![]() ![]() In 1977, Sam Raimi, then a college student at Michigan State University, and his childhood friend Bruce Campbell, made It’s Murder, a short film they showed to Robert Tapert, who suggested they expand it into a feature. That film’s subsequent success helped solidify the advertising model still widely prevalent in today’s trailer strategy: customize trailers to be viewed during prime-time hours of television viewership and then, to the point of near oversaturation, inundate the market with these trailers prior to the film’s release under the blanket hope that potential consumers know of only one movie opening that weekend and their only plan for that weekend will be to see that one movie. The market changed again in the 1970s to promote Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, the world’s first summer blockbuster. ![]() The NSS held a virtual monopoly on the trailer game until the 1960s, when auteur filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick began cutting trailers for their own films. Then Herman Robbins created the National Screen Service in 1919, a company theaters and studios could outsource to do all the work for them, expanding the idea of what a trailer could and should do. Thus began the trailer industry, which was hardly an industry then, operated by theaters and studios themselves at first, but in ways that never fully capitalized on the potential for both business and stylistic expansion. Film trailers were conceived in 1913 by Nils Granlund, the advertising manager of Marcus Loew theaters, when he spliced together rehearsal footage of The Pleasure Seekers, a Broadway play at the time, into a mini promotional montage that trailed after films shown at Loew’s theaters. ![]()
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