This past Thursday, I sat down for the Brattle Theatre’s tenth annual Trailer Smackdown filmmaking competition.. It was the seventh time I’ve attended, and the first during which my skeleton didn’t feel like it was trying to crawl out of my body.
Let me back up. The Trailer Smackdown began life as a sideshow to the Brattle’s yearly Trailer Treats program, a celebration of the coolest and most outrageous movie trailers ever cut, set against a backdrop of barbecue, live music, and hillbilly kitsch. Beginning in 2007 (not coincidentally, the summer that Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez unleashed Grindhouse), the theater introduced a novel participatory element: they released the title to a fictional film (in the case of that first year, Miranda) along with checklists of genres, locations, characters, and actions, and invited the public to make their own trailers from scratch. Word got out, and within a few years the Smackdown became the main event, turning Trailer Treats from a low-key summer evening to a bonafide sold-out event.
As I’ve mentioned in this space before, I began making short films with my friends in high school, under the name Collective Fedora Films (don’t ask me where the name came from – I wasn’t there that day, and no matter how many times it’s been explained to me I’ve never entirely understood). Like most youthful filmmaking endeavors, our output slowed down after graduation – college, jobs, and significant others tend to eat into your running-around-in-masks time – but the Smackdown proved just focused enough for us to reconvene for a couple of weeks every summer. Our Miranda that first year was a shoestring, semi-animated bit of sci-fi weirdness drawn over a weekend by my friend Webster (I contributed narration and character voices via e-mail), but it was successful enough to land us in second place. Like the Smackdown itself, our trailers became more elaborate: we placed second two more times (for our Beatles mockumentary Ten and our scatological tall tale riff Johnsmith) before taking home the gold with our drive-in action take on The Librarian. Our victory in hand, we decided to rest on our laurels (at least for a while).
Attending as an observer for the first time, I was struck by just how pleasant the whole evening is. The Treats portion, as always, was immaculately curated, broken into bite-sized programs like “Terrible Superhero Movies” and “Nicolas Cage, Greatest American Actor” (fused, of course, by 2007’s incomparable Ghost Rider). The event was preceded by a number of 16mm oddities— a W.C. Fields two-reeler, some Rolling Stones performance footage, and a fascinatingly bizarre French student film called The Chicken That Time Forgot (which I NEED to learn more about). And while I didn’t make it for the barbecue portion, the whole night had the laid-back feel of a summer party full of smartasses.
But the main event, of course, was the Smackdown. Divorced from my usual artistic neuroses, I was able to appreciate, perhaps for the first time, the ingenuity that goes into the competition. In honor of Bastille Day, this year’s title was Pomme de Terre (French, of course, for potato), which lent itself to any number of hilariously atrocious accents and subtitle gags. One entry, from Team Pacheco, managed to utilize every item from each checklist (we attempted this with The Librarian, but only got all the characters and locations). The second place winner, from Team Abbruzzese, follows the political rise of a remote control goose in a wig (the goose, of course, is a potato farmer); the grand prize champion, meanwhile, an indescribable mockumentary from Beak Ape Films, is perhaps the most genuinely strange entry in the history of the Smackdown.
What my newfound objectivity most clearly revealed to me, however, is that it’s not about the competition at all. It’s about the joy of creation, of getting together with your friends for a few weeks and banging out a quick, funny, resolutely silly piece of work. The competitors differ greatly (some display seasoned technical chops, others can’t be older than junior high), but all seem to be having the time of their lives. What’s more, the two-minute time limit and rapid-fire nature of the format provide the perfect context to marvel at the variety of concepts and approaches. Whether you’re a participant or a spectator, the Trailer Smackdown is a perfect shot of summertime weirdness. The films may be fake, but the invention is real.
