WEEK OF JULY 31, 2000

WHY ARE MOVIES TRAILING BEHIND?

The amateur movie world has some awesome trailers. Heck, look at the nominees for "Best Trailer" at the recent REwind Movie Awards… a solid group of trailers, and we all know of many others that could have been in there. My problem is that the various movie makers can make a solid trailer….a 2 minute version of their movie let’s say, yet the full length version quite often does not live up to their trailer.

I know what everyone will say…. Hollywood is the worst offender out there, so how can you complain? I’m not talking about trailers for comedy movies that give away all the good jokes, but trailers that hype a movie up to be a great action-fest or a scary scream-a-thon, but are just setting you up for the disappointment when you actually watch the movie. A great example is when Erik and I watched the trailer to a recent release. It was an AMAZING trailer…. We watched it over and over again… it was VERY well done. Unfortunatly, when we saw the movie, we looked at one another and wondered what went wrong. The trailer set us up for a great action movie, and we were disappointed with the end result, because the movie did not live up to the promise the trailer gave. Unfortunate? Yes….. preventable? Perhaps.

Heck, it’s not like TEWS has never ever disappointed anyone. I was recently talking via e-mail with a member of the amateur movie making community, (to keep him anonymous, let’s just refer to him by his initials…) So I was talking with "C.C." about movies, and which ones he was most disappointed in, and he said "The Hunter". Okay, so not everyone is going to like a movie that TEWS does, but I was interested to find out why, out of all the movies that "C.C." had seen from amateur movie makers, why did he find "The Hunter" most disappointing? The reason he told me was that the screen shots he saw were so good that he expected a great movie, and the acting in it really let him down. He still enjoyed it, but the screen shots set him up for a better experience than he had. Was it avoidable? Well….probably. I hope "C.C." doesn’t mind me using him as an example in my story, but it helps illustrate my point.

There are things that an amateur movie maker can do to improve the overall product to lessen the chance of disappointment. Sure not everyone is going to like a movie that I make, but if my target audience doesn’t like it, then that’s probably telling me something. You have to make sure you have solid acting and good cinematography. We’ve talked at length in the AMMA about how important visuals are in movies, and bad acting is just distracting, to the point of being painful sometimes. That makes it hard to concentrate on what’s going on in the movie. That’s where TEWS went "wrong" with "The Hunter". We let the acting slide a little bit, and that took away from the final result. Sure the visuals were nice, and the story was there, but the acting took away from it.

Another problem that I see is that some stories need to be cut down. Like I said in my opening, people make great 2 minute versions of their movies in their trailers, but sometimes their movies just don’t stand up. I’d like to see an effort by ALL moviemakers, even the big studios, not just amateur movie makers, to make the best possible movie in the shortest amount of time. We’re not Hollywood here, so we can make a 15 minute movie if we wish. A lot of movies I’ve seen have been filled with a lot of "extras" that really hurt the pace of a movie. Sure a 15 minute fight scene between two actors is great, but unless it’s really well done, it hurts the pace. The best movies out there tell the story that needs to be told in the shortest amount of time. Any extra "fluff" just hurts the pace, and really wrecks the movie in general.

I know, no one is perfect, and you can’t make one movie that everyone will enjoy (not even you Mr. Spielberg) but if you can make a solid trailer, then you can make a solid movie. I guess that’s something we ALL need to work on. Later all!!!

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