There’s a certain art to crafting a great movie trailer that is sort of a scale model of the art of crafting the advertised movie itself. Often a trailer contains dialogue that’s been edited together differently than what you eventually hear in the movie, scenes and jokes that are dropped by the final cut, and songs by Coldplay or Fatboy Slim that are completely absent from the film or its soundtrack album. The recent rash of recut, homemade trailers for imaginary films like “Shining” and “Must Love Jaws” have taught us that a clever and dedicated editor can completely redefine a movie simply by selecting fragments of it and piecing them together in a unique way.

Awards for the best trailers are handed out in June at the annual Golden Trailer Awards. Statuettes shaped like a gilded camper trailer are awarded to previews in just about every conceivable category — Best Documentary, Best Foreign Romance, even Best Video Game Trailer.

Personally, I think the greatest triumph in the art of making trailers is “the ugly duckling” — taking a terrible movie, distilling the finest two minutes of footage, choosing the perfect music, writing some good lines for voice-over god Don LaFontaine to intone with thunderous import, and stitching them all together to create an overwhelming rush of images and emotions that convince the viewer, all contradictory knowledge notwithstanding, that a movie like Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (2001) is going to be great.

Some trailers have the opposite effect. I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to see There’s Something About Mary (1998), which turned out to be hilarious. The trailer for Go (1999) is another disaster, yet the movie is actually pretty good. I’d heard enough about the disastrous screening of Southland Tales at the Cannes film festival in 2006 to know that the film was going to be an overwrought mess. But when I watched its trailer I was pretty enticed by the use of the ponderous “UK Surf” version of the Pixies’ “Wave of Mutilation” in the first half. And given my limited knowledge of the movie’s plot, Elbow’s “Forget Myself” seemed like it would be used somewhere in the film’s final moments, or possibly over the end credits. To my dismay, it isn’t used in the film. At all.

The Film: Southland Tales

The Song: “All These Things That I’ve Done”

The Artist: The Killers

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Sometimes, when you’re choosing the soundtrack for an adapted screenplay, the source material hands your songs right to you (such as in the novels High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis). And even though it’s about 2700 years old, Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey most likely did include its own soundtrack as a critical part of its performances in its original iterations. The Odyssey begins with the line “O Muse! Sing in me, and through me tell the story…” and consists of 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter, which probably lent itself very well to a musical form. In the Coen Brothers’ loose adaptation O Brother Where Art Thou, however, the original rhyme and meter of the text (which of course, was in Greek) and the music, if it was actually preserved, have been discarded to accommodate the vernacular and musical traditions of Depression-era Mississippi.

The Film: O Brother Where Art Thou

The Song: “I’ll Fly Away” (download)

The Artist: Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss (more…)

The first time I ever visited Sherman Oaks and saw the childhood home of my old roommate Miles (this was back when we lived in San Diego, before he got famous), I mentioned to him that I felt like I’d been there before.

“It looks familiar?” he asked me.

“Yeah.”

“That’s because it’s been in the background of every porn movie you’ve ever seen.”

He explained that, to his knowledge, no porn had been filmed specifically in his house, but that the architecture was very typical for homes in the Valley. This was when I first learned that the San Fernando Valley is the pornography capital of the world. In Boogie Nights, and later in Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson treats the San Fernando Valley with the same reverence that Michael Mann reserves for Los Angeles in Heat and Collateral and John Hughes holds for Chicago in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

From the very beginning of the film, when the muted undertones of Michael Penn’s composition “Big Top” are shattered by the energy of the Emotions’ classic “Best of My Love,” it’s clear that music is going to be a very important aspect of the movie. The collection of ’70s and early ’80s songs Anderson uses in his film blend seamlessly into the scenes, gliding along perfectly in the background until the appropriate moments when the music itself is brought forward and allowed to speak as though it were a character itself. In Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson demonstrates just how much a great soundtrack, when properly presented, can add to an already excellent film.

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To begin: Music has been a essential part of movies since the very first images were committed to celluloid — in fact, motion picture scores existed before spoken dialogue did — so it’s not surprising that one of the most important aspects of a film’s production is what songs are used and how they are grafted onto the visual product. Motion Picture Soundtrack is a new feature in which I will do some research on the songs that are used in some of my favorite scenes in my favorite movies, and why they happen to work so well (as well as some instances where the scenes fail). In order to discuss things properly, I’ll have to operate under the assumption that you’ve seen the film before. It’s not exactly my mission to dump a bunch of spoilers into these posts, but I’m not going to avoid them, either. (more…)