VHS reels, lost bumpers, obscure glory.
He recorded more than 5,000 movie trailers and turned three words into the sound of cinema itself — then took the whole art form with him when he went.
For four decades, almost every movie trailer in America came from one company you've never heard of. This is the story of the great trailer monopoly.
Before you could skip anything, the trailers on a rented VHS were a captive ritual — unskippable, half-remembered, and weirdly beloved. Here's why they vanished.
The name is a fossil. It records a vanished way of watching films — and the very first one wasn't even for a movie.
There was a year when every single top-ten film had a narrator. A decade later there were none. Here's what killed the voice in the dark.