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WARNER BROS. PICTURES, INC. 451
The president believed that his company's 35 exchanges had provided a service that heretofore had not been possible in the distribution of trailers. Furthermore, because the company was in a position to effect maximum cooperation with exhibitors it was able to maintain its stock of trailer prints at a minimum.
Commentary: There are two primary considerations involved in this case; one has to do with the value of trailers as advertising; the other relates to the best policy to pursue in the production and distribution of such trailers.
Trailers are essentially a form of advertising and must be judged as such. Their value is dependent, therefore, upon the interest which they can arouse in forthcoming exhibitions. As an advertising medium they possess certain real advantages. First, the trailers constitute a direct consumer appeal to a class of people easily influenced by such appeals; namely, those already disposed to attend motion picture theaters. This very fact, however, indicates a limitation of the influence of trailers; they obviously have not direct weight with those not already patrons. Secondly, the exhibition of trailers can be timed so as to yield the best possible results, since generally they are used only for pictures exhibited at a particular theater for specific dates. The individual theater, therefore, capitalizes to the utmost on the effort.1 Finally, patrons cannot avoid submitting to the appeal, whereas printed advertising may not be read by any considerable number of people.
On the other hand, it must be said that many trailers are both misleading and ineffective. They are ineffective because they frequently are made up merely of sequences clipped from a feature picture, and the sequences are not always chosen with real appreciation of the most effective interest factors. They are often decidedly misleading in that they do not fairly represent the real character of the play. In other words, though the trailer may be actually composed of sequences from a picture, the picture itself is not fairly sampled, but is actually misrepresented by the trailer. It may also be noted that in some cases the trailer itself is wholly silent, though representing a sound picture. Hence the audience is given no opportunity to judge the quality of the voices or the effectiveness of the dialogue and the supplementary sound effects.
In general, it is believed that a more effective presentation is possible when a separate skit is specifically written and filmed for each particular picture than where a series of isolated scenes are offered. Not only can the appeal be more pointed and hence more effective,
1 Cf. Baldwin Pictures Corporation, page 435