In one trailer for "No Country for Old Men," the Coen brothers' tale of murder and mayhem near the Rio Grande, a driver is pulled over by a police car on a stretch of desolate highway and has his brains blown away by a man holding an oxygen tank and nozzle, which he places to the man's forehead.
In a trailer for "Beowulf," director Robert Zemeckis' cinematic vision of the classic Anglo-Saxon poem done in the same motion-capture technique that he used in "The Polar Express," we see sexy images of a voluptuous and naked-looking Grendel's mother, played by Angelina Jolie, rising seductively from the water.
Neither are likely to surface at the multiplex because of the Motion Picture Assn. of America ratings system, in which scenes such as these are toned down for general audiences in so-called green-band trailers.
But increasingly, more uncensored versions, referred to as "red-band" trailers, are popping up on the Internet, with studios using them as a marketing tool to reach older audiences not as likely to be offended by super-violence, sex or use of the "F" word. In the process, the more provocative trailers allow them to telegraph to moviegoers the edgier content of their films.
"It is the only way to give the target audience a true sampling of what the film is all about," said Adam Fogelson, president of marketing and distribution at Universal Pictures. He noted that with red-band trailers, audiences can more accurately judge for themselves the content of adult-oriented, R-rated comedies such as producer-director Judd Apatow's "Knocked Up" and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," which became big hits.
"Those films were made to be R-rated," Fogelson said. "They didn't accidentally slip into an R-rating. . . . I think Judd's audience has come to expect they can find a true representation of the film online."
But Fogelson said the studios have been having a difficult time persuading theater owners, who still prefer the sanitized versions, to run the red-band trailers.
"Long ago, those trailers did have a real and meaningful life in theaters . . . but over the last five to 10 years, they've slowly been almost entirely removed from an opportunity to be seen there," he said, noting that 1999's high school comedy "American Pie" used R-rated trailers in theaters.
But the theater owners are faced with a dilemma: Do they run trailers that contain gore, for example, before an R-rated comedy such as "Knocked Up?"
