

Free idea: why there are no trailers for theater plays? - gtb

I believe there are two reasons people don't go to theater more often: higher ticket prices and lack of information. If you only have a written review by some snoby artsy people and no friend to recommend a play, you might as well go see the latest Transformer - at least you know what you going to get for your money.<p>If there was a company that produced nice and professional looking (like holywood) trailers of theater plays I believe it could make good business helping producers and theater companies raise their revenue.
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SHOwnsYou
There are _a lot_ of trailers made for Broadway. Even tours of Broadway shows
have trailers advertising when a show is coming to a city near you.

A lot of plays (not musicals) might not have trailers, I don't follow plays as
I do musicals.

But I suspect the reason there are fewer commercials available to a wider
audience is actually due to the type of audience they want to attract. Neither
theater owners nor performers/actors want the typical movie-goer to be the
audience screaming, talking on their cell phone, or generally doing anything
against the rules. At a Broadway show excessive phone use or talking can get
you kicked out. Trying to take a picture often _will_ get you kicked out.

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Jun8
This is a good example of how parallelism sometimes totally breaks down.
Theater and film seem quite similar so your trailer idea sounds logical. To
see the problem with it, talk to any person involved with theater, they will
absolutely hate it, it goes against everything they are trying to do. See,
most movies are created for commercial entertainment, while theater
productions are rarely so (at least they don't see this in that light). Think
about a trailer for a Chekhov play or a recent one, say _Burning_ by Thomas
Bradshaw. To many ears the idea is abhorrent.

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sitkack
They take pictures and make posters for upcoming shows? Why not trailers? I
think because video production of plays is difficult, their time scales are
compressed often still tweaking things directly before opening night. You
would pretty much have to dedicate 1 or 2 hrs of the entire casts time just
for filming enough footage for a 30 second spot. It is interesting but I think
difficult. If you can have a small crew, not take much time and get an edit
out quickly. You _might_ be able to charge at most maybe 2k for a fully edited
trailer. Probably more on the 1k or less scale.

<http://www.broadway.com/>

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xer0
Probably the trailer, as we think of it in the movies, is too expensive.
Trailers are shown to and amortized across a national audience, and I assume
are placed in front of movies where the audience will have a positive
response.

That said, I see static local ads in the discount theaters. I suppose a
theater owner would show any ad that was paid for, but most movie theaters are
chains and probably make large deals for the trailers, just like they do for
the movies.

Or something.

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martingordon
I developed a site called StageGrade (<http://www.stagegrade.com>) that
aggregates theatre reviews.

We hope to at least get around the problem of having to overly rely on one or
a few professional critics' reviews by aggregating them all and also by
allowing users to leave their own reviews which are given equal visibility to
the critic reviews.

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mjs00
I'd prefer no trailers at movies, or really make them _trail_ the film for
folks that might want to see them.

