While I agree completely with what you’re saying, it’s interesting that you mention Fearless.
That’s been one of my favorite films since I was in college. I never saw a trailer for it, but rented it as a Peter Weir fan. I was totally blown away by it. At the time, I was a film student, and one of the exercises in one of my classes was to make a trailer for a film of your choice. We were to make a 3-minute version, as well as 60- and 30-second cuts of essentially the same trailer. I chose Fearless.
[insert ooooohhhhh here]
Now, I’ve always been strong on editing. It’s how I got started, and I love doing it. However, I instantly saw the challenges inherent in choosing a film like Fearless for this project. It’s story structure was too complex to get across in so short a time, so I would have to re-structure it for the trailer. Though the plane crash sequence is the high point of the film, I wouldn’t want to show much of it… just enough to tantalize, not enough to give the whole bag away. While the music used for the film is great (almost ideal really), it wouldn’t come across the same in condensed form, so I had to choose a new piece of music. There were other issues. Structure was the biggest one, though. It seemed almost like I had to re-write the film to make it work for the trailer.
I worked on this thing for a week. Planning it took the majority of the time, but even the production itself was an exercise in tweaking and going back over the same piece over and over. It didn’t help that I was using a cuts-only linear edit bay to do it (a limitation of the project; he didn’t want a bunch of digital effects). I wound up using an excerpt from John Williams’ score for Born on the Fourth of July (I’m not a big Williams fan, but this fit well), and I did sort of re-write the structure of the story quite a bit for the trailer. The plot elements remained the same, but I moved them around quite a bit. And at some point (very early in the morning I think).
When I showed it in class, it got high marks from one and all. However, nobody else had seen the film (shocker), so they couldn’t tell how well I had conveyed the film concept. As has been stated, it’s not an easy film to market. However, the thing that really told me I did a good job was this: several of the students, as well as the teacher of the course, went home and rented the film for themselves, and watched it. None of them had to do it, but they did it anyway. And when we came back to class a few days later, many of them had even better things to say about my trailer.
For what it’s worth, I’ve since seen the real trailer for Fearless. In my oh-so-humble opinion, mine was better, and got the concept of the film across with more clarity. Based on what my old college colleagues said at the time, I think they’d agree. And hell, it made them want to see the movie. That’s the point, right?
Speaking of points, I do indeed have one here. Films like 12 Monkeys and Fearless do represent “marketing challenges” because they are unique and not easily pigeonholed. However, if the person/people trying to sell the film to the public are careful, and take their time, these films can still be sold. The trick is, they have to be sold as unique films. While this seems obvious to many, it seems that it’s not so obvious to some of the people trying to sell movies. Either that, or they just don’t want to try hard enough to sell the tough ones.
And hell, why would they, when an easy one like Armageddon can make more money than three tough sells easily? :rolleyes:
