Rosaline Terrill, her husband William, my wife Melinda and I were all shopping at a rather derelict mall down in Dallas during Wizard World Texas. We were stopped by a couple of those annoying people who beg busy shoppers to interrupt their shopping time to take product surveys…in this case, view a movie clip and give your opinions. I suggested we do it for a rather silly reason:

I used to be one of those annoying people who beg busy shoppers to take product surveys. It was one of the worst two months of my whole life, and I only took the job because it was the only thing I could find that fit my shedule at the time. I could have been a male prostitute but they wanted me to work on Saturdays.

So this girl asked us to come back and view a movie clip. She then asked Roz and Melinda their ages, which made it clear to me that (A) she only wanted the women’s opinions, and (B) she didn’t have the minimal smarts to NOT ask women their ages in public in front of men. She also said it would only take a moment, which I knew to be a lie because, well, I’d told it plenty of times back in the summer of 1992.

Here’s the meat of the story: Roz and Melinda were shown to separate rooms, shown different trailers for “Paycheck” and then asked a lot of questions about what they liked and didn’t like.
Here is the Paycheck Trailer and the Teaser Trailer. I’m posting those sight unseen, as I can’t watch them right now, so I have no clue how close these are to either of the trailers we saw.

The trailer Roz, Will and I watched was a 30-second mishmash of car chases, explosions, more car chases, gunfire, motorcycle chases, explosions, “BEN AFFLECK!” (studly close-up), slow-mo shot of Uma Thurman’s face, “UMA THURMAN!”, a nuclear explosion ripping through a city, and the word “PAYCHECK!”

That’s the whole trailer. No dialogue, no plot, no concept. No explanation of why it’s called Paycheck. The thing could be a textbook example of EVERYTHING WRONG WITH AMERICAN BIG BUDGET MOVIES. It was really the most appalling trailer stripped of all intelligence in the hopes of attracting the people who would be turned off if they find out it’s sci-fi.

Melinda’s trailer, as she told us once we left, was completely different. It details Ben’s predicament, gives the setup of why it’s called Paycheck and context for the action. In summary: I wish I’d watched that one.

Melinda liked hers, although she’s not sure it’s really her kind of movie. Roz held no punches in detailing exactly what was wrong with the trailer and Ben Affleck.

This isn’t really news news, but I thought the movie fans out there would find it informative. For me, it was a good insight how you can take a movie and construct two different trailers making them look entirely different. Not that I didn’t know that before. Remember some years ago when “Jerry Maguire was advertised as a comedy picture about Tom Cruise and the cute kid, a buddy picture with Tom Cruise and Cuba (Tom shouting that awful catchphrase over the phone), a weepy chick flick (with Renee Zellwegger sobbing and saying the final lines from the movie so that you know how it ends and you go anyway), and a sports picture?