I think occasionally in trailers it improves a joke when they have to cut it down. In Jim Carrey’s Liar, Liar there’s a scene where he gets in an elevator with a busty lady who comments that everyone in the building has been really nice to her. He, only being able to tell the truth and says “Well, that’s because you’ve got big jugs. I mean your boobs are huge. I mean, I wanna squeeze 'em. Mama!” Cut to the elevator door opening with him looking like he’s just been punched in the face and her looking angry.
The trailer cut straight from “big” to the door opening and was much funnier for it.
Well, with Pixar, that’s because they create those teaser trailers so far ahead of the rest of the movie that there’s usually nothing else they can show at the time. It’s amusing to watch that Incredibles teaser in retrospect and realize it depicted everything Pixar had camera-ready for the movie at the time – just four walls, a red costume, and an overweight guy.
Well, on the other side of the spectrum there’s the trailer for the sadly underrated techno-noir, Strange Days. The trailer has no footage of the actual movie, just Ralph Fiennes talking to the camera about how he’s the “magic man”. It was a neat idea that bombed. People hated the trailer, the movie’s business wasn’t that great, either. Perhaps if they’d shown some of the car chases and gunfights with spliced dialogue more people would’ve come.
Sometimes the pieces of fake conversation are so blatant it’s laughable. There was a TV ad for 'Maid In Manhattan" where first there’s an indoor scene of JLo as a maid making a bed, saying something like “What am I supposed to do, make the bed with me in it?” and then there’s the lead actor, very clearly outdoors, saying “please!”, with the sky and clouds behind his head.
Fah. I, for one, am increasingly irritated at movie trailers that give away major details of the plot, to a point at which I don’t even need to see one of the interchangable so-called thrillers interchangably starting Angelina Jolie or Ashley Judd to be able to recite the plot developments, practically down to the minute.
It’s one thing if the trailer gives exactly the wrong impression of the film, I suppose, but it’s quite another if the trailer recreates the mood or theme of the film even if using unique footage. The teaser (but not the full trailer) for The Incredibles did a mediocre job of this; based on the trailer, I’d assumed the film was much sillier and infantile that it actually was. (Thankfully, the trailer was much better.) The trailer for Adaptation did a good job of conveying the idea, such as it was, without giving away major details.
I doubt anybody remembers this, but there was a trailer for the Steve Martin/Michael Caine film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels which did this perfectly. It used a trailer sequence which was created specifically for the trailer, with Martin and Caine walking down the Rivera with some narrated voiceover about honest, decent men and a good family movie or somesuch, then stated that this was not that kind of movie, as Martin knocks an old lady into the water and Caine smushes an ice cream cone into a kid’s face. It was really hilarious–far more entertaining than the film it proceded–and conveyed the sense of the film perfectly despite using no footage from the actual film.
