The Academy Film Archive has the largest collection of movie trailers on celluloid in the world — well over 60,000 — and on October 12 the Academy Museum will give the public a rare opportunity to see some highlights at “Don’t Go into the Vault: An Academy Film Archive Trailer Show in 35mm.” Just in time for Halloween, the trailer show showcases a wide range of horror films from the 1950s to the 1980s, with everything from well-known auteur classics to obscure slasher films in the mix.
“It’s an opportunity for us to show off trailers in our collection that otherwise could not be seen,” Academy preservationist Cassie Blake told IndieWire. “It’s almost like a little mixtape you present to everyone.” The show was curated by Blake and fellow Academy preservationist Tessa Idlewine, who are not announcing the lineup ahead of time but promise a wide range of entertaining material.
“There will be some titles that people recognize, but hopefully even more that they’ve never heard of,” Idlewine told IndieWire. Blake added, “We’re working with horror, so of course there’s some William Castle representation, some Hitchcock; we have Vincent Price in the mix, and Kubrick, but we also have some insane, ridiculous niche titles. With these programs, we tend not to reveal what the run of show is, so it’s a nice surprise for the audience.”
Determining that run of show takes a lot of work for Blake and Idlewine, who have to figure out a rhythm that dictates which trailers make the cut and which ones fall by the wayside — no easy feat when working with a collection that houses thousands of thousands of prints. “It’s definitely a ‘kill your darlings’ situation,” Blake said. “There are things that we love that we just didn’t have the time and space for.”
According to Idlewine, it’s not just about finding great trailers, but great trailers that play well together. “You really have to find a good cadence and tone,” she said. “Does this one going into the next feel right, or is it going to take you out of the show? It’s not as easy as just throwing together a bunch of trailers back to back.” Blake and Idlewine even have to carefully consider how much black leader to put in between trailers — too little doesn’t give the audience enough time to readjust for each new trailer. Too much can be deadly for the pace.
Though Blake and Idlewine are both now in the Academy’s preservation department, they spent years as dedicated archivists for the trailer collection and, in a sense, have been preparing “Don’t Go into the Vault” ever since, filing away memories of great horror trailers for future use. “There’s no real way to find excellent trailers; you just have to know from watching them and keeping track,” Blake said.
For “Don’t Go into the Vault,” Blake and Idlewine personally assembled 2000-foot reels of trailers that place extreme demands on the museum’s projectionists. “They have to be ready to fluctuate between full-frame and matted, and to really ride the volume,” Blake said. “We have 36 film items on this, so that’s 36 opportunities to be slightly off.”
It also provides 36 opportunities for an audience to see trailers on the big screen that almost never screen on film. “Some of these haven’t been screened since they came out,” Blake said. “There are trailers that reflect the original film title that was not the theatrical release title, or they include footage that didn’t make it into the film. Trailers really exist as their own entities. And this is a one-night only event in the truest sense.”
“Don’t Go into the Vault” screens at the Academy Museum on October 12.
