Year's Best Trailer

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Year's Best Trailer

Stop what you're doing and click on this trailer for Todd Field's Little Children (New Line, 10.6). It's probably the best trailer for a dramatic film I've seen this year, no shit. It really grabs you, and it's almost all about the sound. No music, almost no talk, no story. All you hear is a wonderfully haunting, far-off train horn in the distance. And the whole piece just seeps right into your soul the second you start watching it.

The trailer tells you right off that Little Children is a smart, A-level drama about suburban infidelity with a kind of John Cheever-ish guilt-trip atmosphere. It tells you it's about Kate Winslet and her little red-headed daughter (who actually looks like her...amazing), and an extra-marital affair she has with Patrick Wilson, and how Jennifer Connelly, playing Wilson's wife, fits into the general discomfort.

Fields' script is based on Tom Perrotta's novel of the same name, and there's more to the story than an extra-marital affair, but for the purposes of the trailer and the "sell," it works beautifully. And with the train-horn effect and all (I used to listen to that lonely sound every night when I was a kid living in a sedate New Jersey suburb called Westfield), it feels exciting. As in original, grabby, exciting.

The idea for the trailer came from Field in a meeting in...actually, there's some debate about that. Two sources say that the first creative sitdown happened in very late 2005, and another says it happened in March or early April of 2006. That's a huge discrepancy, but whatever.

The main thing is that Field said early on that he didn't want the Little Children trailer to have music, dialogue or story. The guy he told this to was Mark Woollen, 35 year-old owner of the Santa Monica-based Mark Woollen & Associates, an agency known for creating smart atypical trailers for hip movies like About Schmidt, Adaptation, I Heart Huckabees and The Royal Tenenbaums.

The other agency guy in the room during that first meeting was Woollen's top editor, Chad Misner. The third principal party was New Line executive vp creative advertising Laura Carrillo, who had brought Wollen and Misner in.

"The train horn came from something that Chad found," says Woollen. "And we had a piece cut together by January '06, which was pretty mich the version you're seeing now." Another source says Woollen's train-horn trailer was delivered closer to early April 2006. (Are these discrepancies amazing or what?)

"So we showed it to Todd and he was very turned on," Woollen says. The other source says Woollen's first cut wasn't quite as train-horn pure as the final version. Field and Little Children editor Leo Trombetta actually cut together a trailer of their own around this time, and I'm told that a fair portion of the elements in their version made it to the finish line.

"And then we spent several months revising," says Woollen. [The New Line people] wanted to see how it would play with music, which we worked on in June. The final version was locked only just recently."

As it turned out, the final version does have a few quiet lines if dialogue, but they're spoken in almost a whispering way. I especially like Kate Winslet's line about how almost everyone she knows has "a hunger for alternatives and a refusal to accept a life of unhappiness."

From Carillo's point of view the trailer was basically a Field-and-Woollen show. "Mark really wrapped his brain around this [piece]," she says. "He began as a trailer editor and has grown this company on his own. He likes to be away from the whole Hollywood thing but tends to be a very collaborative partner with filmmakers.

"I also know that early on, Todd brought up the metaphor of trains connecting all these towns in America. I wrote this down as a note. As you'll see in the movie., there are trains and train sounds in it. Todd shot lots and lots of trains, although a lot fewer made it into the final cut."

The operative phrase here is a famous one: success has many fathers and failure is an orphan.

Woollen started his company in '01. He's been cutting trailers since he was 18. The first trailer he did that he was really proud of , he says, was one for Schindler's List.

Mark Woollen and Associates also did the trailers for Crash, Brick, Syriana, March of the Penguins and Hard Candy.

Note: This piece was slightly re-written between the time it was posted early Friday evening and Saturday morning at 9:40 am, some 15 hours later.

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Posted by Jeffrey Wells on August 25, 2006 at 6:37 PM

comment #1

FilmTurtle says ...

Wow, agreed, Jeff. That's a terrific trailer. Compelling in an unsettling way. But there's actually dialogue in it (mostly from Jennifer Connelly and a bit from Winslet).

Posted by FilmTurtle at August 25, 2006 6:59 PM

comment #2

Dubbs says ...

Good trailer. Kind of David Gordon Green meets American Beauty. Or what an Alexander Payne movie would be like if Payne ditched the humor and satire altogether, and got really, really sombre.

Posted by Dubbs at August 25, 2006 7:00 PM

comment #3

grady says ...

Everyone interested should check out the novel as well as Perrotta's other work. He's a wonderful writer that has been around for years, just working along at his own pace producing wonderful book after wonderful book. Most people's entry point into the world of Perotta was Election, but he's got a novel called The Wishbones about some aging wannabe rockers playing Wedding gigs that seems like a less sardonic, and sad Wedding Singer. A great collection of short stories called Bad Haircut and other stories of the 70s, and finally a novel called Joe College.

Posted by grady at August 25, 2006 7:01 PM

comment #4

Mark says ...

Totally agree. Saw this last night, and it stuck with me all of today.

Posted by Mark at August 25, 2006 7:02 PM

comment #5

tholl-yung says ...

You're doing for trailer editors what Sheigh Crabtree did for film editors. Now for my viewing.

Posted by tholl-yung at August 25, 2006 7:09 PM

comment #6

MarkVH says ...

Fantastic trailer - and great to see that Field's got another film coming out - this just shot to the top of my must-see list this Fall.

Is this the film that finally nets Kate Winslet an Oscar? Would be about freakin' time - she's only the best goddamned actress in the business right now.

Posted by MarkVH at August 25, 2006 7:48 PM

comment #7

kojled says ...

if 'little children' is half as good as 'in the bedroom' it will be the year's best

Posted by kojled at August 25, 2006 7:57 PM

comment #8

tholl-yung says ...

It's perfect, should play very well in theaters, nice to see what can be done. Before a train there always wind. Steady train takes over, horn gets closer, tracks come in, warning bells sound. Bordom, tempatation, suspicion and guilt, revelation and desperation.

Wonder if the trailer was cut parallel in time to the picture. Nice collaboration.

Posted by tholl-yung at August 25, 2006 8:05 PM

comment #9

HAL9000 says ...

This trailer has a very different tone from the novel. Perrotta's words have a wry element of humorous desperation which I did not get at all from this oh-so-serious trailer. I fear that LITTLE CHILDREN will be just as poe-faced as IN THE BEDROOM. I expect quality acting, but that is it.

Posted by HAL9000 at August 25, 2006 8:20 PM

comment #10

fnt says ...

Totally agree with HAL... The book has a sense of humour about itself, not the self-involved darkness that seems on display here.

Intriguing trailer, but I feel it's gonna turn off a lot of people. It looks depressing and slightly navel-gazing. Awards bait.

Posted by fnt at August 25, 2006 9:16 PM

comment #11

le corbeau says ...

That IS a great trailer. (Note who the top-quality producers are.)

You know there are people all over Hollywood, though, saying "What this needs is a little narration-- like 'Brad Adamson had a little problem...'"

Posted by le corbeau at August 25, 2006 9:24 PM

comment #12

KeithNYC says ...

Nice trailer. Don't see much humor in this one. This movie was filmed all over Staten Island, NY. Not sure where they filmed the trains though.

Posted by KeithNYC at August 25, 2006 9:49 PM

comment #13

Nate West says ...

I love this trailer! It creeps like a fuse set under the tracks.

Posted by Nate West at August 25, 2006 11:05 PM

comment #14

MovieBob says ...

Wow, that's well-cut. If I didn't know what this movie was about, I'd be psyched ;) Unfortunately, I do and while I like the train thing dollars-to-donuts what we've got here is another case of "In The Bedroom"-style "cut-a-slow-burn-character-drama-to-look-like-a-thriller" trailer syndrome.

That, and the actual story at play here reads like "what if American Beauty and Desperate Housewives had a baby;" another round of financially-comfortable suburbanites who are just SOOOOOOOOOOOO depressed about how HARD it is to be a financially-comfortable suburbanite. Snore. Oh, and there's a fresh-outta-hail pedophile hanging around making the neighbors all torch-and-pitchfork-antsy, so GEE.. I WONDER what'll go down in the 3rd act...

Still, my libido obligates me to see everything Kate Winslet is in at least once, and apparently in the book her character is pining for bygone college days of lesbian experimentation, so.. at least I've maybe got a flashback or two to look forward to.

Posted by MovieBob at August 25, 2006 11:24 PM

comment #15

hiviper says ...

that trailer has real sense of dread with the train wistle, like there's no stopping it. I thought In the Bedroon was somewhat overrated, but this piques my interest

Posted by hiviper at August 26, 2006 12:05 AM

comment #16

IClavdivs says ...

Nice trailer, now we wait and see what the rest of the movie is like, hopefully, we won't sleep through it or wallow in Sissy Spacek-style plate breaking because that was a bore.

Posted by IClavdivs at August 26, 2006 12:29 AM

comment #17

le corbeau says ...

"what we've got here is another case of "In The Bedroom"-style "cut-a-slow-burn-character-drama-to-look-like-a-thriller" trailer syndrome."

Well, I imagine Hollywood in the next year will also release at least one actual thriller, just for you.

I feel sorry for the people who look at a well-made story about real people and yawn "Been there done that where's the explosions?"

Posted by le corbeau at August 26, 2006 6:17 AM

comment #18

Winter Gladstone says ...

Have to agree with the others that read the book... this very different, and I have to say, very disappointing. The book was funny, light on it's feet, and had it's own unique tone, much closer to Election than to this. This feels very familiar, in that sort of indie movie, middle class blah blah sort of way, that is so, so, so... tired. How many more indie melodramatic white suburban angst movies do there need to be?

Posted by Winter Gladstone at August 26, 2006 9:31 AM

comment #19

Nicol D says ...

I agree that it was a beautifully crafted trailer with fantastic use of sparse sound. The shots were also well chosen and I loved In The Bedroom.

On the flipside, I also kinda feel like Jeffrey did after the Munich trailer: you know what you're gonna get.

Suburbs evil. Suburbs hypocrites. Suburbs worst place of evil hypocrites in humanity.

In other words, I'm sure the film will be beautifully crafted but theamatically it will be 'comm si comme ca'.

American Beauty without the comedy of a great Spacey performance and only the dour Cooper and flaky teen performances.

Posted by Nicol D at August 26, 2006 9:53 AM

comment #20

MRLiepis says ...

I agree as well that it's a well constructed trailer. I ALSO have to agree with previous posters concerned about the overly somber tone of it. The book, while plenty serious, had a nice balance of wit to make the darker stuff easier to take.

All said, it won't stop me from seeing this...I just hope that it keeps its lighter side.

Posted by MRLiepis at August 26, 2006 10:10 AM

comment #21

Rob says ...

Just a trailer, folks...let's not review the movie just yet.

It makes no sense to assume that none of Perrotta's humor made it into the film based on this nearly dialogue-free clip.

Posted by Rob at August 26, 2006 10:14 AM

comment #22

MovieBob says ...

Mgmax:
"I feel sorry for the people who look at a well-made story about real people and yawn "Been there done that where's the explosions?""

You misunderstand me. I'm ready and open for a well-made story about real people, deliberately-paced sombre ones certainly included.

What has me smirking here is the fact that the trailer seems to have been (pretty obviously once you know what the movie is actually about) cut to make it LOOK like some kind of Ashley Judd suspense thriller. I half expected the slow, long-angle zoom on a pistol-packing Morgan Freeman or Tommy Lee Jones to pop up toward the end.

And for the yawning.. hey, I'll give this one a shot. But I can't be alone in being profoundly tired of "suburbanite misery" movies.

Posted by MovieBob at August 26, 2006 11:05 AM

comment #23

Hallick says ...

the trailer's goddamn different, and different GREAT for the most part. I hope the movie's got this kind of thing beating inside it.

Posted by Hallick at August 26, 2006 10:04 PM

comment #24

tholl-yung says ...

Hallick, what a fresh take. If not intentionally, then subconsciously, you use "beating" like story beats. The trailer's a simple story well told, suggesting the movie will be too, but complete with layers. That's why it's such a good sell. Steady train sells boredom, horn tempation, clanging tracks suspicion & guilt, warning bells revelation & desperation, each sound timed to a story beat.

Posted by tholl-yung at August 27, 2006 9:00 AM