Here’s the rather original first trailer of ‘The Thin Man’ (1934) starring…well, if you read this blog I’m pretty sure you know who played Nick and Nora Charles. It uses a rather striking ‘book-end’ gimmick–William Powell doubles himself and Nick Charles in a split screen in which Nick stands within a large volume of ‘The Thin Man’ book and steps out of it while the two of them converse. Interspersed are scenes from the film–rather clumsily inserted, I must say. Nonetheless it’s an unusual and amusing preview of the movie that was to become wildly successful in that otherwise deeply depressed year.
Who made these trailers? Good question. A company called National Screen Service made almost every trailer for theatrically released movies from the early 1920s well into the 1980s–the ’70s saw their business decline steeply as directors became more involved in the design of their movie’s trailers and other more sophisticated trailer companies appeared on the scene. But for many years NSS had the most direct and profound impact on the movie advertising industry. What makes their trailers especially interesting to hard-core (and I mean HARD CORE) film buffs is that the material used frequently differs in subtle ways from the finished films. That’s because NSS was sent dailies–i.e. raw footage–of the movies while they were in production, so as to speed up the process of creating the trailer. Thus alternate takes of scenes were often used, rather than the ones that wound up in the finished product. As a result alternative line readings can often be found by examining the films and the trailers side by side. The more important the film is historically, the more interesting this can be. I myself have never participated in this exercise, though if I did my first stop would be to compare the Marx Brothers trailers with their films, given how important their work is to me and how relatively little material they left us (they only made twelve films, after all). ‘Bringing Up Baby’, ‘Citizen Kane’, ‘On The Waterfront’ and ‘The Sweet Smell of Success’ would be my next stops.