Antedating of "Trailer"

[Wilson Gray]

Thanks for the info! Would you believe that it was perhaps only five
years or so ago that I finally caught on to what a "trailer" was, in
the cinematic sense? It was one of those words whose possible meaning
added nothing to the discourse. "To see the trailer, go to
somemovie.com!" Yeah. Right.

-Wilson

On 3/24/08, David A. Daniel <dad at pokerwiz.com> wrote:
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>  Poster:       "David A. Daniel" <dad at POKERWIZ.COM>
>  Subject:      Re: Antedating of "Trailer"
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>
>  >So, how'd it come to replace "preview" as the term for short excerpts
>  >from a film to appear at some random time in the future that usually
>  >precede a longer film? I'm still not quite comfortable with that
>  >usage.
>
>  -Wilson
>
>  Odd thing this. I went to work for Warner Bros. Pictures in 1974. My very
>  first day on the job, which basically involved hanging around and being
>  introduced to all the big shots, one such big shot was on the phone and
>  said, "Yeah, we're gonna go look at the trailers in a couple minutes." He
>  finished the conversation, hung up, futzed around with some papers on his
>  desk, then looked over at me and said, "Come on, let's go see the trailers."
>  So I went with him, fully expecting soon to be looking at something that
>  gets towed behind a car. What I ended up looking at were the new "coming
>  attractions" or "previews" of Blazing Saddles. To skip to the end, a new
>  colleague later said, "Don't ever call them coming attractions or previews.
>  They are trailers."
>
>  So, I don't know when it started, and I don't know exactly when it ended,
>  but I know for a fact that, for a substantial period of time, in Southern
>  California at least, only people in or around the Biz called these things
>  "trailers". The general public called them "coming attractions" or
>  "previews".
>
>  Even odder: at the same time, the general public in Europe (at least
>  Francophones, with whom I worked) and Brazil were calling them "trailers".
>  Go figure.
>  DAD
>
>
>
>
>
>
>  >
>  >  I noticed the following antedating in the Straight Dope archives:
>  >
>  >  In its entry for trailer the Oxford English Dictionary provides
>  quotations showing the word used in the sense meaning "promotional movie
>  clip" from as far back as 1928. But in the New York Times of June 2, 1917, I
>  found this passage in an article reporting on the movie industry's
>  participation in a campaign to sell U.S. war bonds:
>  >
>  >     A committee of the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry
>  yesterday began sending films known as trailers [advertising the bonds] to
>  all of the 15,000 or more movie theatres in the United States. These films
>  are seventy feet in length and will be attached to longer films that are
>  shown at every performance.
>  >
>  >  Always fun to outdig the OED. Note that this explanation, like Harris's
>  above, suggests a concrete basis for the term: a trailer is a short film
>  that literally trails from the end of a longer one.
>  >
>  >  Fred Shapiro
>  >
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--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
                                              -Sam'l Clemens

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