Amph What was the last movie you saw? (Ver. 2)

Well that's the thing, right? We're moving from courtesy spoiler avoidance, which I'm fine with, to weird-ass panopticon spoiler avoidance and I really, personally, truly must draw the line at trailers. This far, no further, smashing models of the Enterprise with my rifle in an unsubtle suggestion that I've become a new Ahab.

 

Not from a Jedi.

 

Sometimes spoiling in trailers can be a good thing. For example, the trailer for Skyscraper was pretty much the whole movie so I didn't even need to see it!

 

The thing is, I used to work at an on-air promo department, where we cut the trailers for the next week's episodes of shows. I learned the ins and outs so much that now my brain automatically deconstructs trailers and ruins the movie for me. I'll be sitting there watching a film and thinking, "well there was a scene in the trailer with A, B, and C in location X. That hasn't happened yet, and D isn't in that scene, so D must be about to die before then." Completely ruins the tension for me, the tension the filmmakers intend to have.

 

I think James Cameron was pretty upset the way the Terminator 2 trailer was cut because it spoiled a big early twist at the beginning of the movie.

The point of a trailer is to get butts in seats. It's unfortunate when they tend to give a little too much away.

 

Okay, new idea: replace all trailers with Mick Foley winning the title.

 

Oh yeah, my favorite trailers ever are for next week's episode of Mad Men. Matt Weiner hated spoilers as much as me, but AMC still required trailers for next week's episode. So he got them to agree he'd actually have input (since it was their first show, he had more control than most showrunners).

So the trailers were always just completely incoherant. Just short clips of people walking into rooms and saying, "You wanted to see me?" "Yes, sit down" CUT. And other inane stuff like that.

It would truly piss me off as a filmmaker to have a specific twist or moment in a film that I wanted people to experience in context, then to have a trailer blow it just for marketing purposes.

 

You cut trailers? That must have been fun. Did you ever get feedback or were you allowed artistic freedom?

 

I didn't really do the cutting, I was just an intern. I ingested the footage for the editors, who cut the trailers. They did give me my own bay to make practice trailers, though.

The editors didn't ever get any feedback from the showrunners. The showrunners for the shows we were cutting promos for never even knew what we were and weren't giving away about an episode. There was pretty much complete artistic freedom for the promo department to market it how they wanted.

I imagine with film there's a little more high up input into trailers. But I worked on a few big films, and I know the directors there also didn't have input. I delivered footage to the trailer people and they cut it. We didn't get to do anything with it.

 

Srsly?! I've never actually watched Psycho, and I know that. It's almost as culturally iconic as Rosebud. Which I also haven't seen.

 

Could be a generational gap thing.

There's this video from the Jimmy Kimmel show where the young people didn't know how to open a can of paint.



And recently, there was a viral video where to young people didn't know how to use a rotary phone.

 

Well Psycho is my favorite movie and has been since I was 12, but when I saw it, I definitely didn't know the twist. I showed it to a lot of people in college who also did not know the twist and very much enjoyed it.

 

Yeah, the twist of Psycho really didn't get that much play as just the image of the shower scene. I think most people know of that scene but not really the story.

I've never saw Psycho myself but learned of the twists from the sequel and from my older siblings.

 

I have never seen Psycho. One of the few Hitchcock films I have not seen.

 

Whaaaaaat, go watch it.

So hang on... you never saw Psycho, but you watched one of the sequels? Why?

 

I will, like in October.

 

Good idea, watch it for Halloween. That's when I got to finally see it in theatres.

 

I was a scaredy cat with horror films growing up as a kid because I was exposed to them at too young of an age. My mom and my sister loved horror movies and rented the VHS copies on movie night. Additionally, there were times when my family went to drive-in theaters to horror films and there was no escape for me.

I remember parts of Psycho 2, I don't remember actually sitting down to watch the whole thing.

 

Psycho 2 isn't terrible actually. Probably one of the few movies in the 80s to show sympathy for a murderer.

 

That one is not good. IV is actually not bad and was written by original writer Joseph Steffano. It was also largely the inspiration for Bates Motel.

 

I've never seen it, nor frankly do I even really know what/who it's about.

 

Last movie I was watching was Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.

 

I'm sorry.