Jonathan Crow spotlights Orson Welles’ trailer for Citizen Kane, calling it “as innovative as the film itself”:

The trailer for Citizen Kane, which you can see above, has no actual footage from the movie – something of a rarity. Instead, the trailer serves as a curious four-minute long documentary featuring behind-the-scenes footage and short vignettes of characters reacting to the movie’s mysterious central character. … Compare Kane’s trailer with one that was more typical of its time like Casablanca. Amid the overwrought copy and some comically flashy transitions, that trailer all but tells you what is going to happen in the film. There’s violence! Danger! Romance! Kane’s trailer, on the other hand, is less a sales pitch than a mystery. It shows plenty about the people behind the making of the movie but it shows nothing from the actual film. Based solely on the trailer, you don’t know what Kane is about, short of being about a shadowy, complicated character called Kane.

Welles wasn’t just being cagey for the sake of building audience interest. He was trying to head off a fight. Though Welles publicly claimed that Kane was not about media barron William Randolph Hearst, you can hardly blame the tycoon for feeling otherwise. Hearst was a newspaper magnet with a showgirl mistress who built himself a preposterously opulent castle. Citizen Kane is about a newspaper magnet with a showgirl wife who built himself a preposterously opulent castle.

For a broader look at the development of the movie trailer, check out the short documentary below:

Joe Berkowitz captions:

“The History of the Movie Trailer” is a 15-minute video that traces the evolution of its subject matter from the silent film era through to the blockbusters of today. In doing so, the video positions movie trailers as a unique medium that is halfway between advertisement and cinematic artform that is occasionally as impressive as the film it’s promoting. Created by FilmmakerIQ.com with help from BlackMagicDesign.com, “The History” highlights some interesting trivia that even the most hardcore movie junkies among us might not have realized we wanted to know. For instance, it’s strange to think that trailers were initially produced by theaters themselves until the 1960s, when studios took over.

More here.