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Miss the movie, catch the trailer >> Albert Nerenberg's Trailervision is inspired lunacy
by MATTHEW HAYS
The gag is simple enough: each vignette, which features Nerenberg's frenetic, fast-paced camera work and wonky acting style, is a trailer for a film that doesn't actually exist. Each segment ends with the pitch "In Theatres Nowhere." "The trailer is an exciting medium," says Nerenberg as he settles into a coffee in a downtown Toronto eatery. "It's got music, it's fast moving, with action, plenty of ideas and money shots. It allows you to use things very quickly. We really wanted to parody Hollywood. But now, the most moronic thing about Hollywood isn't the films themselves, but rather the promotion surrounding them." Nerenberg's trailers are indeed hilarious. Unlike SCTV, which often spoofed specific works, Trailervision tends to take on entire genres and classes of movies, pointing up just how inane and formulaic things have become. The Man With No Head is a film noir/romance hybrid, in which a man and the love of his life must cope after he's decapitated in a car accident. Lost in Paris and Endless Picnic are dead-on stabs at stuffy Merchant-Ivory period films (the former was shot in Old Montreal). Then there's Don't Talk About Love, a riotously astute take on all those nauseating and trite relationship movies Hollywood constantly seems to churn out.
Cheap but sublime Nerenberg, whose work appears on Moses Znaimer's mini-empire of TV channels as well as CBC's Big Life, got funding for Trailervision from Space, City TV and CFCF-12. Costing a mere $30,000 ("one tenth the cost of a Molson commercial"), the show has gloriously cheesy special effects and costumes that look like they were retrieved from an actor's mother's closet. "But imagine what I could have done with $50,000?" beams Nerenberg. His wish for a bigger budget might just be coming true. Since Trailervision started airing periodically on Space and City TV, the show has gained a sizable cult following. Nerenberg has received copious emails from new fans, many of whom offer to act for free so they can appear in one of the upcoming fictional trailers. Actor Saul Rubinek and Saturday Night Live alum Mark McKinney have both expressed an interest in appearing in future episodes. The suits from Fox have contacted Nerenberg and they're now discussing a new version of the show. But Trailervision's rock-bottom budget fits the show well. SCTV suffered seriously when it was bought up by an American network; the very best episodes were those shot when the budget was little or nothing. And more money could mean more interference from investors. Nerenberg has already faced censorship with Trailervision. The folks at Space, he reports, were not entirely thrilled with some of the material he'd come up with, and snipped away from the original. "They didn't like one called Undercover Homosexual. It's about a cop who's told the gay community is getting more and more powerful, and that he must infiltrate to find out who the head of the community is. It was shot entirely during Pride Day in Toronto, and the actor got under some guy's enormous dress. We couldn't figure out what the discomfort was--it was really funny." Nerenberg has made the censored material accessible on his Web site and every trailer he's created can be downloaded. "It works so well on the Web. We're almost more excited about it as a Web show. Eight million downloaded the Phantom Menace trailer, and that thing was 24 megabytes. Our average is only two. So that comes down, even on a slow connection, in two or three minutes. "When you think in terms of TV, you often censor yourself, because you're thinking of the constraints. But when you think Web, you don't think censorship. It allows us more freedom."
Trailervision airs Friday, April 30 on Space. The show can be downloaded at www.trailervision.com |
As seems to be the rule, the nuttier an idea for TV or the movies actually sounds, the better the chances it will actually work. Such is the result with Trailervision, a new anthology of short films put together by Toronto-based Montreal ex-pat Albert Nerenberg.