturers, 1912-1919 and the Commission on Public Information’s campaign on behalf of morale, bond purchases, recruitment and economic mobilization during World War I.)

While I’m not prepared to call the relationship causal or determinate, theories about and a perceived need for social control and political messaging bear a curious proximity to the development and adoption of the most powerful and effective means of collective impact and mass-persuasion ever invented– I refer here to trailers rather than the moving pictures they advertise.

It’s a truth generally acknowledged that feature films, documentaries and moving images generally and the production resources of Hollywood (and elsewhere) have been pressed into the service of official political, military and economic goals by nation states, most obviously and unambivalently during World Wars I & II. Until well into the 1920’s, such efforts were described without euphemism or embarrassment for what they were: Propaganda. And, it is uncontroversial that the private sector has propagandized on behalf of its products or against limitations on their consumption. (See: The Tobacco Industry campaign to discredit the evidence that smoking causes lung cancer; or, more recently, those efforts on behalf of the American Petroleum Institute to discredit the science of global climate change.)

While there are multiple, overlapping definitions of the term, I find this one clear, comprehensive and compelling: “As generally understood, propaganda is opinion expressed for the purpose of influencing actions of individuals or groups… Propaganda thus differs fundamentally from scientific analysis. The propagandist tries to “put something across,” good or bad. The scientist does not try to put anything across; he devotes his life to the discovery of new facts and principles. The propagandist seldom wants careful scrutiny and criticism; his object is to bring about a specific action. The scientist, on the other hand, is always prepared for and wants the most careful scrutiny and criticism of his facts and ideas. Science flourishes on criticism. Dangerous propaganda crumbles before it.”
–Alfred McLung Lee & Elizabeth Bryant Lee, editors,

, 1939.

Additionally, my understanding is informed by political scientist and communications theorist, Harold Lasswell‘s understanding of the word. “Not bombs nor bread,” wrote Lasswell, “but words, pictures, songs, parades, and many similar devices are the typical means of making propaganda….propaganda relies on symbols to attain its end: the manipulation of collective attitudes.”

So, given the foregoing definition, what might we say about movie trailers themselves, these dense, wonderful movie marketing workhorses that represent the sine qua non of persuasive, emotionally appealing and rhetorically articulated moving images? As a thought experiment, imagine a trailer (ah! if only one existed! If only the description of such a thing existed!) for an overtly and explicitly produced propaganda film like Pershing’s Crusaders (1918). Such a thing would be propaganda squared, the images, symbols and emotional persuasion of the film reconfigured and intensified albeit abbreviated; it would be the manipulation of manipulation.

Now, ask yourself, how different that is from the trailer for a what we will stipulate is a non-political, non propagandizing film? Not much. The trailer is always propagandistic, regardless of the film’s status. The relevant question, then, becomes whether that propaganda is dangerous, anti-social, objectionable and/or deserving of sanction.

I too work in the world of propaganda, to borrow Nancy Goliger‘s frank assessment of her career, and wonder, alongside Trinity University communication’s professor Aaron Delwiche, whether “propaganda [is] compatible with democracy… does it undermine the population’s ability to think critically about world events?”

At my most optimistic, I like to think that trailers, while they offer an opportunity for developing ever more subtle, compelling and effective modes of audio-visual propaganda, also model a skeptical attitude toward their narrative claims, their emotional appeals and their symbolic manipulation. Audiences understand from repeated and disappointing experience that trailers mislead, misrepresent, distort, conceal, dissemble and exaggerate. It’s what they do and even part of their charm. For even the most casual movie goer, reading against the grain of the breathless promise of a trailer becomes the basis of social interaction in the home or commercial theater.

Jeers and hisses, back-talking and voluble dismissal of a trailer demonstrate to fellow viewers that you aren’t buying it; that you can tell this movie is a turkey, no matter how beautifully it’s dressed. On the other hand, applause, reverent silence and stillness indicate that the trailer is taken in earnest as representative of the quality and character of the film in question. In this way, trailers help us recognize the glimmer of moving picture truth within the institutional hype (exaggeration? lie?) of the marketing.

At my most pessimistic, however, I question whether my work, anodyne as it is with respect to most films, has been a proving ground for experiments in propaganda that simulate the argumentation, reason, rationality and deniability of scientific endeavor, but without the commitment to the discovery of truth, the test of falsifiability, or the pursuit of knowledge, whatever the consequences.

I don’t know the answer but I hope to amass more data to help me decide. Most likely it’s a little of both. What I do know is that the research I’m doing now seems a lot more fun (probably because a lot less exhaustive) than what I did when writing my dissertation 17-18 years ago.

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movietrailers101 by Fred Greene is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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LINCOLN TRAILER: What you See is What you Get

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Frederick Greene

After reading A.O. Scott‘s review in the NYTimes, I decided to see Lincoln, which I did the other night. I love Tony Kushner’s writing; I admire Spielberg’s choices and acknowledge his films as “cultural landmarks” regardless of whether I like them. Then there are the inestimable Daniel Day Lewis and my sentimental favorite, Sally Field, in a role that seemed likely to elicit some of her prodigious talent.

Scott called it one of the best American political movies ever made, which, though I’m not qualified to judge the claim, I find to be a generically useful categorization. This very serious, well-intentioned- even educational– film concerns itself with two related political issues confronting President Lincoln: the 13th amendment outlawing slavery and concluding Civil War hostilities expeditiously. Those subjects and their resolution by the deployment of power–significantly via talk, negotiation, exchange and scheme– are the insistent focus of the action. All other matters, for Lincoln and his circle, are subordinate.

While I might complain about the hagiography (saint-making) and the historical conceit that the question of slavery was Lincoln’s exclusive focus, I’m not reviewing the film but rather preparing the ground for my post about the trailer, a trailer that is both faithful to the material and indicative of the viewing experience to be had in the theater.

At 2:15, the official trailer emphasizes public and private talk, whether speeches in the house of representatives, debates in the cabinet, domestic exchanges or fireside negotiations. The conflict whose resolution fuels the action of the script is introduced in a conversation between Lincoln and Preston Blair, a Republican eminence, before being starkly defined by Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William H. Seward (David Strathairn), who explains that he can either pass the 13th Amendment or quickly negotiate a peace deal with representatives of the Confederacy, not both.

By the third act, Lincoln’s words imply that achieving both is possible, with the equivocal “shall we stop this bleeding,” applying equally to the armed conflict and to the institution of slavery. It’s a forgivable slight of hand, of a piece with the saintly portrayal of Lincoln, whose humility and empathy co-exist with a mastery of retail politics and dictatorial self-assertion. Field, as Mary Lincoln, delivers a speech that is similarly equivocal, when she says: “no one’s ever been loved so much by the people, don’t waste that power.” Those who’ve seen the movie understand that she’s urging him not to pursue the 13th Amendment, while those watching the trailer can justifiably believe she is egging him on along the path of virtue.

The trailer can be excused this finesse, given that it takes a two hour film to explain how Lincoln delays the peace process in order to attain his objective in the 13th Amendment. He does ultimately get both, with the Amendment obtained before peace, specifically, Surrender, which is only achieved through additional weeks of grinding trench warfare. It was a terrible choice to have had to make, although from our perspective, it was the right one.

There are no copy cards in the trailer; nor is there a voice over, apart from the voice of Lincoln intoning the words of justly public addresses. There is a card for Spielberg, but no mention of his multiple Academy Awards, since his name is enough. Tommy Lee Jones, Daniel Day Lewis and Sally Field are all introduced with their Academy laurels.

Lastly, the credit block takes 4 separate pages, a testament to the “dream team” of production talent who combined on this project. John Williams the composer; Tony Kushner, screenwriter; Kathleen Kennedy the producer; Janusz Kaminsky, Cinematography; Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the source material, “Band of Rivals.” This is provenance and then some.

In terms of editing, I should note the recurring shots of passage (movement) through a doorway or arch, the point of view from behind the character (whether Lincoln, or otherwise) as the scene, the action, the future is seen and encountered. This seems to me to be a traditional and intuitive mans of presenting history and historical subjects visually.

Indeed, for the first half, Lincoln is shown from the rear or from the side. It’s only mid-way through, as he righteously declares his decision, pointing a long accusatory finger at his caviling cabinet members, that he appears face front. The transition of choice between shots is the fade to black, which apart from its implicit sobriety and restraint, telegraphs seriousness and significance, at least when coupled with the stately music of John Williams that establishes a somber rhythm, appropriate to the material, its historical consequence and the tragic conclusion of Lincoln’s triumphant Presidency.

All in all, the trailer makes clear that the holidays are here and the serious, Oscar-baiting films have arrived.

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movietrailers101 by Fred Greene is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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