When
the movie industry began, there was no need to advertise specific movies.
People did not care what they saw; seeing any movie was a thrilling enough
event. Once the novelty wore off, though, people began to develop preferences
in genre or appreciate a certain actor’s skills. Theater owners soon realized
they needed a way to ensure that their customers would return.
The idea of
allowing customers to preview next week’s shows seemed like a clever solution
to this problem. The first movie trailers, however, were far from the epic,
special-effects-filled previews we see today. The film industry’s first
trailers, created in 1912, followed a formula that was rarely strayed from in
the following years. Nearly all showed a
brief scene from the movie, and had exaggerated captions such as “NEVER BEFORE
SEEN,” or “THE SCARIEST MOVIE EVER.” Though every preview claimed that the
movie it was advertising was phenomenal, there was little faith in this
advertising method at the start.
Paramount
Studios soon realized otherwise, and by 1919 it became the first studio to
release trailers for all their movies. Later that year, the National Screen
Service was created and began overseeing the creation and distribution of
advertisements for all major Hollywood studios. They were not afraid to overdo
the basic formula that had been created, and the following decades’ movie
trailers were all fairly similar, showing only one scene of a movie and then
flashing over-top-promises that took advantage of gullible audiences.
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This tactic came
to an end, however, in the 1950s, when the movie trailer industry was
revolutionized and trailers began to resemble what we know today.
