These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art. 

In the summer of 1990, I worked in a video store. One the perks of such a gig — at least in the small, independently-owned the cut me a biweekly paycheck — was picking the tapes (only VHS tapes back then, friends) that would play on the store television. Ostensibly, it was promotional, but mostly it provided a chance for me to watch movies while patrons wandered aimlessly among the shelves, complaining that everything they’d hoped to rent was already checked out.

That summer, the tape I slipped into the VHS player more than any other was Hard to Kill, starring Steven Seagal and Kelly LeBrock. To be clear, I never watched the main feature contained within that plastic block. Instead, I repeatedly returned to that tape because I knew that the batch of advertisements preceding the action flick included a trailer for an upcoming release entitled Goodfellas.

Although my devotion to Martin Scorsese is by now exceedingly well documented, I can’t say his name prompted the same automatic response from me at the time. (The nineteen-eighties, with one highly notable exception, wasn’t the director’s strongest.) But something about the trailer grabbed me tight. I found it mesmerizing, its editing and use of music precisely perfect all the way through. It didn’t make me want to see the film so much as it inspired a strange sensation that I’d already watched something special, a self-contained piece of art.

The trailer isn’t novel or daring. It follows the normal cadences of the time, right down to the narration opening with the phrase “In a world….” Yet, the trailer somehow signaled to me that the film it touted was something truly special, a monumental achievement. And it did so without betraying some of the most memorable moments: the tracking shot through the back passages of the Copacabana, Joe Pesci’s “I’m funny, how?” scene, the storytelling ingenuity of narrator switches and other similar feats of creativity. The trailer makes small promises, and the film delivers a feast.

I’m so glad our video store always had a copy of Hard to Kill on hand.