Last week I had a long sit down with The Wackness director Jonathan Levine; one of the things he told me is that the campaign for the film is about to ramp up. He said that there was a new trailer coming that was a big improvement on older trailers, and that there was finally a red band trailer on the way.
That new trailer is here, and it’s quite good, despite the massive limitations that a film about a high school kid who sells and smokes lots of dope faces. For one thing, Levine told me that smoking is a very touchy subject in trailers (you see Famke Jansen with a lit cigarette in this one), and people smoke in a good two thirds of his movie. And then there’s the weed itself. And the fact that some of the best bits in the movie are most definitely not green band material.
But still, I like this latest trailer a whole lot more than previous ones. And I’m looking forward to seeing that red band come along. A note to the Sony Picture Classics people, though – you shouldn’t do one record scratches to a halt bit, let alone two.
Meanwhile, David Poland is reporting that the movie has had fifteen minutes cut out of it since premiering at Sundance; I’m not sure what’s been cut exactly, but the Sundance cut did seem like it could be trimmed. Levine said that there’s almost an hour of deleted stuff – stuff that was even in the Sundance cut – so maybe these fifteen minutes will show up alongside that deleted content on the eventual DVD release.
Click here to watch the new trailer for The Wackness, which opens July 2.