Neither a critical or commercial success on its release in 1973 (six years after Mike Nichols directed The Graduate, and two after George C. Scott turned down the Best Actor Oscar for Patton), this tale of espionage and talking dolphins was originally going to be directed by Roman Polanski: he was scouting for locations for the film when his wife Sharon Tate was brutally murdered by the Manson Family.
Just to reiterate, this is an occasional attempt to trace the work of creative minds as it is adopted, reused and transformed by those that follow them, and (either sooner or later) ingested by the hungry maw of advertising. Only because the attempt might be kind of fun, not because referencing or being influenced by previous creative work is necessarily a bad thing.
Here’s the trailer for the American release of Armando Ianucci’s implausibly funny and just as clever political satire In the Loop.
The frenetic cutting of the trailer calls back to the work of Pablo Ferro, who was recruited by Stanley Kubrick to make the trailers to Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and A Clockwork Orange. The In the Loop trailer also refers to the Clockwork Orange trailer in its choice of soundtrack: both use a disturbingly insistent electronic version of the William Tell Overture (in the grip of madness, or when woken by them first thing in the morning, all mobile phones sound like this).
However, Kubrick apparently initially approached another master of quick cuts to produce the trailer for Dr Strangelove – Arthur Lipsett, whose short film ‘Very Nice, Very Nice’ Kubrick much admired. Lipsett declined the offer, and Kubrick got Ferro. (You can see ‘Very Nice, Very Nice’ here, if the National Film Board of Canada’s website is working.)
Whether Ferro was influenced by Lipsett when cutting his trailers together isn’t clear. But this is the tradition the makers of the In the Loop trailer built on to convey a sense of the film without including any of its impressive, inventive and near-fucking-constant profanities. Which is a pretty miraculous feat of editing.
