Trailer Titan Dies

The name of Andrew J Kuehn may not be familiar to most of you, but this movie legend, who died on Thursday, was responsible for enticing moviegoers into the cinema for the best part of three decades. Kuehn was Hollywood's King of the Trailers and in his lengthy career pioneered the use of snappy editing and catchy taglines, turning the trailer into its own diminutive artform. 'A trailer is two or three minutes long - about the length of a song - and I think of trailers as songs,' the mini movie maestro once told The New York Times. And if trailers were songs, Kuehn was also a snappy lyricist, coining the phrase, 'Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water', for the lamentably bad Jaws 2. 'A trailer has but one goal,' Kuehn once explained, 'to draw audiences out of their houses and into a theatre. To do that you have to set up a sense of urgency.' So that's what the man did, coming up with the trailers for such classics as E.T., Star Wars, Aliens, Back To The Future and the entire Indiana Jones trilogy. Witness Trailer: Click here. ET Trailer: Click here. Star Wars Trailer: Click here.