X-Rated Trailers – Sexploitation Marketing in 1970's Hard Core Previews

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Frederick Greene


(note: this is an age gated trailers. You must be 18 to view)

Director Stephen Gibson’s The Lollipop Girls in Hard Candy preview opens with a zoom in of an “IN 3-D” text block, which is immediately followed by a close-up of bare breasts. Another graphic card reading “SUPER 3-D STEREO” flashes onscreen with intermittent scenes of actors in the throes of sexual passion, followed by an actor in character comically explaining the 3-D process.

Porn icon, John Holmes gets into the act by directly teasing female audience about certain parts of his anatomy “shadowing portions of the theater,” while Gibson addresses the men in the audience with the promise that “the girls will be right in your face.” The tone of the trailer is self-conscious and light, selling the film’s “hardcore” qualities with a playful touch.

The trailer cuts to an elderly couple watching the preview, in a facetious representation of potential audience members. The husband expresses interest in seeing the film; the wife objects, claiming she would not be “caught dead” at such a movie. In an over the top, grind-house gesture, the husband nonchalantly pulls out a pistol and shoots her. Lollipop Girls concludes with additional softcore sex scenes under graphic cards reading “eye poppin’!” “outasight,” “outrageous,” followed by more 3-D hyperbole.

Films and their previews have long used technology as a way to differentiate their products and appeal to customers. Why should we imagine that adult filmmakers–those masters of marketing–wouldn’t exploit the same approaches in their sexploitation trailers?


PANORAMA BLUE: AN EPIC SELL FOR AN EPIC SKIN FLICK

    “Never before has the motion picture industry produced an adult film with such vastness, scope and stature.” So reads the opening title card for the X-rated trailer for Panorama Blue (1974). The first scene shows an amorous couple riding a rollercoaster, as light kissing leads to a full scale sexual encounter. Richard Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathustra,” is the music cue, a playful and ironic nod to the austere, magisterial vision of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

    Panorama Blue’s amusement park ride is intercut with scenes from a sexually-charged drag race, quick cuts to a night club scene and a point-of-view sexual encounter from the male perspective (emphasizing the immersion of the viewing audience). The Strauss music reaches a crescendo as the preview shows a surreal shot of a naked couple in bed surrounded by a symphony orchestra, alluding to yet another Kubrick film, A Clockwork Orange. The reasoning behind this trailer’s visual and auditory ambitions/pretensions? To highlight the film’s “70mm Super Widescreen Panoramascope” format with “4 Track Stereophonic Sound.”

    Although they market x-rate features, The Lollipop Girls in Hard Candy and Panorama Blue previews still observe fundamental rules of the genre and exploit familiar methods of appealing to audiences. In both instances the previews draw attention to the technical innovations (3-D film and Widescreen Panoramascope) of their features using rhetoric that echoes the hyperbole found in trailers of the 1950s.

    In both, however, it is apparent that the filmmakers are using cinematic bombast as an inside joke; they are well aware that audiences care less about innovations in film exhibition and more about the onscreen “action.” This facetious, self-conscious approach to the audience is a trademark of 1970s non-mainstream motion picture marketing to “hip” and “savvy” audiences who appreciate the alternative, a style that continues to influence “underground” trailers to this day.

    GUEST BLOGGER
    Tony Best is a researcher, digital media producer/archivist and aspiring TV promo creative director based in Los Angeles. An alumnus of UCLA’s Moving Image Archive Studies master’s degree program, Tony has worked on several preservation projects, including digital restoration of “lost” television programs and coordinating the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s “L.A. Rebellion” initiative (under the aegis of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time). He is also a regular contributor to the music and film quarterly Wax Poetics. Tony can be reached at tonyvision@me.com.

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The Clones (1973) – Science Fiction Meets Science Fact

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Frederick Greene

[Part 3 in our continuing look at trailers for exploitation films. Advertising and marketing for exploitation films enjoy benefits not available to mainstream fare. Lower budgets allow greater risk taking; lower visibility allows more risque risk taking. Experimentation and excess seem to me to be the twin poles around which most exploitation trailers are organized. Often, such trailers hearken back to tried and true formulas from the history of movie marketing. Occasionally, they break new ground and teach mainstream trailermakers some new tricks. Guest Blogger Tony Best shares his insights into a 1973 sci-fi cult “classic?” below.]

Lamar Card‘s sci-fi shocker The Clones (1973) takes a novel and artistic approach to trailer structure. A smart, stylistically engaging short film that eschews gore and shock value, the trailer opens in an authentic laboratory setting with scientists manning banks of medical equipment. This is followed by scrolling text read in an ominous voice by an off-screen narrator discussing the advent of genetic engineering and the new science of plant and human cloning.

The trailer then cuts to a title card for the film, whose graphic design is inspired by Russian or “nested” dolls. A fleeing protagonist—a cloned man, running for his life– is intercut with further laboratory scenes and a stream of consciousness, science-centric montage that evokes the editing technique of Godfrey Reggio’s films.

The preview returns to narrated text quoting United States Senator John Tunney’s statement against cloning research, which supports the trailer’s claim that “what was once science fiction will soon be science fact.” It ends on the title graphic described above. What makes this trailer unique is that it is presented and narrated without bombast as if it were a documentary. The viewer is given the ambiguous impression that the film is fact based.

The Clones coming attraction is unsettling and disturbing, which seems to be the producer’s intent. Although it doesn’t employ sensationalism or typical marketing rhetoric, the trailer suggest that it is “important” to watch this film. Nearly forties years after its release, I feel compelled to watch The Clones despite the concept of genetic engineering being passé and clichéd within science fiction and science fact, generally.

Although I haven’t seen the film (indeed, where to obtain a screener?) I was intrigued by the footage contained within the trailer. While some of the moving images look as if they came from the feature, a significant portion of the footage has a “grainy” quality and can be presumed by the viewer to be stock footage borrowed from other films. If this suspicion is correct, then this preview is not only a trailer but an artistic manifestation and enactment of what the film itself is describing—-the use of components from an original to create a viable copy.

And let’s not forget that a viable clone or copy is also independent, self-directing and unpredictable. Jean Cocteau called the film trailer its own form of cinematic expression, one that exists independently of its original. I think we’ve seen a confirmation of his prescient insight, as trailer websites proliferate, fan-generated trailers fool the marketplace, and graduate seminars devote themselves to the study of these dense, short film texts.

GUEST BLOGGER:
Tony Best is a researcher, digital media producer/archivist and aspiring TV promo creative director based in Los Angeles. An alumnus of UCLA’s Moving Image Archive Studies master’s degree program, Tony has worked on several preservation projects, including digital restoration of “lost” television programs and coordinating the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s “L.A. Rebellion” initiative (under the aegis of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time). He is also a regular contributor to the music and film quarterly Wax Poetics. Tony can be reached at tonyvision@me.com.

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The Wizard of Gore: The Undeniable Appeal of Excess

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Frederick Greene

[Continuing our look at trailers for exploitation films–what I’ve called in a previous post, a redundancy, insofar as a trailer is itself an “exploitation” film–we have today a trailer for an exploitation horror film. Tony is charmed by the preview and tries to understand what it is about this admittedly and confidently crude trailer that makes it effective marketing. Personally, I think it has much to do with our aesthetic distance, which casts a patina over this film and its ilk. But I also think that there’s an argument to be made for the ways in which the hyperbole of trailer making in general combines with the excesses of a splatter film to produce a self-conscious, self-parodying “kitsch” effect. And who can resist that?]

The promo for independent filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis’ The Wizard of Gore employs a marketing approach reminiscent of 1950s fright fare. It begins with Lewis in the role of onscreen narrator, solemnly introducing the trailer and intoning that this film will be one of the most shocking and controversial of its time, an appeal especially tailored for the counter-cultural sensibilities of 1970s audiences. He goes on to warn audience members with “cardiac conditions” and “parents with small children” to close their eyes or leave the auditorium “for the next two minutes.” (Hitchcock posted signs with similar warnings outside theaters where PSYCHO was being exhibited.) Lewis fades out followed by a fade up on Ray Sager, in character as magician Montag the Magnificent, who introduces scenes from the movie with a dramatic flourish of his cape.

True to Lewis’ warning, clips of young women subjected to sadistic forms of torture and mayhem appear on screen. These images are so graphic that even hardened 1970s New York City grind house habitués must have squirmed in their polyester bellbottoms. In a bizarre interlude created specifically for the trailer, the Montag character demonstrates a self-decapitation act using a guillotine: his headless body picks up his own head. A series of scenes from the film displays more ultraviolent acts ending with a disembodied voice over proclaiming that the film “will make motion picture history, a cinematic achievement.”

The Wizard of Gore is not a sophisticated coming attraction preview by any means. Its gory stunts are hardly realistic and its editing is crude, even by then current trailer standards. Yet, however bluntly, it delivers the promised shock value to a specific demographic. The studio and producers of this film tailored this trailer to “those in the know” who were familiar with the genre and forgiving of the low production values. This coming attraction also relies on provenance – in this case the director Lewis – whose previous film trailers were likewise extremely graphic. (Interestingly, they were occasionally shown to matinee audiences at much tamer, Hollywood fare.) Still, despite its visual excesses and production deficiencies, The Wizard of Gore trailer retains a certain “charm,” an effect of its undeniable enthusiasm and experimentation, a charm that polished and gorgeously edited contemporary coming attractions often lack. Perhaps there is a lesson for filmmakers and film marketers in the sincerity and visceral enthusiasm with which Lewis approaches independent cinema and advertising for it?


GUEST BLOGGER:
Tony Best is a researcher, digital media producer/archivist and aspiring TV promo creative director based in Los Angeles. An alumnus of UCLA’s Moving Image Archive Studies master’s degree program, Tony has worked on several preservation projects, including digital restoration of “lost” television programs and coordinating the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s “L.A. Rebellion” initiative (under the aegis of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time). He is also a regular contributor to the music and film quarterly Wax Poetics. Tony can be reached at tonyvision@me.com.

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

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