Joseph Farrell, Creator Of The Movie Trailer, Has Died
For many movie fans, the movie trailer has become an event. A rest stop on the long journey to your highly anticipated film where you get refueled with excitement long before you see the final product. For others, movie trailers in front of a feature are how they first learn about films that may later become something truly special to them. Whether you fall into column A, column B or somewhere in between, advertising upcoming movies before another seems like a no-brainer. However, if wasn't for Joseph Farrell, we might not have trailers today.
Farrell was a legendary Hollywood marketing genius who is not only credited with creating the movie trailer, but also had a hand in test screenings, tracking, quadrants and more. He passed away Wednesday at the age of 76.
Farrell was the former head of The National Research Group, which was one of the leading market research firms in all of Hollywood. It was his idea to not only create the movie trailer, but test movies before release for filmmaker benefit, poll people to gauge awareness of a film and also think of film audiences as four quadrants – men and women above and below 25. To this day, many films still aim to please all four "quadrants" and use that term because of Farrell.
After leaving the National Research Group, Farrell founded FP Productions, which had a first look at Disney, and has movies like Joy Full Noise and The Leonardo Job still in development.
We all dream of leaving this life with a lasting legacy and Farrell's engages millions every second of every day. Thank you, good sir.