Why the trailer really is the best part of a film

Ever thought the preview was the best part of a movie? There's a good reason for that, says Rob Long

A still from the movie The Intern, where Robert De Niro plays a 70-year old intern (Francois Duhamel / Warner Bros. Pictures)

If you've seen the previews for the new Robert De Niro movie, The Intern, you've pretty much seen the whole picture.

The movie – which was written and directed by Nancy Meyers, and also stars Anne Hathaway – tells the story of the world’s oldest intern, played by the 72-year-old De Niro, who finds himself working for a driven and vaguely unhappy fashion industry executive, played by Hathaway.

He’s too old, really, to fit in with his co-workers at the online fashion retailer – he doesn’t know their lingo, or how to use all of the technology, or the current trends of today’s workplace. But his old-fashioned know-how and dogged determination – and his business street smarts, hard won over the years, garner the respect of his co-workers. He and his young boss develop a warm and unusual friendship, and both of them learn a lot from each other.

I mean, I’m pretty sure that’s what the movie’s about. I haven’t seen it yet. What I’ve seen, though, are about six different previews – or trailers – which give away almost every twist and turn in the movie as well as some awfully funny moments. It’s tough to imagine that there are still surprises in store.

Nancy Meyers is a smart and witty writer, and the two leads are almost always terrific, so I’ll probably see the movie anyway. I’ll go to the cinema and buy a ticket and watch the film as if it’s entirely new to me, even though I know that De Niro and Hathaway have some initial comic awkwardness and tension in the early part of the movie (there are two moments in the trailer that illustrate this) and then have a few moments of emotional connection near the middle of the picture (the music in the trailer, when it plays over shots of the stars looking at each other, implies as much) and then, at the end of the picture, De Niro’s character helps Hathaway’s character overcome a major obstacle (this is pretty much stated outright) and the movie’s over.

“Give it all away,” a film producer once told me when I asked him how much of a movie’s story a trailer should reveal. “Tell them as much as you can in the three or four minutes you’ve got. People don’t come to the movies to be surprised. They come to be satisfied. They come to get exactly what you promised.”

There’s a certain logic to that. When you pitch a movie to a studio – or, for that matter, when you pitch a television series to a network – more often than not the executive on the other side of the desk is waiting to hear what we call “trailer moments”.

Trailer moments are scenes or moments that basically tell the story of the movie – that show what’s funny about it, or scary, or thrilling. They’re the promise to the audience: if you give us your money (or, in the case of television, your time) we’ll deliver entertainment exactly like this. So when you pitch your project to the studio or network executive, you’re pitching the characters and the theme and all sorts of arty nonsense. But the executive is thinking: Can any of this be used in the trailer?

Because every Hollywood product – television series, film, whatever – is eventually sold to the audience through a series of trailers or clips, the most important thing for an executive to know is that there’s going to be some material in this project the studio can use to sell it.

That may seem obvious – it's a movie! Of course there will be scenes that can be pulled for use in the trailer – but you'd be surprised how often that isn't the case. The rumour has persisted for years that in one of De Niro's biggest comedy hits, Meet the Parents, the now-iconic scene where he interrogates his prospective son-in-law, played by Ben Stiller, with a poly­graph device did not appear in the original script and wasn't shot during production.

The idea evolved only when the marketing team was trying to come up with a simple, clear, comic image that captured the entire concept of the picture. How about, they asked, if the movie poster was De Niro hooking Stiller up to a lie detector? It was not only a terrific movie poster idea, it was a winning trailer moment. The only problem was, as the rumour goes, the scene didn’t exist.

Which isn’t a problem in Hollywood: if a scene doesn’t exist and you need it, you simply call the actors back for a few days and film it. Each actor has in his or her contract a clause for just this kind of thing. And so they shot a scene that became a trailer that became a poster that, in many ways, made the movie a hit.

Did it give away one of the funniest moments? Yes. Did it hurt the box office appeal of the movie? Not at all.

I'll remember that when I'm sitting in the dark watching The Intern unfold exactly as the previews promised it would, and I'll try not to wonder why I paid good money to see funny scenes and hear comic dialogue I had already seen and heard, for free, in the trailers.

Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl