Authors — Stephen Garrett
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How to Cut a Trailer Redux: The Styles and Trends Reshaping the Art of Film Advertising
The following article was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Fall, 2020 print edition. We’re drowning in entertainment. Dozens of streamers, from mainstream catnip like Netflix and Disney+ to niche platforms like the Criterion Channel, each offer hundreds of feature films, limited series and TV shows. National theater chains like AMC and arthouse cinemas like the Alamo Drafthouse—at least before and hopefully after the pandemic—serve up fresh options every week on more than 40,000 screens. And legacy networks on basic cable, from NBC to TBS, continue to deliver a firehose of prerecorded content and live broadcasts every day. How to choose? Simple: […]
by Stephen Garrett on Jan 14, 2021 -
Spoiler Alert! How to Tell the Story Without Telling the Story
(WARNING: There will be spoilers) When Charlie McDowell’s mysterious film The Discovery debuted at Sundance last January, its distributor, Netflix, premiered a teaser trailer along with it — a good strategy, considering the film’s intriguing premise (that science has proven the existence of an afterlife) and its abundance of plot twists. No spoilers, please! A beautiful piece of promotion for a dark sci-fi romance ostensibly about life after death but essentially about a person looking for his soul mate, the teaser uses Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely” for an 88-second music-driven montage (a song not used in the film but well-suited for […]
by Stephen Garrett on Mar 23, 2017 -
When It Comes to Raw, Focus World Sees Red: On Red Band vs. Green Band Trailers
“Aberrant behavior, bloody and grisly images, strong sexuality, nudity, language and drug use/partying.” So reads the information box on the R rating for Raw, Julia Ducournau’s tasty little horror film about a vegan who becomes a cannibal. Explicit films (gross-out horror flicks, bawdy comedies, sexy dramas) always face the same marketing challenge: how do you show the best parts of a movie when those moments might be too graphic? In the case of Raw, Focus World gave the movie two trailers: a mainstream gothic green-band trailer and a frenetically disturbing red-band trailer. Ironically, the two share a lot of the […]
by Stephen Garrett on Feb 15, 2017 -
Strategies for Sharing
“I’m the only one of these directors with a @twitter account. Am I doing it wrong?!” tweeted, tongue-in-cheek, Moonlight helmer Barry Jenkins last November. Good question: Jenkins had just been announced as one of the Best Director nominees for the Film Independent Spirit Awards (the others were Andrea Arnold, for American Honey; Pablo Larraín, for Jackie; Jeff Nichols, for Loving; and Kelly Reichardt, for Certain Women), and among such esteemed company he was the sole denizen of the Twittersphere. Was Jenkins boosting his chances during awards season by maintaining an active presence on Twitter? Or does a social media identity […]
by Stephen Garrett on Jan 18, 2017 -
How Do You Market a Madman? On the Trailers of Werner Herzog
“The sun dimmeth, the land sinketh, gusheth forth steam and gutting fire,” rasps Werner Herzog ominously, quoting Norse poetry from the Poetic Edda as bursts of lava erupt onto the screen in the trailer for his latest release, Into the Volcano (Netflix). The message is clear: the Underworld awaits. And your Teutonic guide is a veritable Stygian ferryman. So how do you market a madman? Or — more accurately — when? Herzog, the acclaimed septuagenarian director, first rose to prominence as part of the New German Cinema movement in the 1970s and quickly staked his claim in film’s firmament with […]
by Stephen Garrett on Dec 5, 2016 -
History in Under 90 Seconds: Critiquing the Barry and Jackie Trailers
Stephen Garrett’s “The Art of First Impressions” is one of Filmmaker‘s most widely read articles, an insightful and incisive guide to making a great movie trailer. We’re happy to have Garrett, who is not only a critic but also the founder of the trailer and marketing house Jump Cut, back writing for Filmmaker, beginning with a regular series on the creative direction of today’s most noteworthy trailers. This first installment begins with Garrett examining teasers for two films about political figures acquired by their distributors out of the Fall festivals: Barry and Jackie. — SM Despite a punishing election season […]
by Stephen Garrett on Nov 2, 2016 -
Lesbian Lovemaking, Graphic Novels and a Changing China: Parsing the Cannes Awards
Sex sells, but it’s not the kind of thing that wins highbrow prizes—right? The fact that Abdellatif Kechiche’s explicit and entrancing Blue is the Warmest Color (La Vie d’Adèle, chapitre 1 et 2) won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival is a watershed moment, not least of which because its frank depiction of lesbian lovemaking wasn’t an obstacle towards being taken seriously. People may have tweeted their puerile snickering about the randy onscreen romps, but any sober viewer would acknowledge that those relatively brief moments (especially in a 179-minute film) were hardly exploitative — in fact, they […]
by Stephen Garrett on May 27, 2013 -
Cannes 2013: Portraits of Purgatory
Portraits of purgatory dot this year’s Cannes Film Festival, with movies that run the gamut in terms of styles and techniques: epic drama, cheeky comedy, documentary, animation, and surrealism. No matter what the setting, the plight is the same, with characters stuck in a cycle of emotional limbo where hope for happiness floats tantalizingly but incessantly out of reach. The most accomplished of the group is The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino’s voluptuously crafted riff on La Dolce Vita and a masterful study of 65-year-old Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), a dilettante journalist still coasting on the acclaim of a single early-career […]
by Stephen Garrett on May 22, 2013 -
Cannes 2013: Veterans Return to the Croisette
There’s a good reason James Toback named his new Cannes-set showbiz documentary Seduced and Abandoned (unspooling here May 20). No other film festival is quite as alluring – and none has an audience as uniquely emotional. As the world’s premier showcase for cinema, Cannes is arguably the most extravagant way to introduce a film on an international stage. That said, expectations are high and reactions can tack violently from swoon-worthy praise (Michael Haneke’s 2012 drama Amour received the most recent tsunami of adoration) to outright condemnation (just ask Johnny Depp or Vincent Gallo about their respective directorial fiascos, 1997’s The […]
by Stephen Garrett on May 14, 2013 -
The Art of First Impressions: How to Cut a Movie Trailer
by Stephen Garrett on Jan 13, 2012
Stephen Garrett on crafting a winning trailer
