Thomas Pynchon, whose distaste for having his picture taken rivals Muhammad’s, seems to have transferred that aversion to his publisher. When Penguin released the trailer for Inherent Vice, they deliberately avoided showing faces. This could have been an economic decision; no faces means no actors to pay. But the resulting commercial, especially if viewed without sound, is drab, if not lonely and depressing. The voice-over suggests the narrative tone of the novel, but there’s nothing compelling about the trailer. For instance, if you take it as a short film, it has no inherent entertainment value. Yet when I asked people to send me book trailer examples, it was the most suggested. I must ask, though, would so many people have recommended it if it weren’t promoting a Pynchon novel?

In my last article I wrote, “The micro publishing industry must create new, autonomous work that relates directly to the book being pushed, but which provides its own independent entertainment.” The Inherent Vice trailer doesn’t qualify for two reasons. Firstly, Penguin is not part of the micro publishing establishment, and just as they don’t need to publish good books to turn a profit, they don’t need to produce innovative promotional material (or not yet, anyway). Pynchon is a brand in and of himself, and virtually any reminder that he has a new book forthcoming functions as sufficient marketing. I don’t mean to insult Penguin for the sake of insulting them, though. The production value is certainly high in the Inherent Vice trailer. I just don’t feel they tried very hard. The book is set in Los Angeles, and the trailer is a sort of non-linear montage of overcast Los Angeles beach images. Similarly, the production team extracted the script from the novel. Though this is the logical reservoir of material to drain, deciding not to write new copy relegates this commercial to the re-appropriation genre—the Inherent Vice trailer isn’t a recontextualization of the novel so much as it is an excerpt laid over a dreary visual. In other words, no one other than a Pynchon fan is going to watch it all the way through.

As is our wont at Flatmancrooked, I’m not here to criticize Penguin’s efforts without suggesting some solutions. If voicing-over a film montage (which relates obliquely to the book) doesn’t qualify as innovative, what does? In my last article I suggested that Simon & Schuster’s collaboration with Marvel for the promotion of Stephen King’s N met my inventiveness criteria. The story might not have been great, but the packaging was exceptional. Though, as I also wrote in my last article, not every house has the luxury of working with Marvel. But recently, Electric Literature, on a shoestring budget, managed to create an animation for Jim Shepard’s “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You” that rivals, in terms of production value, what Simon & Schuster pulled off.

Structurally, the “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You” trailer resembles Inherent Vice. It has at its core a voiced-over excerpt laid atop an image montage. But the quality is remarkable. Not only is each frame hand-painted, but the sequence of the images is narrative. In combination with the scoring by Nick DeWitt, the trailer produces a self-contained emotional response. Therefore the commercial functions as a compelling, autonomous film and isn’t only appealing to fans of Jim Shepard. In fact, the film should help attract new readers.

When I saw this trailer a month ago, I figured the editors at Electric Literature, whose magazine got press in the Washington Post, had managed to attract investors for the animation project. But when I spoke to them, they told me the following:

Our budget was very low. We found creative people who liked the project. Mostly, a labor of love. Still, it entailed so much work we felt the need to pay something. Our animator probably made about two bucks an hour.

Our time frame was 6 weeks but it was barely enough. Jonathan Ashley, the animator, used innovative techniques to speed up the process without sacrificing quality. A traditional frame-by-frame animation 2 minutes long might take an individual 3-6 months. We began by contacting all the major art schools with animation programs, but they unanimously told us that it could not be done in our time frame. In many cases, the money was also too low. I am not sure any of the administrators ever even passed the project along to their students. It was frustrating. We ended up finding both our animator and composer through friends.

We wrote a draft of the script and worked with Jim [Shepard] on the final version. We worked with the animator on editing. It was very DIY.

This may not be a scalable-or even repeatable-production model, as it relies on artists working for nearly free, but it is an astounding marriage of concept and execution. It also serves as a perfect example of what a small press can manufacture from nothing and for, virtually, nothing. Why, then, did Penguin, with their budget, strive for so little with the Inherent Vice trailer? Let’s help ensure they don’t get away with mediocrity for much longer.

Here are a few other trailers worth seeing, all of which re-imagine the texts they’re advertising, rather then simply re-appropriating them. I’m sure I’ve missed plenty of good ones, so please add them to the comments section.

For Shya Scanlon’s forthcoming Forecast.
For Flatmancrooked’s First Winter.
For James P. Othmer’s Adland.

Read Part I.

By Kaelan Smith, with special help from Molly Gaudry