Making Coming Attractions More Attractive

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/movies/making-coming-attractions-more-attractive.html

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They reveal too much. They don’t reveal enough. They’re misleading. They’re manipulative. They’re better than both the movie they’re previewing and the movie that’s about to start. They delay that movie by 20 minutes.

The already mistrustful relationship between moviegoer and trailer becomes even more strained during awards season, when the contenders are by and large films that deal with topics audiences would rather skip. They leave studio marketing executives and the trailer editors they hire with sensitive decisions about what to omit and what to include.

Take “Flight.” In one sense the trailer portrays the movie accurately as the account of an airline pilot (played by Denzel Washington) deeply affected by a crash. But left out is any firm indication that it’s an addiction drama, a Lifetime movie genre that rarely sets box office records. Technically, giveaway moments are in the trailer: a lawyer mentioning a toxicology screening, a glance at a minibar, some alcohol being poured down the drain. But it also looks as if the pilot is dealing with something more nebulous than addiction. A Paramount spokeswoman declined to provide interviews for this article, but Mr. Washington told Entertainment Weekly, “The trailer, that’s how they sell it, and they really fool you.”

At the other end of the spectrum is the “Impossible” trailer, which establishes early on that the vacationing family it follows during and after the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami survives. It might have been just as easy to leave the viewer wondering whether they survive. Instead, the spot works hard to demonstrate that the story is one of triumph.

“No one wants to see a movie about children in jeopardy,” said Nancy Kirkpatrick, president for worldwide marketing at Summit Entertainment, who oversaw that trailer’s production. “Speaking as a mother, I would be hard pressed to go to that kind of movie.”

The studio commissioned several trailers, she said. “We tried versions where you weren’t sure if the family got together,” Ms. Kirkpatrick added. “It made me nervous. It also distracted focus from what the movie is actually about. So we put it all on the table. Let’s see what we can do in an elegant way to address the emotional journey you’re going to go on.”

The trailer for “Rust and Bone” puts it all on the table. That movie, set at the French equivalent of Sea World, is about a whale trainer (the Golden Globe nominee Marion Cotillard) whose legs are amputated following a work accident. The trailer is careful to prepare the viewer: First with a shot of her legs, then the accident, then Ms. Cotillard screaming, a shot of her in a wheelchair, and a flash, albeit a quick one, of her being carried out to sea for a swim, leg stumps visible.

Ms. Cotillard’s legs are not what the movie is about, argued Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which released the movie. “It’s a movie about a woman’s self-esteem and her regaining it,” he said. “But since it contained those themes, it is best to prepare the audience. You want people to have the right attitude going in. We could have spliced together a trailer that made ‘Rust and Bone’ look like a great action movie. That would have been a disaster. You don’t want to send people in with the wrong expectations.”

You can’t sell the movie to everyone, he said, adding: “You have to sell the movie to the audience that’s going to see it. You have to be in touch with them.”

Some movies, though, don’t have a choice but to be upfront. “The Sessions” is about the paralyzed Mark O’Brien (played by John Hawkes), who spends most of the movie on a gurney or in an iron lung, save for visits to a sex therapist (the Oscar-nominated Helen Hunt). There was hardly a frame that didn’t feature the harsh reality of his condition.

But even if there were such an opportunity, the trailer might not have featured it.

“The movie is more of a coming-of-age story,” said Larry Baldauf, executive vice president for marketing at Fox Searchlight, even if the character is already an adult. “It’s not really about his paralysis. It has an optimism and a lightness to it.” He said the trailer had to portray that levity, and that meant letting scenes play out (as opposed to the usual quick cuts) and showing the humor. “This wasn’t a message movie. We didn’t want to show anything overly dramatic or cloying.”’

That was also the case when Mr. Baldauf oversaw production of the trailer for “The Descendants” (2011), the best picture nominee starring George Clooney as the head of a Hawaiian family, Matt King, facing major decisions. Mr. Baldauf and his team decided to omit any image of Matt’s wife, on life support for most of the film.

“It was only on the surface a story about Matt King’s wife in a coma,” he said. “If we put that in the advertising material, you might give a potential audience member a view of opting out of movies that are going to be work, or sad.”

Instead Mr. Baldauf took Mr. Bernard’s faith in the audience one step further and said it is the viewer’s responsibility, once exposed to a few minutes of the film via the trailer, to investigate the movie further: “That sensitive information is available to any sophisticated moviegoer.”

“Trailers dance to a different rhythm than films do,” Mr. Baldauf said. “In the film, everything is contextualized and nuanced. All of the subtleties can play themselves out.” Not so in the trailer.

And that’s why, ultimately, the marketing executives agreed, the first duty of a trailer is not to warn, and not even to sell, but to convey the spectrum of emotion that a viewer can expect to feel during a film.

“A trailer’s responsibility is to show you the emotional core of the movie,” Ms. Kirkpatrick said, “A trailer’s job is, in two and a half minutes, to present a sense to the movie.”

Then again a trailer can be more of a Rorschach test of sorts for the moviegoer than anything else.

“It’s not in anyone’s best interests for us to take a movie like ‘Black Swan’ and try to trick an audience into thinking it’s just about ballet dancing,” said Mr. Baldauf, who also marketed it, a best picture nominee from 2010 that some saw as horror, others as thriller — none as a simple movie about a ballerina. “There were people who thought that movie was solely about dancing from the trailer. But it was all there. They should have paid closer attention.”