In this post on The Hot Blog, commenter Direwolf asks how movie trailers work as far as their positioning before a movie. Here’s the lowdown circa late 1990s.
Almost every day, new trailers arrive at the movie theater. Some trailers come “in the can” with a movie and other trailers are physically “attached” to the film you receive.
For a generic fall action film, you can simply program whatever trailers you want as long as they are thematically similar to the film you are showing. A good manager will allow you a little play in matching movies with the same demographic appeal. These are obviously the most fun to program because it allows you the most creativity.
For a bigger release, things get trickier. The studios want their trailers on their movies. I worked for United Artists and their policy was no more than two trailers per company per release. If Fox attached three trailers before ID4, we cut them all off and picked two of them to play with the movie. You still had some freedom in what trailers you showed, but you had trailers that you had to include to keep the studios happy.
The next issue is UA had policy trailers. That’s the trailer that pimps popcorn and cokes, tells you to be quiet and, in a different age, told you not to smoke. That was to always play immediately before the feature. That meant any attached trailers had to be removed and the policy trailer added before it.
The final situation you might encounter would be when a memo from corporate arrived before your print did. If a movie was projected to be a mega blockbuster, you might get told exactly what trailers to attach. The last big film I put together was Titanic. The prints didn’t arrive until the morning the movie opened. We knew we were getting two prints and we knew the movie was long. (Before the digital age, each film came on a series of 2,000 ft. reels that contained about 20 minutes of movie each.) We put together trailer reels the night before to save us time, but when my partner and I got to work the next day, the cans were there along with a memo from corporate. This happens because your theater chain cut deals with the movie companies to promote particular films. This, obviously, is worst from a creativity standpoint, but it happened rarely.
Today with digital projectors, I am not sure what happens. I know my two years as a projectionist were awesome. I loved building and breaking down prints and got really speedy at it in the end. I also loved the trailers and loved trailer management (policy with our manager was take trailers off the week a movie is to start and generally try to keep the trailers fresh).
That job might have been what I enjoyed most in college.
