Illustration by Diana Gerstacker; Photo by Jake Hills/ Unsplash
In the early days of moviegoing, you didn’t just buy a ticket for one feature-length film and leave once the credits started rolling. You were instead treated to a mix of shorts, newsreels, cartoons, and, eventually, trailers — which, per their name, played after the movie rather than before — with people coming and going throughout the day. The idea for trailers came from Nils Granlund, who in addition to being a business manager for movie theaters worked as a producer on Broadway, which explains why the first trailer was actually for a play: 1913’s The Pleasure Seekers.
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It's a factIf you’d prefer not to spend 20 minutes before every movie watching trailers, you aren’t alone. The National Association of Theater Owners has tried to impose a two-minute limit on previews, which is about 30 seconds shorter than their average individual runtime.
Chicago producer William Selig took the idea further that same year by ending each installment of his serialized action-adventure short films with a tantalizing preview of the next chapter — a precursor to ending movies and TV shows on a cliffhanger. Today there are production houses that exclusively make trailers and are handsomely rewarded for their efforts, sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars.
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Trailers began playing before movies in the ______.
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Trailers began playing before movies in the 1930s.
One company made almost every trailer for 40 years.
Between 1919 and 1960, almost every movie trailer was produced by the National Screen Service (NSS) — a near-monopoly that also included posters and other marketing materials. Like a lot of cinematic innovations from the era, we have Alfred Hitchcock to thank for ending their reign: The “master of suspense” began making his own trailers, including a six-and-a-half-minute preview of Psycho, and other filmmakers followed suit. Trailers have long been recognized as an art form unto themselves, with many moviegoers arriving to theaters early just to see them.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
