History of film trailers

The first trailer shown in a U.S. movie theater was in November 1913, when Nils Granlund, the advertising manager for the Marcus Leow theater chain, produced a short promotional film for the musical The Pleasure Seekers, opening at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway.

Up until the late 1950s, trailers were mostly created by National Screen Service and consisted of various important scenes from the film being advertised, often augmented with large, descriptive text describing the story, and an underscore generally pulled from studio music libraries. Most trailers had some form of narration and those that did featured specific voices.

In the early 1960s, the face of motion picture trailers changed. Textless, montage trailers and quick-editing became popular, largely due to the arrival of the "new Hollywood" and techniques that were becoming increasingly popular in television. Among the trend setters were Stanley Kubrick with his montage trailers for Lolita, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 1964, Andrew James Keuhn distributed his independently-produced trailer for Night of the Iguana, using stark, high-contrast photography, fast-paced editing and a provocative narration by a young James Earl Jones. His format was so successful, he began producing this new form of trailer with partner Dan Davis.

Kuehn opened the west coast office of Kaleidoscope Films in 1968 and Kuehn and his company became a major player in the trailer industry for the next three decades. As Hollywood began to produce bigger blockbuster films and invest more money in marketing them, directors like Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone and Barbra Streisand began to depend on Kuehn and Kaleidoscope for their ability to create the best trailers theater-goers could see.