Has social media ruined movie trailers? Pretty much. Movie trailers will garner over one billion views on YouTube this year. There will be some great ones, but most will be 15 second spoilers, tweet fuel pure and simple. In the eighties people watched trailers in a cinema, on a big screen, as part of an audience; they didn’t playback frame by frame, they didn’t go to an entertainment site to tell them what to think, they just surrendered to the cinema screen. So here’s three of my eighties favorites, their impact won’t be the same if you watch them on your tablet but maybe someone will start screening trailers in a cinema once again, maybe somebody does already.
Top Gun 1986
Easy to ridicule, but this trailer is pure eighties Americana. A masculine movie made at a time when masculinity was in crisis, it certainly looks very homo-erotic today. The trailer opens with big close ups of Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer exchanging meaningful glances to a Top Gun monologue from a moustachioed officer who gives Tom a winning smile and says ‘I like that in a pilot’. Cut to a motorbike/jet sequence complete with power anthem and Tom punching the air. Brief flying sequence, two guys just having fun. Then back to Cruise and Kilmer in intimate shot/reverse shot conversation.
At 1.32 we get a woman, an exploding plane, a silhouette lovemaking and a man parachuting into the sea: is this an impregnation metaphor? Cruise and Kilmer in those tight, tight close ups again. And finally an admonition to Tom ‘Your ego is writing cheques your body can’t cash’. A fitting epitaph for the eighties if ever there was one.
The Color of Money 1986
An interesting contrast this one, it’s presented much more as an auteur movie: Paul Newman, Tom Cruise in a Martin Scorsese picture. The emphasis is on character rather than action: the dialogue is Newman’s, the shots are of Cruise.
There are lots of shots of money, twirling pool cues and the big white car- this film regarded as one of the best gambling films of all time. At 1.13 we get conflict between the characters: ‘You want my game, you couldn’t handle my game.’ Sound familiar?
Ghostbusters 1984
Was Don ‘The voice of God’ LaFontaine’s wonderful voice ever used to better effect? In the eighties, the trailer voice-over was king and Don contributed over 5,000 illustrious performances to the genre. In this trailer his voice is used as a counterpoint to scenes from the movie so that the inherent absurdity of the portentous voice-over works to superb comic effect: ‘They catch the ghosts that won’t stay dead’. Don apparently wrote many of his own lines, if he penned that one he deserved an award.
Trailers often miss the movie’s best lines, there’s no ‘I’ll be back’ in the The Terminator trailer. This trailer is on target every time. From the opening ‘Hello, Ghostbusters’, which sounds like Lois from Family Guy, through the ‘Do you want this body?’/‘Is this a trick question?’ sequence to the concluding comic-macho of ‘Heat em up, make em hard’, this is a really funny trailer, powered by that great, albeit borrowed, theme song.
