What makes a shitty trailer? (Horrible music and comatose-sounding announcer copy)

Examples of the not-so-shitty work of Mark Woollen's trailer house (Photo source: New York magazine)

Movie trailers are a form of advertising I first became fascinated with in 2005, when I started experimenting with using '70s movie radio spots as interstitials to introduce the next piece of music on AFOS. For example, if the next tune on AFOS was the Love Unlimited Orchestra's "Theme from Together Brothers," it was going to be preceded by an actual Together Brothers radio spot from 1974.

A few months later, playing around with those old radio spots made me realize the audio from the spooky Batman Begins bat noises TV spot worked fantastically as a similar intro for any Batman Begins score track on the stream. This saved me the trouble of opening GoldWave and recording an intro to ID the composer and score album for every single track on the four different playlists AFOS consisted of at the time (today, AFOS consists of 56 different playlists).

From then on, I scoured the Interweb tubes for every single trailer or TV spot for a movie or TV show I could get my hands on and then re-edit into interstitials (and I continue to scour for trailer audio, as well as shorten them for radio because a lot of trailers contain huge chunks of wordless visual action or vague-sounding dialogue that would make no sense on radio). I wound up getting a few thumbs up in listener e-mails and on Twitter for this trailer-audio-as-interstitials approach. Someone tweeted that AFOS has a DJ Food vibe because of it. It was better than the occasional harsh criticisms I used to receive about the sound of my voice on AFOS.

Check out A Fistful of Soundtracks on tunein. Its got a DJ-Food feeling to it.

— CharlesHBissonnette (@CharlesHBissonn) October 18, 2013

Fistful of Soundtracks on itunes radio - Starts each track with a sampled quote, superb.

— Liam OC (@LiamOC) May 12, 2009

By 2006, I had listened to so much trailer audio that I stopped dismissing trailers as annoying commercials that would always get in the way of my enjoyment of the feature presentation, whether I'm watching that feature in the theater or on disc, and I started to respect the art of producing and editing these trailers. I've become a fan of the Buddha Jones trailer house's laugh-out-loud funny trailer campaigns for 2011's The Muppets and Muppets Most Wanted, and I've grown to admire Hollywood trailer producer Mark Woollen and his eponymous trailer house's inventive work on the campaigns for films like Little Children, In the Loop and Gone Girl.

"Mark has the difficult task and very rare talent of finding a film's DNA in 120 seconds. Once he finds it, he translates it not by revealing its story but by expressing, in a clear but mysterious way, the film's emotional essence," said Alejandro González Iñárritu to New York magazine about Woollen, who crafted the trailers and TV spots for Iñárritu's Best Picture Oscar winner Birdman. Woollen has been pushing for stylish trailers that move away from extremely on-the-nose and frequently parodied trailer styles like the tired comedy trailer template The Simpsons once made fun of in its fake trailers for an Ed O'Neill sports comedy called Soccer Mummy and a Going Ape/Dunston Checks In-ish piece of shit called Editor-in-Chimp.

Some of my all-time favorite trailers, like the ones for Albert Brooks' Real Life and the 2002 documentary Comedian, don't even include any footage from the film and are amusing short films by themselves. I also started to respect the art of narrating trailers. I had listened to so much trailer audio by 2006 that I started to be able to identify the names of the voices behind the voiceovers. Before 2006, I used to often get Hal Douglas, the announcer who appeared as himself in the Comedian trailer, mixed up with Don LaFontaine, because their authoritative voices sometimes sounded the same. After 2006, I was able to tell them apart, and I can now do the same with any announcer who's become more prominent in the trailer voiceover biz since the deaths of LaFontaine and later, Douglas ("Yo, that's Ashton Smith in that TV spot. And that's definitely Keith David. Or is that Dorian Harewood, the voice of NBC? Nah, that's definitely David").

So when Childrens Hospital regular Lake Bell starred in and directed In a World..., an indie comedy about a post-LaFontaine trailer voiceover industry (as well as the Bell character's frustrations over that industry being such a sausage fest), I felt like she made that movie just for me. The movie's opening montage of archival footage of LaFontaine at work was excellent as an opening title sequence, and I especially enjoyed how a lot of In a World... took place in recording studios, a world I'm familiar with from my days of either being involved with college radio or recording content for AFOS inside a cozy and loungey studio.



It's also great whenever any publication takes an In a World...-like look at the trailer biz and discusses at length the unknown history of cutting together trailers or, in the case of the A.V. Club, the stylistic choices that go into making a standout trailer (one "AVQ&A" panelist says, "While I appreciate the art of a tasteful teaser, sometimes I just want to be told exactly what the hell is going on," while another panelist says, "My answer happens to be the opposite... I like a trailer that doesn't tell me anything about what's going on"). The A.V. Club's September 25 Q&A with its own staff writers about "What makes a great trailer?" inspired the bloggers over at The Solute--a film discussion blog founded by film lovers who became online friends in the surprisingly calm and civil comments section of Pitchfork Media's much-missed The Dissolve--to discuss examples of terrible trailers for good movies.

The Solute post scores points for not overlooking the most notorious recent example of coming attractions that are so atrociously made that they're incongruous with the word "attraction" and they wind up diminishing the attractiveness of whatever film they're hyping. That example would have to be the shitty trailers that caused the surprisingly enjoyable Edge of Tomorrow to get squished at the box office as if it were Tom Cruise's body getting run over by an Army truck.

But the king of terrible trailers for good or great movies has to be the American trailer for the Samuel Goldwyn Company release of Henry V, Kenneth Branagh's 1989 big-screen directorial debut. In 1989, the most talked-about trailer campaign belonged to Batman, not just because the footage presented a dark Batman who had never been depicted on screen before, but also because of the extremely minimalist approach of the Tim Burton film's 1988 teaser trailer: no voiceover narration, no music (Woollen's Little Children trailer became notable for also containing no music) and not even an appearance by either the title of the film or its about-to-be-ubiquitous, Anton Furst-designed logo at the end of the trailer. The minimalist approach was due to Warner Bros.' eagerness to rush a teaser trailer into theaters to intensify the buzz for Batman. It's funny how the Batman teaser's lack of narration ended up influencing a lot of trailers today when it was really a result of the trailer house not having enough time to record narration for the teaser. A similar minimalist approach also distinguished another trailer from 1989: the original U.K. trailer for Henry V, which opted for no narration and simply relied on Shakespeare's dialogue and Patrick Doyle's epic score from the film to sell the drama and gritty war-movie feel of Branagh's first Shakespeare adaptation for the screen.



Doyle's very first film score kicked off a long-lasting cinematic partnership with Branagh (before Henry V, Doyle had scored Branagh's 1987 stage production of Twelfth Night) that continued recently with Doyle's score for Branagh's version of Cinderella earlier this year. The Henry V score remains my favorite work of Doyle's. That's why selections from the Henry V score are in rotation on AFOS. "One of Pat's great gifts is for melody, and I wanted every tune to make an impact. The great set pieces needed underscoring as powerful and immediate as the words themselves," wrote Branagh in the Henry V score album liner notes.

Henry V's 14-minute St. Crispin's Day speech score cue, which Doyle has covered on piano in his recent Varèse Sarabande release The Music of Patrick Doyle: Solo Piano, is the Branagh film's most memorable example of underscoring that's as powerful and immediate as the words themselves. The Crispin's Day cue also became a staple of trailers or TV broadcast promos for feel-good movies in the '90s. But the Henry V cues that actually better sum up for me the drive and pulse of Branagh's film (recently reissued on Blu-ray by Shout! Factory) are "Opening title--'O! for a Muse of fire,'" which was used in most of the British trailer, and "'Once more unto the breach,'" which is in rotation on AFOS. So how did the trailer house that produced the American trailer for Henry V manage to fuck it all up? It stupidly didn't use "'O!' for a Muse of fire,'" "'Once more unto the breach'" or any other cue from Doyle's exceptional score. The chintzy synth music in Henry V's American trailer is, to borrow a line from Henry V, like a foul and ugly witch limping so tediously away. Cue Jean-Ralphio.

Why the fuck does the American trailer music sound like walk-in music at a 1988 Christian leadership retreat? The music that was chosen by the American trailer house is so atrocious and shoddy-sounding I actually removed as much as I could of it from the intro that transitions into either "'Once more unto the breach'" or "'Non nobis, Domine'" whenever they get streamed by AFOS. Also, the music, which doesn't sound like anything Doyle would ever compose, fails to convey that this is the kind of non-stodgy and visually interesting Shakespeare movie that's capable of a remarkable shot like the epic tracking shot Branagh came up with to powerfully illustrate the costs of war. To its credit, the American trailer doesn't omit Shakespeare's dialogue to make Henry V more palatable to American moviegoers who either are unfamiliar with the play or doze off whenever they hear Shakespeare. But unfortunately, it tacks on an announcer who delivers some of the most drab-sounding late '80s/early '90s trailer copy this side of the 1993 Batman: Mask of the Phantasm trailer ("It was one of history's greatest adventures, led by a soldier who wouldn't retreat").

Combined with that feel-good music that creates the notion that this movie is boring homework, the addition of a cheesy announcer totally kills the mood and the aura of political intrigue that were more effectively indicated by the film's British trailer, a trailer that, stylistically, is much closer to the largely voiceover-less, Woollen-style trailers that are being made today. Henry V's American trailer is exhibit A in how not to shape a trailer out of historical material that can be difficult to market to a non-art-house American crowd, as well as how not to make a trailer, period. "The Samuel Goldwyn Company presents a bold new film by Kenneth Branagh"? Nah, B, it should be "The Samuel Goldwyn Company misrepresents a bold new film by Kenneth Branagh."

Selections from the 1989 Henry V score are in rotation during "AFOS Prime."

Who's that voice on AFOS?

(Portions of the following were culled from a series of "Who's That Voice on AFOS?" posts from July 13-17, 2010.)

The new indie film In a World... is distinctive for being the first comedy set against the voiceover industry. I took a bunch of voice acting classes back when I was considering breaking into the voiceover industry, so the subject of In a World... is of great interest to me. In a World... is the feature-length directorial debut of actress Lake Bell, one of the stars of the most hilarious 11-minute show on cable, Childrens Hospital, as well as an occasional director of Childrens Hospital episodes. Bell stars in In a World... as a vocal coach who attempts to break into the male-dominated movie trailer side of the industry and ends up competing with her announcer father for the lucrative gig of reading copy for an ad campaign for The Amazon Games, a much-hyped tentpole franchise based on a popular series of YA page-turners with similarities to a certain Suzanne Collins YA franchise.

In a World... opens with footage of the late Don LaFontaine--the copywriter-turned-legendary voiceover artist who's credited with coming up with the ubiquitous '80s and '90s trailer phrase "In a world where..."--cold killing it as a trailer narrator. In a post-LaFontaine world where everyone's still in awe of DLF's baritone and incredible work ethic, only two or three voiceover artists have carried on LaFontaine's raspy, imposing and frequently parodied style--most notably Ashton Smith, whose baritone was all over the TV spots for the first three Bourne movies (Smith once said, "When you die, the voice you hear in heaven is not Don's. It's God trying to sound like Don.").

But as Bell, a self-described trailer fanatic, noted when she and actor/voiceover artist Fred Melamed, who plays her dad in In a World..., both plugged the film on Fresh Air last week, trailer houses are increasingly veering away from voiceovers and letting the footage speak for itself. While that's great for trailer houses that want their product to look more sophisticated and stylish and sound not as dated as the '80s and '90s "In a world..." days of advertising, I'm a little concerned about that because it adds some difficulty to my task of tracking down more recent trailer audio clips I could use for AFOS, in which announcers like Smith portentously utter the taglines and titles of recent movies or TV shows.

I attach these clips of trailers or radio/TV spots to score tracks from the movies or shows that are promoted in these trailers or spots because I don't want to go through the tedium of switching on both my mic and Audacity and recording a back-announcement for every single track that's in rotation on AFOS. These intros I cull from trailers or TV spots are, to me, an entertaining way to let the listeners know what they'll be hearing next, as well as a way to keep them from asking me what they're hearing. (Only rarely will I receive a message from a really dumb and lazy listener who doesn't bother to either pay attention to the intro or read the track info on the radio station widget, so he'll ask me to identify the already-ID'd track that was streamed at yadda-yadda-yadda in the afternoon. Yo, Einstein, it's impossible for me to go back and check because I don't exactly keep a running tab on when shit was streamed during the day. I wish these dumb shits were more like illustrator Kevin Greene, who's much more helpful when asking me about a track he was having some trouble IDing.)

In 2005, I experimented with attaching the vintage radio spots for Black Caesar and Foxy Brown to the themes from those movies, and I liked how the old ads sounded as intros (any old ad or trailer that features the late Adolph Caesar's voice is always fun to listen to). Then shortly thereafter, Warner Bros.' home video division dropped the Batman Begins soundtrack album, and I was looking for an effective and ominous way to announce "This next track is from the Batman Begins score" without having to say those words. I found it in the form of an audio clip of the Batman Begins TV spot that consisted solely of the bat swarm graphics from the film's opening titles. I thought that was an even niftier intro than the blaxploitation radio ads, so from then on, I tacked on trailer or promo clips to almost every single track during the block that's now known as "AFOS Prime." (On AFOS, LaFontaine's voice can be heard during clips of trailers or TV spots that were produced for Purple Rain, The Untouchables, The Living Daylights, Mo' Better Blues, A Rage in Harlem, Passenger 57, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, Hoodlum, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Ratatouille, The Simpsons Movie and Midnight Run.)



As In a World... gets audiences to better appreciate the art of trailer voiceovers and the talents who partake in such a faceless profession, here's a guide to some of the distinctive non-LaFontaine voices that surface during the movie or TV trailer clips that function as intros to the tunes during "AFOS Prime," "Beat Box," "The Whitest Block Ever" and "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round."

Adolph Caesar
Who's he?: A New York stage actor whose classy baritone was all over trailers and ads for blaxploitation flicks, Caesar earned acclaim late in his career for some of his acting work both on stage and screen before dying from a heart attack in 1986.
Most memorable on-screen role: A role he reprised from the stage: the self-hating light-skinned black sergeant in A Soldier's Story who, in the above pic, is preparing to whup the ass of some future double Oscar winner.
Most memorable voiceover work: The trailers and TV/radio spots for the original Dawn of the Dead ("When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth").
When can you hear him on AFOS?: The radio spots for Trouble Man, Foxy Brown and Claudine and the trailers for Three Tough Guys and Superfly.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (07/03/2012): Tron: Uprising, Motorcity, Gravity Falls, Ultimate Spider-Man and The Avengers

I felt the same way after having to sit through an episode of The Killing, except it didn't look like rainbows.

Each Tuesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired. And yes, this week, they're all shows that aired on Disney channels. As Motorcity creator Chris Prynoski said to USA Today, it feels like Disney is a good place to be for small-screen animation right now. Even when the jokes don't land (*cough*Ultimate Spider-Man*cough*).

Tron: Uprising's "Identity" episode introduces a Kryptonite-style Achilles heel that's new to the Troniverse: if a program in The Grid is separated for prolonged amounts of time from the identity disc that's supposed to be always attached to the back of his or her suit, he or she will experience temporary periods of amnesia before permanently losing his or her memory and turning into one of The Grid's "strays." And that's the predicament Beck (Elijah Wood) faces when a Black Guard security check on lightrail passengers' discs allows a thief (Adam DeVine) to trick Beck into losing his disc.

Because Beck's frequent memory glitches make it difficult for him to function as the new Tron, the real Tron (Bruce Boxleitner) re-assumes his own identity and must help his protégé retrieve his disc in the black market on the sleazy streets of the city of Pergos. They're joined on their search by Lux (Lake Bell!), a white-suited warrior program who at first appears to be helping Tron and Beck. But she's actually trying to capture Beck for her evil employer/lover Cobol (Sons of Anarchy's Mark Boone Junior), who procured Beck's disc from the thief so that he can deliver Beck and others like him to General Tesler's army, where, without their discs, they'll be repurposed as soldiers.

"Identity" undoes one of the Tron franchise's biggest flaws--the title character is its least interesting and most underdeveloped character--by allowing Boxleitner to express more emotion as Tron than he ever did in live-action during the two Tron movies. The episode further develops the mentor/protégé relationship between Tron and Beck, who doesn't like how distant and chilly his mentor acts towards him when his disc is stolen.

We learn that Tron's reluctance to treat Beck as a friend and call him one stems from the time Tesler's superior Clu betrayed both Tron and Kevin Flynn to take over The Grid, which was shown in a flashback during Tron: Legacy. Tron blames his former friendship with Clu for causing both Clu's despotic rule and his own current torture-scarred condition, but in the end, Tron realizes that his reluctance to trust another program again could also endanger Beck's life. Identifying Beck as his friend ends up being the only way to save him from permanently losing his memory and being converted by Cobol into one of Tesler's grunts.

The B-story once again centers on Beck's friend Zed (Nate Corddry), whose growing resentment of the Renegade--whom he doesn't know is Beck--has attracted the attention of Bartik (Donald Faison) and Hopper (Paul Scheer), programs who are working for Tesler's lieutenant Paige (Emmanuelle Chriqui). She, Bartik and Hopper are trying to form a task force to hunt down the Renegade. The possibility of Zed joining them and betraying his friend is too easily resolved in this episode, which fares better with its A-story about Tron, Beck and Lux.

The other highlights of "Identity" are a thrilling point-of-view shot where the camera follows Beck as he accidentally deactivates his light cycle in mid-air and crashes into an office building--God, I wish this show was in 3-D--and Bell's guest shot, even though her character is on the underdeveloped side. So the mournful wordless singing and slow motion that attempt to accentuate the tragedy of Lux's sacrifice at the end feel kind of unearned for a character we barely got to know during "Identity."

I love me some Bell ever since she's displayed great comic chops as one of TV's most vacuous doctors on the hilarious Childrens Hospital and has become unafraid about nudity on both that show and How to Make It in America. Of course, Bell's character doesn't show her software on Tron: Uprising, but it's nice to see that this show is starting to make an effort at baring the souls of its previously chilly lead characters a little more.

***

Penned by Megas XLR co-creator and Star Wars: The Clone Wars writer George Krstic and directed by Prynoski, "Going Dutch" is Motorcity's inevitable zombie episode, but what the show does with the zombie genre is the most interesting and novel twist on zombies on a sci-fi action show since a pre-Shield Shawn Ryan transformed racist LAPD officers into the undead in Angel's "Thin Dead Line" episode back in 2001.

Instead of spreading a zombie virus through bites or Community-style tainted meat, Motorcity introduces a virus in the form of nanites that embed themselves into human flesh. We realize it's not a typical zombie virus when it infects not just humans but also machines, particularly the Burners' constantly trembling robot assistant Roth, which is transformed into an even more trembly, spider-like monstrosity straight out of John Carpenter's The Thing. The nanites are, of course, another invention masterminded by Abraham Kane. Donald Trump is a troglodyte in a shitty combover compared to the Burners' scientific genius/industrialist nemesis.

(Photo source: wait, was that slutty?)

"Going Dutch" gives ample screen time to a previously underwritten character--in this case, Dutch, the Burners tinkerer who built Roth and looks after the team's rides--and has him save the day. That leaves Julie as the Burner we know the least about, other than she's Kane's daughter, she works at her father's corporation to spy on his plans when she's not in Motorcity and her favorite gadget can create holographic duplicates of anyone or anything (when's her spotlight episode coming?).

Dutch returns to Motorcity from a vacation away from the Burners that Mike recommended to the burnt-out mechanic--for a creative workaholic like Dutch, a vacation is concentrating on his mural artwork--and discovers the city is under attack by zombies, including the Burners, who have been infected as well. His knack for bringing to life the silliest of ideas, like a pre-infected Texas' pre-credits suggestion to an artist's block-afflicted Dutch that he should paint "a dragon shooting like some lasers out of its eyes," ends up being the key to putting a stop to Kane's virus (and Texas helped save the day too without knowing it).

My favorite moment in "Going Dutch" isn't zombie-related. What's up with this series and its allergy to awkward exposition? It continually finds clever ways to avoid having its characters deliver unnatural-sounding expository dialogue like on other action cartoons. Motorcity's latest remedy for the infectious writers' disease of clunky exposition is a wordless sequence that's worth freeze-framing and is even cleverer than the flashbacks in "Vendetta" because it details Dutch's backstory through his artwork, which is fitting for a character who enjoys expressing himself through art and technology.