Giving It Up: Movie Trailers Are Easy

On the evening of the 31st, I found myself in an unfortunate predicament.  It was Halloween and all, so most everybody would be making some sort of trek out into the world clad in costume.  All of my friends were doing that, at least.  And they were all doing it while seriously inebriated.  It's Halloween at college, that's how it works.

My predicament was two-fold: (a) as a once-a-week intern at a film company far from where I live, I can't afford to show up late or hungover the one day a week I come in, and (b) in anticipation of a boring Halloween I neglected to get any kind of costume.  So when the night finally arrived and I realized I was willing to risk a potentially rough morning, it was already too late for me to put together a costume that didn't look thrown together at the last minute.

If I had Mr. Miyagi to help me out, this wouldn't be a problem.

Andrew, a close friend of mine living in that dilapidated fraternity mansion I mentioned a while back, came up with a good way to remedy the holiday.  He proposed a Halloween Marathon of Horror, an idea which I would have loved to follow through on had it not been for that Tuesday morning 7:00 am alarm I had been anticipating for so long.  I agreed to two movies.  Later intrusions on the part of exasperated fraternity officers demanding my attendance at some sort of Important Ceremony forced me to climb out the back gate, unchain my bicycle in the dark, and pedal away from my fraternal duties along with the promised second film.  We got the first one in, though: it was called Tucker & Dale vs Evil.

You see, normally I'd include a link to the trailer with the title there, give you readers a clue as to what I'm talking about.  Unfortunately for all of us, myself included, Tucker & Dale vs Evil is one of those movies where they give away almost every element of the story and plot in the trailer.

"Shucks."

I say "unfortunately for me" because Andrew -- who had seen the film at Sundance with a clean slate, with nothing but the "Horror/Comedy" label on the program to indicate what the movie was about -- pulled up the trailer to give me an indication as to what one of our choices could be.  By the end of the trailer, Andrew turned to me sadly and admitted that we'd basically just seen all of the most important moments.  They had cut the trailer like a highlight reel.

I'm glossing over something here, though.  The material looked funny enough to warrant me watching it anyway, which is a rarity.  This kind of thing happens all the time.  Every trip to the theater inevitably results in at least one trailer that gives away the entire arc of the story.  The greatest (most awful) one that comes to mind immediately is a film I never saw but am absolutely certain I completely understand, Leap Year.

This trailer not only convinces me of the film's moral worthlessness (like Bride Wars, here's apparently yet another romantic comedy that takes as a given the woman's sole value as a seeker of a mate and a partner for Interchangeable Homogeneous Brown Haired Pretty Men... take a look at romantic (screwball) comedies from 60 years ago and try to convince me that this genre hasn't undergone a troublingly regressive transformation), this trailer also tells me everything about the movie except for the final choice of our ostensible protagonist, this desperate woman with some serious attachment issues who would in all likelihood succumb to some kind of violent psychosis lest in life she be denied a Homogeneous Brown Haired Pretty Man who has intentions of turning her into a spouse.  What I'm trying to say is, I can guess that part -- she probably chooses the guy who's less of a dick.  I've watched a two-and-a-half minute trailer and not only do I know every major interaction within the first two acts, I also know the "protagonist's" final choice and by extension, the "moral" of the story.

I wonder if they're gonna overcome some surface-level differences.

In film school, we're taught that story is king.  The sacredness of story cannot be overstated.  We're taught a number of ways to keep an audience invested, but that desire to keep them invested is inherent to our education.  Engaging the audience in some way or another is not really up for debate at USC.

Which is why I'm so surprised when I see commercial endeavors like Leap Year (and to a lesser extend, Tucker & Dale, which was produced somewhat independently) so flagrantly exposing all the inner mechanisms of their plots within their advertising.  If commercial fiction film thrives on audience engagement and investment, and commercial fiction film schools teach us that it's story/plot (different things in my opinion, but usually interchangeable in the film school vocabulary) that allows an audience to stay invested, then why do studio advertisements so often give away that most precious commodity?

...maybe not the most precious commodity...

My hypothesis is that often, the people designing the advertising don't have faith in an audience's desire for surprise.  Let's be honest, the massive financial success of remakes, sequels, and franchises based on comic books over the course of the past few years indicates one thing to the studios funding the product as well as the advertising: that we don't want anything new or surprising.  Why do they tell us everything in the ads?  Because they think we need to know every plot point in order to want to see a movie in the first place.  We're not looking for New.

I have to wonder whether this advertising strategy is another effect of the escapist direction that cinema has taken in the time since the financial success of Star Wars in 1977.  The studios still do it because Leap Year made over $25 million on a production budget of $19 million.  We don't care about story, really.  We just want our expectations to be catered to.

Speaking of which, when is Shrek 5: Puss in Boots 2 coming out?

I don't believe things will stay this way forever, but in order for movies to get better we need to stop paying to see things that advertise rigid adherence to genre tropes.  In the case of Tucker & Dale, it only partly ruined what was otherwise a very enjoyable movie-watching experience.  In the case of Leap Year, I can only find solace in the idea that everyone involved in its creation will one day feel the Sweet Sting of Karma.

And just so you get a visual, I'm imagining the Sweet Sting of Karma embodied as the towering green ghost of Orson Welles shooting slime at and then devouring the cast and crew as he bellows angry incantations.  But until that starts happening, can we just stop going to these movies that are obviously awful?

The Vengeful Ghost of Orson Welles