posted 09-14-2007 10:47 AM                       

quote:

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I imagine it's a job done by junior or trainee studio film editors,

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posted 09-14-2007 02:44 PM                       

quote: Mike Blakesley

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it's done by advertising agency professionals.

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posted 09-14-2007 10:11 PM                    

quote: The New York Times

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The 150-Second Sell, Take 34
By MARSHALL SELLA
Published: July 28, 2002

Art Mondrala, a pale, monastic-looking man, is shrouded in the deep gray of his Hollywood office at the Ant Farm, a company that edits trailers for major movie studios. It's an unrealistically sunny day in June, but Mondrala is huddled over his computer, just as he has been since October. He has been working 60-hour weeks cutting the previews for just one movie: ''Signs,'' the new Touchstone film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. The sum total of Mondrala's work in all this time has been to edit not only the official 150-second trailer for the film, but also a pair of shorter-format ''teasers'' and a 30-second TV spot that was shown during the Super Bowl. Nine months of work, for less than six minutes of footage.

Mondrala doesn't watch movies the way most humans do. In order to distill a feature film into a demographically targeted, two-and-a-half-minute montage, his job is to become obsessed, myopic, perhaps even a little mad. To him, movies aren't sustained narratives that build to a climax. ''I watch purely from the standpoint of single moments,'' he says. ''Someone turning his head quickly, a fast camera sweep, lines with compressed emotion. In my work, I live in fractions of a second; one second is an eternity. It's like being a hairdresser and cutting one hair at a time.''

This is why directors never cut their own trailers. To ask a filmmaker to hack away 98 percent of his movie is like asking an epic poet to create a haiku from his original work -- one that will appeal to every kind of reader. And a director's storytelling skills run against the grain of everything it takes to create a trailer, which must be clear without completely clarifying anything.

Tapping through his list of computer files, Mondrala ferrets out the very first version of the preview he edited for ''Signs,'' which stars Mel Gibson. It's a 65-second rough cut that would never be shown to the moviegoing public; nor was it meant to be. The clip shows a black dog barking, Gibson looking intensely concerned, a field that somehow seems a little too tranquil. Near the end, a phrase pops up on screen: ''Directed by Tom Whitaker.''

Of course, Tom Whitaker, whoever that is, has nothing to do with ''Signs'' -- but then, neither does anything else in the preview. Every shot was culled from other movies (though there would be direct parallels for each one in the final version). The dog was lifted from ''Summer of Sam''; Gibson's scene was swiped from ''Ransom.'' But Mondrala's collage was no idle exercise. It was an explorative attempt to help Disney, which owns Touchstone, answer some basic questions. Did the trailer need a voiceover? What feeling should the music convey? Should the trailer lean on the pedigrees of Gibson and Shyamalan? Or, given the director's success with ''The Sixth Sense,'' should it emphasize the film's supernatural element -- the sudden worldwide appearance of crop circles, those geometrically perfect phenomena that began showing up in the late 70's, baffling scientists (to say nothing of farmers)? Mondrala's rough cut helped develop the cinematic language that the final ''Signs'' trailer would bear.

Companies like the Ant Farm are under immense pressure to come up with the goods for their Hollywood clients. Competition among ''vendors,'' as trailer companies are known, is fierce. Studios often hire between two and five vendors to work -- simultaneously -- on the same picture, to see who will hit closest to the mark. The saddest fate a trailer-cutter can endure is to see his work ''Frankensteined,'' Hollywood slang for the practice of stitching the work of multiple vendors into one trailer. Moreover, competition doesn't stop at the studio-to-vendor level. At one point, even the Ant Farm had two editors working in adjacent offices on the same ''Signs'' teaser. It was a kind of intramural editing contest, but without the fun.

Of course, moviegoers love movie trailers; you can hear it in the vitriol of their complaints. In those 12 minutes before the feature presentation, people enjoy the jolt and flutter of intense imagery, the barrage of different genres, the pleasure of seeing what's next for their favorite stars. But previews often frustrate audiences. Not only are they too loud (and intentionally so), they give away the whole damn picture. Comedy trailers include the best jokes; suspense previews ruin surprises. Two summers ago, for example, the trailer for ''What Lies Beneath'' notoriously showed Harrison Ford to be the villain -- a fact revealed very late in the film.

Oren Aviv, Disney's president of marketing and the man who made final decisions on the ''Signs'' trailer, is sensitive to the problem of showing too much leg. But sometimes, he says, there's no choice. ''In a trailer, you want two or three great moments,'' he says. ''When a film has 10 great moments, you're lucky. Sometimes it doesn't. Maybe, in 'What Lies Beneath,' without that information about Harrison Ford's character, there wasn't enough to get people excited. Maybe people needed to think: 'Harrison Ford is the bad guy! I haven't seen that.''' And despite audience grumbling about overexplicit trailers, he says, ''What Lies Beneath' opened to over $30 million.''

That said, for the ''Signs'' campaign, Aviv and Shyamalan made an early decision to push hard the other way: to seduce the crowd by withholding. ''We erred on the side of secrecy,'' Shyamalan says. ''Why rob the audience of surprise? For all they know, the movie might turn into a comedy, or 'Terms of Endearment,' or go into 'Exorcist'-land. I want to walk you to the door and turn the knob, then refuse to let you in.''

Mondrala shares this philosophy. ''I think of a trailer as pulling back an arrow string,'' he says. ''You let the arrow go, the trailer soars through all this material -- but right before it hits its target, that's the end.''

when the ant Farm's editors were first called upon to work on the ''Signs'' trailer last September, they were not sent footage to edit; that didn't yet exist. Nor were they given scripts on special paper that cannot be photocopied, as is routine. Even that was deemed too insecure by Disney. In an unprecedented move, the studio insisted that they come to the lot and sit in a room reading a ''sequestered script.'' The team absorbed what it could to start conceiving the subliminal language of the film -- all sight unseen.

After finishing his rough cut, Mondrala created four initial ''teasers,'' some with more than 30 versions. Out of those 120-plus versions, 2 were shown in movie theaters, starting last December. (Teasers, which are released up to a year before the movie opens, are typically about a minute long.) Add in the final full-blown trailer, which went through 34 incarnations, and you get a sense of how fanatical studios are about marketing. A trailer is a studio's prayer, one that is answered on opening weekend. And everyone wants the answer to be yes.

The average Hollywood movie now budgets $35 million on advertising, and anywhere from $250,000 to $750,000 on its trailers alone. (The previews for ''Spider-Man,'' which where digitally altered after Sept. 11 to remove a shot of the twin towers, cost nearly $2 million.) Considering that studios are pitching their wares to proven moviegoers, it's an efficient investment. But the process isn't entirely about the math. It is a science of meticulous tinkering, all for the sake of what ad people call ''filling the quadrant'': that is, reaching out, in 150 seconds, to younger men, older men, younger women and older women.

There was plenty of tinkering with the ''Signs'' trailer. In Art Mondrala's office, which is sardonically decorated with gargoyles and votive candles, he and two other people who toiled on the ''Signs'' campaign gather to show me how 33 versions of the trailer evolved into a magical 34th that would reveal little enough to please the millions. There's Barbara Glazer, an owner of the Ant Farm, and David Singh, a Disney vice president.

The hardest challenge of trailer cutting, everybody agrees, is paring the thing down to two and a half minutes. That's not an aesthetic choice. It's a limit enforced by the Motion Picture Association of America. Each studio gets one exception every year; the DreamWorks trailer for ''Road to Perdition,'' for example, clocks in at 2:46. (Disney has yet to choose a 2002 exception, but it is not ''Signs.'')

Here in the half-light of his little realm, Mondrala loads up a digital version of the first trailer he cut using Shyamalan's footage. The file is dated Feb. 26. It's axiomatic at the Ant Farm that Version 1 is always the most elegant, most evocative trailer that is ever created -- and the one that is never released. ''Art's job is to make it beautiful, to make it flow,'' Barbara Glazer explains, ''and my job is to make sure it's doing the marketing and telling the right story. Then it's Oren Aviv's job to really make sure it does the marketing and tells the right story.''

Mondrala has no illusions about his role. ''After the initial cut,'' he says, ''you have to let go, or you'll feel crucified. On the first cut, the focus is to do it as artfully as I can -- and that's the last time it's the focus. Understandably, art isn't the issue to anyone else. What matters is, How will this sell?''

To the untrained eye, Version 1 isn't radically different from its 33 offspring, except that it contains no ad copy explicating the plot. The only text informs us of the star, the director, and the name of the film. In these graphics, all the ''g's'' (in ''Signs,'' ''Gibson,'' ''Night'') rotate slightly, like ticking clocks, or crop circles, or . . . something else.

In the narration-free cut of Version 1, the music immediately tells us what we need to know: things are out of joint in the great Chain of Being. The preview begins just as the film does. There's Mel Gibson in his Pennsylvania farmhouse, alarmed to discover that his children aren't in their beds. He runs into his family's cornfield and finds them; his young son (Rory Culkin) physically turns Gibson's head to show him a circular patch of flattened crops. We see the whole family staring at something terrible and then -- bang -- an aerial shot reveals a vast, impossibly intricate pattern carved out in the field. Now the preview tightens the straps. As the family dog lunges at Gibson, a sheriff observes that animals around town have been acting strangely, ''almost like they act when they smell a predator around.'' (Audiences have known this code since the time of Shakespeare: animal behavior is a gauge for the state of the world.)

The tension ratchets up. Gibson's young daughter says of the TV, ''The same show's on every station.'' What she means is that there's a news story of such global import that nothing else is on. An anchor, referring to India, speaks of ''the 18th reported sighting in that country in the past 72 hours.''

In a signature Shyamalan portrayal of a child's reaction to supernatural terror, the boy Culkin is seen listening to static on a baby monitor and creepily suggesting, ''It's a code.'' After a jump cut, we see Culkin and his sister wearing pointy, aluminum-foil hats. The boy explains their logic to Gibson: ''So the aliens can't read our minds.''

Now comes a close-up shot of Joaquin Phoenix, who plays Gibson's younger brother. He whispers, ''It's like 'War of the Worlds.''' Gibson and Phoenix frantically board up the house as someone (or something) tries to push through an attic door. Gibson pleads, ''Don't be afraid of what's happening!'' All we know for sure is the release date shown in the final graphic: ''August 2nd.'' And that ''g'' is rotating, too.

As day must follow night, Version 1 would have to change. The trailer, it was felt, didn't hit all sectors of the quadrant. David Singh thought there was too much emphasis on the kids. Glazer wanted more of the ''War of the Worlds'' element. It skewed too far toward young women, and Disney needed a call out to the fellows. Finally, the film's humor -- which Shyamalan saw as a key element -- was almost entirely absent.

On Disney's command, Mondrala created a second version. Even a millisecond of extra footage changed the tone considerably. After Culkin explained his foil hat, Gibson was now shown concealing his dread with a gentle ''Oh!'' That one beat made a big difference in conveying humor, and it remained in every subsequent version. Also added was a catchy line of ''I see dead people''-style dialogue -- in which Gibson's daughter flatly tells her father: ''There's a monster outside my room, can I have a glass of water?''

The air of suspense was also magnified in Version 2. Suddenly we were seeing Gibson in the dark, amid the crops, turning his head to hear an awful, incomprehensible whispering; he spun around, dropping his flashlight, which -- as cinematic law dictates -- instantly lost power. By the time Gibson knocked it to life, he was recoiling in horror, although the viewer didn't get to see what had shocked him.

To sharpen the dramatic tone, this version also included text written by David Singh, interspersed through the clips: ''The first sign you can't explain . . . the second sign you can't ignore . . . the third sign you won't believe.'' That added not only to a sense of escalation but also to the promise of a Big Mystery Revealed, true to the Shyamalan brand name.

Other bits in Version 1 vanished. Shyamalan and Aviv have developed what the director calls a ''value system'' that forbids including any footage that doesn't accurately represent the finished movie. When Shyamalan cut the clip of the attic door from the film, it was removed from the trailer, too.

Shyamalan's agreement with Disney is unusual. Hollywood trailers routinely misrepresent the movies they're designed to sell. The preview for the recent comedy ''Snow Dogs,'' for example, left viewers with an impression that the thing was all about talking dogs, when in reality the footage was culled from a single dream sequence. Nevertheless, the film made $81 million, and a sequel is now in the works (which will have a lot more talking dogs).

Version 2 was more amped up, but some good things were now missing. In this 170-second attempt, Mondrala lost a lot of Mel -- including his climactic ''Don't be afraid'' speech, which, Glazer decided, ''was better than the chugga-chugga music Art used.'' That speech would find its way back into the final trailer. Another Mondrala change was similarly overruled. In Version 2, the trailer began with a shot of Joaquin Phoenix staring into the eerie calm of a field. Studio logic demands that you always lead with your big star. In later versions, Mel would return.

Despite the seeming omnipotence of the quadrant in Disney's strategy, the ''Signs'' preview could have gone in any number of directions. It could have pitched itself squarely at young men, hitting every image of intensity and global conflict the film had to offer. Or it could have sung to the female crowd, with a heavy emphasis on Gibson's character -- a widower struggling to keep his family out of peril's reach. Shyamalan's movies, with their universal ''What if?'' premises, offer trailer editors a range of choices, whereas other films do not. ''Coyote Ugly,'' a 2000 movie about sexy barmaids, was scored with a hep soundtrack and riddled with teen-friendly text (''They make the rules. . . . They call the shots.'') that exclusively targeted moviegoers between the ages of 13 and 21. The makers of ''Jerry Maguire'' fielded two separate trailers to appeal to distinct slivers of the quadrant. One emphasized romance; the other emphasized sports.

The very idea of the quadrant, of course, is founded on the stereotype that men like conflict and women like cuddliness. But the studios' success with this formula has given them no reason to see the world differently. In their 150-second ontology, there's little space for ruminations on the complexity of gender roles.

in their infancy, trailers were, as the word itself suggests, clips that followed the feature, not advertising that loudly preceded it. The first known trailer hit the screens in 1912. Promoting something called ''The Adventures of Kathlyn,'' its basic structure -- the Big Tease -- doesn't seem as archaic as it might. Kathlyn is seen plunging into a lion's den; on-screen text asks: ''Does she escape the lion's pit? See next week's thrilling chapter!''

As years passed and studios keyed in on the importance of advertising, a distinct, hard-sell style of trailers emerged. Every movie coming down the pike was touted to be more ''spectacular'' or ''hilarious'' than anything seen before. The trailer for ''The Sea Hawk'' in 1940, for example, promised ''the greatest adventure in all history'' and ''the greatest spectacle of all time!''

But as films evolved, their marketing changed. Explicit hype pulled a Garbo and gave way to subtler hype. The man responsible for this shift was Stephen O. Frankfurt, the Young & Rubicam ad executive who brought America the Lay's potato chips slogan ''Betcha can't eat just one.'' In 1968, Paramount hired Frankfurt to come up with a trailer for ''Rosemary's Baby.'' Violating Hollywood's marketing rules, Frankfurt ignored the plot in favor of something starkly evocative -- an image of a baby carriage in silhouette, the grating sound of an infant crying and a cryptic tag line: ''Pray for Rosemary's baby.'' The movie was a huge hit, and the campaign became an industry benchmark.

Frankfurt's later trailers maintained this minimalist approach. His 1979 ''Alien'' preview, for instance, had no footage from the film, just a slow pan across outer space. During the trailer, the letters of the title came into view gradually, only disclosing the word ''Alien'' at the end. The spot landed firmly on the now classic line, ''In space, no one can hear you scream.''

Frankfurt, who is now 70, holds fast against unveiling a film's full storyline. ''Trailers today give it all away,'' he says. ''If the thing tells you too much, it eliminates your involvement, which is the first step to persuasion.''

Since Frankfurt's heyday, the pendulum has swung back toward divulging plot details. These days, one of the few things that restrains Hollywood from revealing all is the strict code of regulations decreed by the M.P.A.A. Because trailers fly off the screen at general audiences (including children), studios are urged to submit rough cuts before making prints to avoid costly mistakes. ''Even before we see it,'' an M.P.A.A. handbook breezily specifies, ''you should eliminate excessive violence -- close-up shootings, guns/weapons to people or to audience, stabbings, hacking with axes, etc.'' (''Signs'' itself wasn't hampered by these rules; though rated PG-13 for ''frightening moments,'' it is not excessively violent.) The handbook similarly advises against ''bed scenes with any action'' and drug references.

Such regulations can force some trailers into being almost bizarrely oblique. Mark Woollen, a trailer vendor in Venice, Calif., has direct experience with the drug issue. ''You have trouble even including the word 'drugs,''' he says. ''It was a real problem with the trailer we cut for 'Traffic,' which of course was all about drugs. We had to analyze every shot where a character pulled a package out of his pocket.'' As a result, the campaign was rife with images that slyly evoked cocaine without once showing it. Even the narration was coy. One teaser actually ended with the line ''It's all about money.''

for the ''signs'' project, Barbara Glazer and Art Mondrala were less tormented by the M.P.A.A.'s distaste for intensity than by the search for demographic balance. With each new version, elements flew apart and were reassembled. The baby-monitor ''code'' scene was deleted on the logic that some of the kid stuff had to go, to tilt the balance back toward male viewers. In its stead, Mondrala added grainy TV footage of ground troops being assembled. That seemed like a guy thing. Another tip of the hat to males was the inclusion of a military man telling Phoenix, a bit too pertly, ''They're staying in the shadows . . . to make sure things are all clear.''

''Clear for what?'' Phoenix asks.

The sergeant answers: ''For the rest of them!''

The quadrant rules were absolute. Lose too much of Mel and Joaquin, and you'll lose younger women. Bolster the theme of Mel protecting his family, and you'll attract older females. Cut back on shots of the ground troops -- there go the older guys. In a 150-second movie, a scene that lingers on a bent cornstalk half a second too long can throw the whole balance. In this context, a single shot of the family hugging -- which Mondrala added halfway through the process -- begins to feel like a grand bid for female viewers. True, it's less than one second long, so it's an almost subliminal appeal. But that's where trailers live or die.

A talented trailer cutter, of course, does more than fill his 150 seconds with images designed to appeal to demographic niches. He must carefully build suspense. In one stingy exception to the ''Signs'' trailer's self-restraint, the final version does show what Gibson sees in that cornfield before recoiling in terror. It's a glimpse of what appears to be a leg, vanishing into the corn. And the leg definitely doesn't look human.

But even seeing that leg, ultimately, denies us resolution. It's a point of pride for Shyamalan that absolutely nothing from the last third of the film is remotely hinted at in the trailer. At least a dozen early versions did have such a moment, actually used as the trailer's climax. It was a Big Scare from 78 minutes into the film, a moment I will not describe here -- but Shyamalan rallied against it. The Ant Farm was in no position to argue. ''We got greedy,'' Glazer says. ''But M. Night was right. Why go there?''

Through all of this tinkering, Disney's Aviv made it his business to stay out of tiny decisions but, in no uncertain terms, to protect the big picture. ''I needed to show there was character and that there was story,'' he says, ''and the story is that there's a global event potentially threatening everybody, told from the point of view of one group of people, one father.'' Aviv notes that the trailer for ''Signs,'' which was aggressively tested on audiences by Disney, yielded the highest rating he's seen in his 14 years at the studio. That kind of feedback is taken very seriously.

Throughout the process, Shyamalan maintained a watchful eye. He was adamant that the theme of crop circles -- crop signs,'' as everyone at Disney is suddenly pleased to call them -- needed to be hit hard. Aviv agreed with this, partly because Disney's internal research revealed that 60 percent of Americans had no familiarity with the phenomenon.

It's a mark of Shyamalan's power that Disney afforded him some degree of veto power. ''I never saw the first version that Oren and the Ant Farm edited,'' Shyamalan says. ''I waited until they'd nailed what they wanted to do.'' But marketing strategy has crept into his thinking, even during filming. ''At some points during a shoot,'' he admits, ''I'll think about why a certain moment would be great for a trailer -- why something would be iconic.''

Movie stars, too, have a voice in the process. Mel Gibson's contract allotted him ''consultation'' rights on the ''Signs'' campaign. There are cases where agents go to war with studios over their star's prominence in a trailer, but Gibson was satisfied with the ''Signs'' campaign. Still, one can only guess how he might have reacted if the trailer had begun with a shot of his co-star. He was never shown Version 2.

By Version 26, the trailer was relatively in place, though it still required eight more edits to satisfy the powers that be. In the sublimina of the job, this meant letting a fade-to-black linger an instant longer; fiddling with the precise glow that emanated from the title logo; altering the sound of a musical ''sting.'' (The computer Mondrala uses to edit trailers is packed with sound files bearing names like ''Big Hit With Horror-Like Atmosphere.'')

Sound, of course, is key to any trailer. But, unlike the preview for ''Signs'' (which included the composer James Newton Howard's score from the outset), trailers rarely contain anything from their movie's own soundtracks. Editors can tick off a list of films whose soundtracks are used again and again. The scores to ''Dave'' and ''Hoffa'' have been licensed for use by trailer vendors dozens of times. Same with the one for ''Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story.'' When I tell Barbara Glazer I've never heard that music, she replies: ''Oh, you know it. I once heard it three times in the same theater.''

And so, after countless readjustments, the ''Signs'' trailer wrapped. Everyone was especially happy with the rotating ''g'' effect in the graphics, though stories vary as to who actually came up with the idea. David Singh was amused by the sheer coincidence that every text frame had at least one ''g'' in it. ''Thank God we're coming out in August,'' he says. ''If this were a July release, we'd be doomed!''

The ''Signs'' trailer was shipped to multiplexes across America in May. The finished campaign, with its scrupulous attempt to baffle -- not to exasperate filmgoers, but to intrigue them -- falls directly in the lineage of ''Rosemary's Baby.'' Given Shyamalan's penchant for surprises, it's impossible to say where this trailer is leading us. The marketing bends toward eschatology, but what's the opposite of that? No one who sees Disney's trailer can say with any assurance what ''Signs'' is ultimately about, and that's the result of scores of strategic decisions on the part of Oren Aviv. If nothing in the appearance of crop signs is what it seems, what's left? Aliens who want corn and harvest it in a highly interesting manner? A government conspiracy? The mere fact that moviegoers are now performing this sort of math in their heads is a mark of how the role of marketing has edged to the forefront of the industry. When people watched the trailer for the Sam Peckinpah film ''The Getaway'' in 1972, they didn't see the marketing; they saw the clip. They thought to themselves, Looks like McQueen pulls a heist and then he gets away. Viewers of the ''Signs'' trailer are offered no foothold, and in fact are assured that they have no foothold.

pretentiousness is not an affliction common to trailer editors. They cringe when you use the phrase ''the art of cutting a trailer,'' because they understand that their craft is about commerce, what Shyamalan himself calls ''putting butts in the seats.''

That paradox -- the fact that trailer cutters reside in a country all their own, between the high art of ''The Godfather'' and a 1950's commercial for Lucky Strikes -- doesn't bother them as much as the deep misconception of how they do what they do. Trailer editing is viewed by the general population, and even some in the film industry, as hackwork. Art Mondrala doesn't even like to let people know what he does for a living. ''If you tell them you edit trailers, they reply, 'Oh, so you just put together the best parts of a movie,''' he says. ''And they get a sorrowful look in their eyes.''

If Barbara Glazer is even fleetingly troubled by the way her craft is perceived in the streets, she doesn't show it. Though she's constantly focused on the mercenary nature of the Ant Farm's work, she sees trailer cutting as more akin to documentary editing than anything else. ''A feature editor has a script,'' she says, fiddling with Greek worry beads in her office. ''Commercial editors have storyboards. We have to create our own reality from a world of footage. The movie wasn't shot to help us make a trailer. The way our minds work is to look for connective tissue -- to create a shorthand.

''Happily, when I see movies in the theater, I don't watch for images that would work in a trailer,'' she adds. ''I shut off that part of my brain. Having worked on 'Lord of the Rings,' I still saw it three times.'' But here at the Ant Farm -- as previews for the sequels of ''Lord of the Rings'' and ''Harry Potter'' are being cut right down the hall -- Glazer's world is composed of isolated shreds of footage. Knowing which to kiss and which to kick, she says, can spell the difference between triumph and ruin.

A minute after telling me this, bounding up some stairs, Glazer is interrupted by one of the Ant Farm's 25 editors to answer a specific question about how to balance a trailer that's in its early stages. ''I don't know,'' Glazer replies. ''Just make sure I see Meryl Streep giggle!''

Marshall Sella is a contributing writer. He last wrote about the creators of ''Jerry Springer: The Opera.''

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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