Yesterday, I went with my son Noël to see the latest Spielberg-movie, Disclosure Day. It was a fun enough movie, well crafted if somewhat derivative (of his own work, so that’s not something I would judge him too harshly for), and left me with little in the way of new ideas. However, as I was watching the trailers before the movie – one for the new movie by Alejandro Iñárritu (starring Tom Cruise?!?), one for the upcoming Supergirl movie, and so on – I started thinking about trailers as an art-form unto themselves.
A good trailer is difficult to create. It should make clear what the movie is about, capture the vibe, and make people excited about the movie. At the same time, it shouldn’t spoil the movie for you, shouldn’t shout but rather whisper, and overall tease rather than reveal. This last bit becomes extra confusing when you realize that in modern movie-selling (as separated from movie-making), one also uses “teaser trailers”, which are something like trailers for full trailers. It’s all a bit much. Still, a great trailer can be a masterpiece of storytelling, hinting at the richness of a story while still keeping you very much in the dark about the characters, the scenes, and the twists. It should be noted that I find most trailers (including the one for Supergirl) as failures in this more narrow regard – even when they can be successful in getting people into the theaters (which, I have to admit, is their key task).
So why am I going on about trailers? Well, my other thought, sitting in that darkened theater, was that trailers are underused outside the movie-business. Sure, there are book-trailers out there, but these tend to be quite clumsy things, stemming more from the general drift towards using video in marketing than a true intellectual engagement with what a book trailer could be. Fashion houses have experimented with the medium, and arguably all of Kickstarter could be understood as using trailers as a business model (the link here to OnlyFans is an obvious one, but not one I have intended to explore…), but for most creatives, trailers are just something that marketing people think about. I think this is a rather limited way to think about it all.
The trailer, as we understand it today, was created by Nils Granlund (1889-1957). He was born in Småland, Sweden (his birth-year is a bit tricky to pin down, as I’ve seen it given as 1889 or 1890, but his gravestone says 1899(!) and spells his name as “Niles”), but moved to the US when he was just four years old, and is a fascinating character who lived quite a life. I may return to him at some point, but here he is notable for marketing a Broadway play (!) called The Pleasure Seekers by taking some footage of it and playing it after the feature film at Loew’s movie theaters – in 1913! Two things should be noted here. One, the reason trailers are stilled called that, even when they today always come before the movie, was due to the fact above; they originally ‘trailed’ the feature presentation. Two, the first trailer wasn’t even for a movie, but for a play!
For a long time, nigh-on all trailers were created by a single company. The National Screen Service (est. 1919) was the go-to creator of trailers, so if you ever wonder why old trailers look so same-y, this is why. There was a template, and it was adhered to. Sure, some independent moviemakers did their own things, but for big pictures, the trailer-game was NSS’s game. Then, in the 1960s, some auteurs, like Kubrick, started insisting on creative control of trailers as well, making them into something less like straight ads and more like a peek into the specific aesthetics of a film. Later still, in the 1970s, there was another Spielberg-movie, namely Jaws, that created the contemporary model for the trailer as spectacle and advertising – ensuring endless trailers where the biggest explosions and greatest set-pieces have been seen by most audiences before they enter the theater.
But this wasn’t really supposed to be about movie-trailers. What is interesting in the above is specifically the move when creators started thinking about trailers as less ads, more something like a part of a Gesamtkunstwerk. The trailer as a way into a creative work, such as the absolutely brilliant trailer for Alien (1979), is a mindset that, I believe, could be transposed to many other creative works.
Trailers are often considered mere ads, but the best trailers are something far more than that. They instead take something deeper in the product (be this a movie, a show, a book, or, I don’t know, a pop-up restaurant maybe?) and re-presents this in a condensed form. The great trailers do not present a story so much as a vibe or an aesthetic, and thus function as positional devices more than mere advertising. The trailer for Alien clearly shows that this is a sci-fi movie, but also that this is not just another space caper, but a tense bit of horror, utilizing the claustrophobia of space in a novel manner. I can also at least imagine a book trailer for a mystery novel that downplays less important facts such as who was murdered how, and instead focuses on setting and the general feel of the story.
The reason I think this is more significant than usually considered is that it forces the creator to think about how to convey something essential or even affective about their creative work; and also the challenge of how to do so in a very condensed way. Put somewhat differently, it is a way to force creatives to think about a rather uncomfortable question, namely:
“Does your work deserve a trailer?”.
Some creatives would likely bristle at this. They would point to how a creative work should be judged on its own merits, studied as a whole, and not be lessened by its (assumed) marketing. That would be missing the point, however. What I am talking about is a mindset-shift, seeing the trailer less as an ad and more as a way to lead the person experiencing the creative work into the same. The trailer, understood thusly, is a passage, an opening, a gentle way to translate the creator’s vision and conveying this to the person ready to engage with the same. It should also be noted that by thinking about it in this manner, it becomes clear that what I am talking about doesn’t depend on video as the medium. In fact, I believe trailers can (and should!) come in many forms, and that we are a bit myopic when we automatically think about trailers as videos. A zine can be the trailer of a book, a mixtape the trailer of an album, a zine or a series of posters can be the trailer for many kinds of shows. Naturally, video can be used as well, but that is a choice of medium, not a choice of for or against trailers.
All this is also a way to make creatives think in a somewhat more… I want to say business-like, but this will be misunderstood… pragmatic way about their work. In a world overrun by books, movies, music, art, what have you, creators need to become better at communicating why people should engage with their work. This isn’t ‘just marketing’, it is something deeper in the dialogue between a creator and their audience. Now, since this is going out on Substack, it should be noted that this platform is, to a degree, great for exactly this. Several authors are already using their newsletters as a way to trailer their work, they’re just not thinking about their Substack as a trailer.
So, if you are a creative and want to be taken seriously as one, why not think about what your work might look like when turned into a brief pitch? What can you do to communicate a vibe or a mood or a statement in your work? It isn’t going to lessen the work, and in many ways it can heighten it. Sure, this can be done in bad and clumsy ways, but the work lies in creating a trailer for your work that isn’t bad or clumsy, not denigrating the art-form of the trailer as a whole. So here’s to the trailer! A misunderstood art-form, existing only as a passageway to something greater, yet one where the very limitations of the medium forces us to think seriously about what we’re trying to convey.
Some Recent Tidbits:
Jill Lepore is almost always worth a read, and this piece on the pre-history of slop is quite the little delight, at least to my nerdy mind:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/25/the-prehistory-of-ai-slop
This article from LitHub is a great companion piece:
https://lithub.com/inside-the-long-history-of-technologically-assisted-writing/
As I am going off to a conference, where I also plan to write a fair bit, I had to think about what writing tools to bring. Thankfully this, the keyboard of my dreams, is far too expensive and difficult to get, for if I had one I would have to pack a second suitcase just for keyboards and the likes…
https://www.theverge.com/reviews/659125/norbauer-seneca-review-luxury-capacitive-keyboard