Screen writer

Donald Clarkeon the movie trailer's online rebirth

During the 1970s and 1980s, bores liked to argue that the "trailers were better than the movies".

This was, of course, an absurd generalisation. Mad scientists have yet to devise a lobotomy procedure effective enough to create an invertebrate that would prefer to watch a trailer for The Way We Were rather than all of, say, Klute or Taxi Driver. But the clutter of previews that came before the main feature did hold a special excitement in those days. Relatively few films were advertised on television, so this was the only way of getting an early glimpse of the latest Bond villain or Robin Askwith's upcoming underpants.

Does easy availability of a commodity always lessen its appeal? It is certainly true that, for many cinemagoers, the overture to the big picture is no longer quite such a thrilling experience. True film enthusiasts will already have viewed the more appealing trailers a dozen times on their computers and, no doubt, discussed them at length with fellow fanatics on SlackBanana.com.

Less than a decade ago, gangs of jobless imbeciles happily queued up to buy tickets for Barry Fingleton's Horse Sandwich (I've made this up because I can't be bothered to look up the actual film) in the hope of catching an early trailer for Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. If (God forbid!) a new Star Wars film were to materialise in the current era, the men in black helmets would, surely, just catch the promo on the internet.

That moan out of the way, it must be acknowledged that cyberspace has, in fact, given the trailer considerably greater power and has encouraged the studios to be ever more creative in their attitude towards the form.

Sometimes, as noted before in this column, they get a little too creative. Bridge to Terabithia and Pan's Labyrinth, both fine films with sombre subjects,

were misleadingly sold as jolly amalgams of Narnia and Lord of the Rings. On the other hand, the team that put together the trailer for Borat should be congratulated for helping turn an obscure comic character into a cult sensation.

Few short films have been quite as hysterical as that terrific compilation of Borat highlights. By the time the movie finally opened, a few million Americans, hitherto strangers to the Kazakh bungler, were primed to enjoy his unique humour of embarrassment. The achingly funny trailer for Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, an upcoming parody of music biopics starring John C Reilly, is fast becoming this year's equivalent of the Borat promo.

The most gabbled-about trailer on the internet must, however, be the one for . . . well, what, exactly? JJ Abrams, the canny creator of Lost, recently set loose a teaser for a film - it may be titled Cloverfield; then again, it may not - which appears to detail the destruction of New York by Something Big and Scary.

The fact that you're reading about this obscure entity in a national newspaper proves that JJ's scheme is coming together very nicely indeed.