June 26, 2005

What's on My TiVo

You can tell a lot about a person by what he keeps stored on his DVR. I keep mine stockpiled with movies that aren't on DVD (although I don't always get around to watching them). The sucker claims to hold 80 hours, but I seem to have squeezed quite a bit more than that into storage. Here's what's on there now...

[And while we're on the subject of entertainment advertising, check out all the limits on TiVo's carefully constructed brand image.]

Continue reading "What's on My TiVo"

Posted by Peter Debruge on June 26, 05 at 11:45 AM | Comments (1)

June 25, 2005

Welcome!

There’s no question: Trailers are the best part of going to the movies, period. Most times, they’re better than the movies they advertise. When you compare what your imagination can do with 2 ½ minutes of carefully selected scenes from an upcoming movie to the finished product, your imagination wins out every time.

But nobody said it was easy picking the right clips to get an audience excited to see yet another blockbuster – or, for that matter, to give them reason to consider an obscure foreign film or documentary. That doesn’t even take into account all the work that goes into editing, narrating, and scoring a trailer. There's a fine art to giving audiences a good reason to part with their hard-earned 10 bucks (although I’d argue that getting to see half a dozen new trailers before the show makes up for almost any dud).

So that brings us to the purpose of this site. I've created Movie Trailer Trash as the place to turn for commentary on the latest and greatest trailers on the web, with added insights on classic previews and how the movie advertising racket works. My name is Peter Debruge. I’m a Los Angeles-based film critic who’s been on the movie beat since 1996, writing for magazines like Premiere, Entertainment Weekly, and Life.

I first launched Movie Trailer Trash back in late 2000 as a companion piece to my undergraduate honors thesis at the University of Texas. Based on dozens of interviews with professionals who work in the trailer business, I intended it as a forum to celebrate (and criticize) the art of movie trailer advertising, but the site's sat stagnant for the past four years. As of today, I’m overhauling it to offer up-to-the-minute coverage of breaking trailers on the web.

So stay tuned, come back often, and be sure to share your comments!

Posted by Peter Debruge on June 25, 05 at 11:24 AM | Comments (16)