LOS ANGELES -- It is not easy to keep a single, coherent thought running through one's mind after experiencing the Sixth Annual Golden Trailer Awards here Thursday evening. Everything in the real world now seems so slow, so long. And without explosions.
Because the trend in movie trailers is Bigger. Louder. Faster. And did we mention louder?
At the multiplex, it is now common for a theater to present seven, sometimes 10 trailers before the feature film (as is the case now with the latest "Star Wars" episode). At the Golden Trailers, known as the Trailzees, organizers showed 95.
It was like some kind of extreme scientific experiment you would perform with crack monkeys in cages. If it were legal.
They didn't show the whole trailers, mind you. The maximum running time for a trailer is limited, by theater-owner decree, to no more than 2 minutes 30 seconds. If they had shown the trailers in their entirety, the awards show would have run into the ugly wee hours.
No, mercifully, they only showed 30-second cuts, essentially trailers of trailers.
This is the show that its founders describe, with pride, as "the Oscars for the short-attention-spanned." Serious ADD, people.
Still. Even the dedicated -- and the audience at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Los Angeles was composed almost exclusively of trailer-shop editors, producers, graphic artists and sound engineers (and their close friends and relatives) -- seemed dazed by the end.
The show's host, Harland Williams ("Dumb & Dumber"), resorted to begging for applause for the winners. "Come on people, this is about you," he said.
It was a hip but down-market event. The pre-show featured plenty of free tequila and vodka, provided by sponsors. Supported by platters of cold cuts. With -- we're not making this up -- bread. No one eats bread in Hollywood. But these people did. The look: jeans and T-shirts mixed with ironic zoot suits and slinky black cocktail dresses. Average age: 36. Lots of goatees. And pale skin (from lives spent sitting in dark rooms in front of a bank of Avid editing monitors).
There were 19 categories, some obscure, like best voice-over. Winner: "The Motorcycle Diaries."
This is something else we learned: "I'd say one of the big trends is: To VO or not VO, that is the question," explained Josh Glaser, a producer/editor at Mighty Pictures, a trailer chop shop in New York. VO means voice-over. And you know it. The clipped incomplete sentences of Don LaFontaine (known in the trailer world as "the voice of God") saying something like, "In a world gone mad." Pause. "One man." Pause. "Stands alone." Pause. "Heavily armed."
