In 1916, Paramount became the first motion picture company to hire an in-house team of trailer makers. They saw great potential in splicing together the best scenes of their films to promote upcoming movies. However, most movie houses outsourced the job to a group of NY ad executives at the National Screening Service. As a result, many trailers from the twenties through the sixties are very similar to one another. In the sixties, more movie producers deviated from the structured NSS formula and sought to create their own divisions of trailers clips producers. Richard Kahn of Columbia House explained, “It’s like the ebb and flow of the ocean: The whole question of whether someone should do these in-house or job them out varies with the attitudes of those in charge.”

Alfred Hitchcock was a known innovator in the history of the movie trailer. Often, this iconic filmmaker would appear in his own previews, just as he did on “Hitchcock Presents.” In the preview for Psycho, he took audiences on a tour of the Bates Motel and Bates mansion. In trailers clips for The Birds, he talks about the relationship between man and bird. The suspense and sheer creepiness of Hitchcock’s films were wonderfully demonstrated in just a few short seconds of his previews. “It was always Hitch, and the trailers worked the same way,” said his assistant, Peggy Robertson.

Andrew J. Kuehn was an innovator in modern movie trailers production. In 1964, he released independently-produced trailer for Night of the Iguana that used fast-paced editing, high-contrast photography and suspenseful narration. When he realized the potential for this format, he partnered with Dan Davis to manufacture trailers for some of the biggest names and top movies — including Stanley Kubricks’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, James Cameron’s Aliens and George Lucas’s Star Wars. ”He came into the world of previews when they were done very conventionally, and he reinvented them,” said Bob Harper, vice chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment. ”He pioneered the idea of previews as a stand-alone piece of entertainment.”

You’ll note that many of the trailers for new movies have extremely fast cutting between scenes. Andrew J. Kuehn explains, “When MTV came along… it recognized that the retention, the ability of the audience to observe, had grown faster because of television: It’s not a matter of lack of attention span, it’s a matter of how much information people can grasp at the same time.” He added, “In the process you accomplished two things: One, you can get more information across. Two, you can hide your flaws more easily.” Thus, the modern trailer was born.

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