As you may have noticed if you’ve an interest in films, the art of making trailers has changed over the years. Here for example is the trailer for the 1963 movie Cleopatra, with Elizabeth Taylor, which is fairly typical of the time.
Trailers are, of course, an attempt to draw in an audience and some movies are harder sells than others. Take 2001. It’s a brilliant movie, but essentially not much happens in it until the end – and what does happen is unfathomable to most people (or it was at the time).
Here’s how they tried it at the time.
So the question is, if you had to advertise a movie like 2001 now, what would its trailer look like? Well, ponder no more, because this is probably even better than what they would have come up with.
I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.
