It is extremely unlikely that even Samuel L. Jackson’s authoritative presence will enable this summer’s reptile planejack sh(l)ocker,
Snakes on a Plane, to dodge a critical panning. And yet its release (during August’s throwaway holiday season schedule) will mark a watershed moment for the film industry. Because this is the film that rewrote the marketing rule book and remade itself in the image of the online movie fans’ ridicule.
The seeds for the Snakes on a Plane experience are embedded in one of the biggest internet trends of the moment. Trailer mashups are made by taking footage from one trailer and recutting it with sound (and sometimes footage) from another. An early and notorious example can be traced back to 2003, when a group of New York University students crossed Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Vol 1 with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. The result — Kill Christ (its tagline changed from “In 2003 Uma Thurman will kill Bill” to “In 2004 the Jews will kill Christ”) — targeted both the hackneyed formula of the contemporary film trailer and the (suggested) anti-Semitism of Gibson’s original. It stayed on the internet until Icon Pictures threatened to sue.
But it was with Brokeback Mountain that the trailer mashup came of age. Here was a profound movie with a simple premise, iconic trailer and memorable soundtrack, and its release coincided with cheap-as-chips video editing software and a collection of new websites (YouTube.com the most famous) where you could display and share your videos for free. By the time Brokeback Mountain controversially failed to win the big Oscar, a Google search for “ Brokeback” was as likely to return Brokeback to the Future (“It was an experiment in time, but the one variable they forgot was love . . .”), Brokeback Redemption (“In a place of men, they found each other . . .”) or The Empire Breaks Back (“A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, there was a friendship . . .”). Trailer trashing, as it became known, was the biggest film-related buzz topic online.
Mark Bell, a reviewer for FilmThreat.com and a part-time mashup artist, says it is difficult to pinpoint exactly who is making these films: “Nobody’s running around saying, ‘Hi my name is Bob and this is my new illegal mashup trailer,’ but you get to recognise ways of tagging films. They might throw a website up there or you might find a hidden link.”
So why do it? “It’s almost like dressing up for Hallowe’en. We’re not in the industry, so this is our opportunity to insert ourselves into a film’s history.”
According to Steve Rubel, a senior vice-president at Edelman PR in New York, and a prolific blogger on the subject of internet buzz, the instinct isn’t all that different from the computer virus writer’s: “They want to be the one who creates something and watches it go around the world.”
One mashup artist who did get to see his trailer mashup go that far, but whom I managed to track down to West Springfield, Massachusetts, is Mike Hindes, a 29-year-old part-time film editor, part-time construction worker. A couple of months ago, Hindes made Toy Story 2 Requiem — the children’s animation crossed with Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, arguably one of the darkest films in cinema history. The results are extraordinary: a profound and disturbing virtuoso piece, Woody and Jessie taking on an emotional depth beyond even the most perverted secret night sweats of a renegade Pixar employee.
Hindes says he made the film over six days. At first, it was going to be funny but as the animated footage became cloaked in an increasingly sad and bleak counter-meaning, he decided to push it as far as it would go. Hindes even reanimated sections to sync better with the dialogue. A friend persuaded him to tag it with an e-mail address, and the res- ponse has been phenomenal.
“I’m blown away by how much notoriety it has gained. When I hosted it on my own website I saw this traffic boom and a week later it was on almost every movie website on the internet. I had to upgrade my hosting account, and I couldn’t even respond to all the e-mails. I still get e-mails almost every day.”
For Bell, it is this viral power that has attracted a lot of amateur film editors. The days of the calling card short film, passed around on VHS, are over: everybody has one now. But these trailer mashups, tainted as they are with infamy and copyright illegality, are being seen as a risky but sometimes effective way for somebody outside the industry to get noticed. “They are saying, we have the skills and can do this form as well if not better.”
Right now, access to the tools couldn’t be easier. In fact, in recent weeks several websites (Eyespot.com, Grouper. com, Jumpcut.com) have sprung up offering not only free social storage for video footage, but rudimentary editing tools, too. The idea is that you post footage online, borrow other people’s, cut it together, remix. Nor is it only the film editors who have noticed the viral power of the internet. Which brings us right back to Snakes on a Plane.
The movie (a creative assassin releases a crate of venomous snakes on an LA-bound plane to stop Jackson’s FBI agent transporting a witness) will almost certainly be terrible. And yet the free internet buzz it is receiving — mock trailers, mock soundtracks, jokes, games, T-shirts — has earned it the kind of profile the marketeers behind Mission: Impossible III, with all its promotional firepower, could only dream about. Here’s what can happen when a catchy title attracts the attention of the trailer trashers.
But where the studio (New Line) showed new-media savvy was in their response to all this online hum. When others might have sent the lawyers out to battle for control, New Line is not only letting the phenomenon run its course, but is actually borrowing from it. A 19-year-old called Chris Rohan recorded a fake audio trailer, in which a hip-hop Jackson screams at the stewardess: “I did not ask for muthaf***in’ snakes on my muthaf***in’ plane.” It was an immediate internet hit.
Within days, New Line was organising six days of extra shooting (this was six months after filming had wrapped) to spice up the film to an “R” rating and include some of the lines from Rohan’s spoof. Rohan has since been courted by a major US ad agency. Elsewhere, via TagWorld.com, the studio is inviting bands to submit Snakes on a Plane-inspired songs. The winner will be announced on June 1 and included on the soundtrack.
Steve Rubel feels that this kind of online activity “is definitely something that the smart studios are going to embrace and try to facilitate. What I would do is put out chunks of content, as opposed to trailers, and say, ‘Here’s material, go make a trailer for us . . .’”
The projects that will appeal will be low-budget and high-concept, with titles (like Snakes on a Plane) that sum up the action — no more, no less.
In the meantime, the trailer mashup scene is already getting crowded. People such as Hindes set the bar high, and much of what has materialised since disappoints. I ask Rubel for a prediction: what will be the next big thing in movie mashups? “I'm waiting for somebody to make the first feature-length, two-hour, mashup movie. Believe me, that will happen. That will happen this year.”
Steve Rubel blogs at www.micropersuasion.com
