Movie Trailer History: Part 1

                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.

annyas.com

 

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.