See the update at the end of this post about the positive public, critical and dental reception to the NBFF trailer.
ORIGINAL POST, APRIL 12, 1:43 P.M.: I–swear to God–have a teeth cleaning appointment Monday morning. It will not be a pleasant experience. It's not because I am a wuss in the chair or my dentist is a sadist. Well, at least not during working hours. No, it's because I have just seen the final cut of the Newport Beach Film Festival trailer.
Wake up, whitener people, this is gonna hurt . . .
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I don't think the festival folk will mind me revealing this, but the slickly produced, all-original NBFF trailers that precede film entries each year can be better than the entries themselves. They are always better than the sponsor commercials the precede the trailers.
Mandible, the nearly seven-minute trailer for the 2013 April 25-May 2 festival run, was created by Santa Monica advertising agency RPA, which relied on the Tool of North America directing duo of Erich Joiner and Robert Richardson, a three-time Oscar-winning director of photography whose credits include Django Unchanged, Inglourious Basterds, Shutter Island and Kill Bill: Vol. 1 & 2. The trailer, which plays more like a short film than a promo, was written by Lee Aronsohn (Two and a Half Men, Big Bang Theory).
The queasy of stomach–hell, the non-queasy of stomach–will be shutting their eyes to parts of the following . . .
Fest co-founder and marketing guru Todd Quartararo was among the queasy of stomach when he showed me the rough cut of Mandible. At that time, he was wondering how to make it fest-audience friendly. Obviously, the message at the end got through and erased such fears.
“Graphic, intense and unlike anything film festival goers are prepared for, this hard-hitting short film takes the audience into a heightened state and then reminds them to relax–this is not real life–just particles of light on a screen, a demonstration of the incredible power of film,” reads the description on the trailer's YouTube page, which you should visit should you want to read more about the making of it and the end credits.
Once you've stopped panting, come out from under your desk and changed your underwear, I'd love to know what you think of Mandible; leave a comment below.
Now spit!
UPDATE, APRIL 23, 10:30 A.M.: As you can see from the comments below, Mandible did not produce any OC Weekly reader outrage. Which means:
1) You people are even sicker than we feared;
b.) Your mouths were left too sore to holler.
Todd Quartararo, the festival co-founder and marketing guru who had early reservations about exposing the clip to the masses, is now the opposite of concerned thanks to the positive public and critical reception it has been getting.
After a week, it had more than 30,000 views on the NBFF YouTube channel, AdAge and Creativity made the trailer their picks of the day last week and more buzz came Monday from AdWeek. In “Is This the Most Horrifying Film-Festival Ad Ever?” Tim Nudd writes, “It will certainly shock you–and may, with its darkly comic premise, also amuse you.”
The crown-ing glory (pun firmly intended):
“Our trailer made it big!” Quartararo gushes. “We are mentioned on Dental Care Today!”
See for yourself:
http://drdentalcare.blogspot.com/2013/04/hollywood-2013-newport-beach-film.html
Alas, there are no negative comments left there either, so given the sounds of silence expect the 2014 NBFF trailer to mine the horrors of thick-fingered rectal exams. I see Jeff Garlin in the physician role . . .
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.