Movies were about to hit mass audiences and make people lots of money. A growing number of city dwellers were heading to nickelodeons and movie theaters to scream at reels of trains pulling into stations—or so the legend goes. But trailers weren’t originally used as they are today. Paramount executive Lou Harris told the Los Angeles Times in October of 1966 that the first “trailer” appeared in 1912 at the end of the serial The Adventures of Kathlyn.

Trailing off

At the end of the reel, Kathlyn was thrown in the lion's den. After this "trailed" a piece of film that asked in text "Does she escape the lion's pit? See next week's thrilling chapter!"

The idea of luring customers back to the theater was the birth of modern movie marketing. Serials opened the door to previewing other pieces of entertainment. In November of 1913, Nil Granlund, an advertising manager for Loew’s Theaters, devised and shot an ad for the Broadway musical The Pleasure Seekers, which was playing at the Winter Garden theater in New York. Granlund’s trailer caught the attention of Loews owner, Marcus Loew, who set about having Granlund make more of these short advertisements. By 1914, he was making trailers for Charlie Chaplin, then one of the world’s biggest stars and a marketing revolution began.

Going corporate

Like all great things, Granlund’s innovation would soon be stripped away from him and taken by a faceless corporation. In 1919, the National Screen Service (NSS) started in New York and began a four-decade monopoly over the creation and distribution of movie trailers and promotional materials. Finally, the floodgates were open.

Movie trailers of the silent era aimed to give you the most bang for your buck. In the absence of sound, they put the cast and crew upfront, along with some sizzling ad copy. In the trailer for Charles Hines’ The Live Wire (1926), the spot promises the “Crackling Sparks of Fun and a Flash of Its High Voltage Thrills,” before a montage of the film’s most extraordinary stunts. A tightrope walk across telephone lines, a car racing a train and men scaling tall buildings without a harness were the space ships crashing into buildings of the 1920s.