Sounding Off on Trailers

Hollywood wants its movie trailers to tickle, tease and dazzle you, not give you headaches. That’s why even though previews of coming attractions are growing more visually innovative, the film industry is lowering their volume to stem a rising crescendo of complaints.

Take the crowd one recent evening watching trailers at the AMC Promenade 16 in Woodland Hills. “They were shouting out . . , ‘Turn the sound down! It’s too loud!’ ” said Darryl Anka, 47, a production company co-owner who sees a couple of movies a week. “Sometimes, if I didn’t think the trailers were going to end in a couple of minutes, I’d complain too, but I know they’re going to be done soon, so I sit there and take it.”

How loud is too loud? Some trailers tested last summer by Hollywood audio engineers yielded one that averaged a skull-drubbing 92 decibels over its entire 2 1/2-minute run, buffeting audiences with more sound intensity than they’d get riding the New York subway, according to noise experts.

But when theater employees dutifully comply with customers’ demands to lower the sound during the trailers, more complaints follow when the lower-decibel feature starts.

“They play it [the main feature] so low, I have to ask, ‘What did he say? What was that line?’ ” said Chuck Bond, 65, of Newport Beach.

Take heart: The Trailer Audio Standards Assn. feels your pain. Earlier this spring the association--a panel representing studios, cinema audio companies and exhibitors--unveiled new controls that will, in effect, turn down the loudest trailers by about one-third. The new rules take effect June 1, but some studios have already implemented them.

The regulations will be enforced by the Motion Picture Assn. of America, which screens 500 or more trailers a year to see if they can run the familiar green leader showing that the preview is approved for all audiences. Trailers can’t show such things as nudity, shootings or spattering blood. Now, they can’t be too loud.

Turning down the volume means trailer producers will have to work harder to make an impression, especially among the coveted teen audience, which is flocking to movies in record numbers. The MPAA reports that last year 234 million tickets were sold to 12- to 17-year-olds, a leap of 28.4% over 1997. That’s the crowd that expects previews to be sharp, fast and loud.

“We just have to be a little more creative these days. We have to work a little harder to put something in front that catches your attention,” mused Richard Rogers, a rerecording mixer at Sound Services Inc.’s Hollywood studio, where he was preparing to apply the soundtrack at the new lower levels on the preview for “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” for New Line Cinema.

The need to mute trailers is an offshoot of the digital audio revolution earlier this decade that produced the often-transcendent surround sound systems.

“Rich, pleasing clarity is the key to immersing the audience in an environment that splashes sound off the side walls,” said sound designer Wylie Stateman, a co-founder of Soundelux Entertainment Group, who recently finished work on Disney’s “Tarzan” and on “For the Love of the Game” from Universal.

Alas, that capability created problems.

“Every time technology is improved, people will push it to its limit,” said Ioan Allen, the Oscar-winning technical wizard who co-wrote the trailer association’s new sound limits. Allen, who won an Oscar in 1988 for his work on sound technologies, is vice president of Dolby Laboratories, maker of one of the three audio systems used by most movie theaters (the other two are Sony Dynamic Digital Sound and Digital Theater Systems).

“Where the thing [movie sound] went crazy was with the trailers, which are in direct competition with each other,” he noted. “Each company wanted their trailer to be the loudest, and it got so bad that we ended up with World War III.”

Theater sound systems are designed to peak at 105 decibels, the noise intensity of an electric circular saw, said DTS’ studio facilities director Jim Fulmis. The usually brief peak levels, say for a gunshot or explosion, are more than twice as loud as the 92-decibel average recorded in that trailer sound-level test.

Loud, Long Sounds

Are Most Annoying

Allen explained how sustained noise colors perception:

“If you have a desert scene with soft, gentle wind, then--bang! a gunshot--the audience will be surprised out of their wits. But they won’t be annoyed,” he said.

“But if can you imagine a jet engine going solidly for 90 seconds at the same level as that gunshot, then the audience will get really very annoyed. The real method of measuring how loud something is is to take into account how long the loud sound lasts. So in a trailer for an action movie, all the highlights will be stuffed close together, so you get a sustained loudness.”

Trailers were traditionally played louder than feature films simply as an attention-getter, said DTS trailer manager Michael Archer. Trailers lagged a few years behind features in converting to digital sound; when the change was finally made, the complaints were immediate. The reason: Digital sound remains crisp and clear when played at even painfully high levels.

When studio executives heard what was possible, they began asking mixers for an extra decibel here or there in the final mix. The situation thus spiraled out of control.

“Very few people will admit they were doing it, but everybody was massaging their tracks to a higher level of volume to stay competitive, because it’s a huge political issue,” acknowledged David Todd Davies, a marketing vice president at MGM. “When the filmmakers and studios would go check their product, and their trailer is not playing as loud as the other trailers, it becomes a political football. . . . It’s not something you want to have happen.”

Trailers for last summer’s big-budget action films upped the ante spectacularly, most cinema audio experts agreed, pointing out the previews for “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact” as among those drawing the most complaints.

Notes Seth Gaven, vice president of creative advertising at MGM: “We’ve been wallowing in the MTV generation for the last eight, nine, 10 years, and things have gotten louder and louder. I’ve yet to hear my parents say ‘I love it’ when they crank it up loud.” People are anticipating more of a ride, more excitement. So we do it for them, we crank the visual effects and crank the sound.”

Allen said that getting all parties to cooperate with the new trailer sound standards is something of a minor miracle in dog-eat-dog Hollywood. And trailer editors have gone back to repeating some of their old chronic complaints.

“You should tell the exhibitors to turn down the lights during the trailers so people can see them,” grumped one trailer producer. Grumbled another: “Theaters still paint their side walls in light colors. That’s really distracting.”