Movie Trailers

One casualty of the Disney-DreamWorks animation battle may have been a few seconds of footage featuring Shrek playing the bagpipes and Donkey playing the accordion. It was part of a new trailer promoting THX, the venerable sound system owned by George Lucas and used in more than 2,500 theaters across America. Last June, DreamWorks pitched THX the idea of using the "Shrek" characters in a new trailer.

Sony Pictures Entertainment, which has suffered a series of marketing embarrassments this summer, removed an R-rated trailer for the upcoming film "Not Another Teen Movie" from the Internet on Thursday at the request of the Motion Picture Assn. of America. The trailer, which contains partial nudity and foul language, has appeared on Sony's Redbandtrailer.com Web site since Saturday, a Sony spokeswoman said.

In a controversial marketing gamble, Sony Pictures quietly made a deal with four theater chains to pay for the placement of previews for upcoming films that previously were shown at no cost to studios. The move is being criticized by executives from other major studios who worry that, at a time costs are skyrocketing everywhere in the movie business, the free advertising may be in jeopardy.

The Question: When I got seven teens together last week to watch trailers for 17 of the most anticipated summer movies, who was the actor who got by far and away the biggest reaction when he showed up screen? The Answer: Not Jennifer Lopez. Not Heath Ledger. Not Ben Affleck, Paul Walker, Angelina Jolie, Brendan Fraser or Rob Schneider. Not even Chris Tucker, Jackie Chan or the Rock.

By all appearances, the new horror film "Wes Craven Presents Dracula 2000" is scary, sexy, gory and dark and comes with a hip heavy-metal soundtrack--just the ingredients that usually lure today's teenagers to the local megaplex. But in a move that was unthinkable a few months ago, the motion picture studio distributing the R-rated horror movie is doing everything it can think of not to promote it to America's youth.

Theater owners have adopted new guidelines blocking the showing of trailers for R-rated movies and strengthening policies to prevent children under 17 from seeing restricted films. For the first time, the guidelines prohibit theaters from showing trailers advertising R-rated films before feature films rated G or PG. The National Assn. of Theater Owners, with 700 members in the U.S., issued the guidelines Monday. The policy was approved at a meeting held last week.

Senators and studio chiefs can cajole, lecture and promise all they want, but to a group of Los Angeles middle school students it doesn't amount to a whole lot--at least not yet. The students, ages 12 to 15, say they go to R-rated movies all the time--with or without their parents--and no one ever stops them. During a discussion Wednesday at the New Roads School in central Los Angeles, students said that they thought the ratings system was misleading and ineffective.

Sen. Kelly's campaign Web site looks remarkably like a hate site. On it, the senator warns that our country is being overrun by a "growing number of individuals--who are impure at their most basic level." He promotes "a brighter, genetically cleaner United States of America." And 13-year-olds everywhere are eating his message up. Before you write your congressman, you should know that Sen. Kelly is actually a fictional character in "X-Men," and his Web site, http://www.mutantwatch.

You may find yourself doing something different at the movies these days: reading. The written word has become the hottest ticket in selling and telling part of a movie's story; it's being used increasingly in movie trailers and in visually enhanced main title sequences.

Every picture may tell a story, but words can set one apart from the pack of movie trailers these days. The pick of the litter? Even rivals of Sony Pictures point to Creative Domain's teaser trailer for the studio's summer release "The Patriot," an adventure epic about the American Revolution. The story line in the trailer races by to a haunting, methodical score, its word-graphic telling peppered with images from the film. No dialogue. No narrator.