The history of my chosen medium:



Trailers or previews are film advertisements for feature films that will be exhibited in the future at a cinema, they are used to promote and advertise said film to attract audiences. The first film trailer was shown in an American cinema in November 1913. A short promotional film was created for the musical The Pleasure Seekers which would be shown at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway. this was produced by Nils Granlund who was the advertising manager for the Marcus Loew theatre chain. Nils Granlund also first introduced a film trailer for an upcoming motion picture in 1914. He used a slide technique to promote a film featuring Charlie Chaplin at Loew’s Seventh Avenue Theatre in Harlem. Film trailers up until the late 1950’s were mostly created by the National Screen Service. These trailers consisted of a number of key scenes from the film, they were often augmented with large text describing the story. Like film trailers today, they had some form of narration yet those that did featured stentorian voices.



It was in the early 1960's that the face of film trailers really started to change. Because of the arrival of the "New Hollywood" textless, montage trailers and quick editing became popular. among the most famous trendsetters for this was Stanley Kubrick who created montage trailers for Lolita, Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey. He got his main inspiration from Canadian film visionary Arthur Lipsett and his short film "Very Nice Very Nice". In 1964 an independently produced trailer for ' Night of the Iguana' by Andrew J Kuehn used high contrast photography fast paced editing and a provocative narration done by James Earl Jones.

Because Kuehns format was so successful he began producing this new form of trailer with partner Dan Davis. He opened the west coast office of Kaleidoscope Films in 1968 and his company became a major player in the trailer industry for the next three decades. Over this time Hollywood began producing more and more blockbuster films and investing more money in marketing them, directors such as Steven Spielberg, Barbra Striesand and and Oliver Stone began to depend on Kaleidoscope Films for their ability to create the best trailers. Kuehn alumni include leading trailer makers and marketing creatives. Top trailer companies have all been run by former Kaleidoscope creatives, like The Cimarron Group (Chris Arnold), Ant Farm and Aspect Ratio (Mark Trugman). Michael Camp headed the trailer department at paramount pictures, Tom Kennedy at Mgm, Jeff Werner and Vince Arcaro all started their own successful trailer companies and Bob Harper began his career as a messenger at Kaleidoscope before becoming a producer and quickly Vice-Chairman of Fox Film Entertainment and in 2007 became chairman of regency entertainment. John Beal credits his career success to the thirty-year collaboration with Kuehn and their new approach of creating original scores using a whole new musical template.

In earlier decades of cinema, trailers were only one small part of the entertainment which included things such as serial adventure episodes and cartoon shorts. These earlier trailers were much shorter and often consisted of title cards and stock footage. Today, longer, more elaborate trailers and commercial advertisements have replaced other forms of pre-feature entertainment and in major multiplex chains, about the first twenty minutes after the posted showtime is devoted to trailers.