The New Book Trailer: An Interview with Adam Cushman

Popular wisdom holds that the movie is never as good as the book (with allowances, perhaps, for the adaptations of Stanley Kubrick and a few others). But an emerging genre is challenging and re-imagining the relationship between film and literature. Red 14 Films, founded in 2011, makes “literary short films. They also call them “cinematic book trailers,” to distinguish them from the low-end, slideshow-style trailers currently in vogue in indie circles.

The films capture the core of a book in just a few minutes. They are often used as part of an online advertising campaign, but they also stand as artworks in their own right. “Through film,” the company says on its web page, “we offer the chance to spread the idea of your book in a way that’s engaging to readers and expresses the plot and tone of your book without compromising the reading experience.”

On July 15, Red 14 Films will launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund films for Jason Ockert’s Neighbors of Nothing, Matt Bell’s In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, Scott Dominic Carpenter’s This Jealous Earth, and Monica Drake’s The Stud Book.

Co-founder Adam Cushman was kind enough to answer some of my questions over email.

*

Nathan Goldman: What inspired the founding of Red 14 Films?

Adam Cushman: It was entirely accidental. My background is in fiction writing and filmmaking. About two years ago, a friend asked me to direct a book trailer for his new novel. I had no idea what he was talking about. So I researched online and found they’d been around for a few years, but were universally, maybe even intentionally bad. My partner Mike Sandow and I enjoyed the creative freedom of working within a new form. So we did a few more book trailers for friends with novels. Pretty soon we had writers asking to hire us, and the company was born.

Nathan Goldman: The Kickstarter campaign video defines the “literary short film” as “a 1-3 minute film that spreads the idea of the book much like a music video.” When making one of these films, what’s the process like for determining “the idea of the book”?

Adam Cushman: It depends on the book, really. We read the book and come up with an approach. Very often what we shoot is informed by a passage from the book or the back cover synopsis. Other times the writer has a solid idea of what they want, and if that vision is realistic, we adapt it that way. It’s similar to a film adaptation in that sense, because you’re translating one medium to another. The question becomes how much do you translate? How much plot is necessary to include in the trailer in order to interest readers in the book and the author? My feeling is these films are better as sense impressions than direct film adaptations, giving readers just a taste.

Nathan Goldman: The Red 14 Films website describes the literary short film as an art form in its own right, as well as a part of an advertising campaign for a book. How do these two aims work together? Do they ever come into conflict, and if so, how does Red 14 Films negotiate between them?

Adam Cushman: They haven’t really come into conflict. There are three strains at work here: cinema, literature, and advertising. To me these literary shorts are most closely related to music videos only in the sense that we’re not using them as direct ads. Music videos, for example, don’t feature the album cover at the end or ask you to buy the album. They use the song as a vehicle for a new work of art that hopefully creates an interest in that album and that band. To me direct advertising is dead. No one is going to share a spammy “book trailer.” No one’s going to click on your banner ad. So you have to give people something that spreads. You can’t do that by talking down to people. You can ask them to buy the book, and who knows, some of them might. But why not give them something that’s visually and emotionally pleasing?

Nathan Goldman: How do you think book trailers fit into the changing publishing industry?

Adam Cushman: Well, it’s an interesting time. Book trailers are everywhere. And they’re for the most part really terrible. Most publishers have gone along with using them begrudgingly, and that’s evident when you watch the trailers. It’s clear from the work that publishers wish they didn’t need book trailers, so they throw a slideshow together and say, “It’ll do.” But it won’t do. And this gives book trailers a bad name (rightfully so). There’s no doubt that you need online video as part of your marketing plan. So why not make it awesome? I hope, if we’ve accomplished anything in two years, we’ve proven that these trailers can be high quality and affordable at the same time. And there’s no doubt that book trailers are here to stay. So the question becomes, do big publishers prefer mediocrity? I think the answer is no. Over the last year I’ve seen a bunch of amazing book trailers pop up. So it’s definitely beginning to get better, although the really bad ones still make up most of them. Right now it’s all still new, and the typical response from publishers is, “Well, the numbers haven’t been proven, so….” But there’s no way to measure the numbers. Music videos have no way of measuring how many sales a video generates. And that’s really not the point anyway. The point is to increase the interest in books and in reading. The success of the eReader ought to tell you that people want to read. How you compel them to do that is a different story.

Nathan Goldman: The Red 14 Films website says, “We’re not creating typical ‘book trailers,’ amateur slideshows using an iMac, still frames from the web, and maybe some scrolling text. This is neither our product nor something we are interested in being involved in.” What do you think high production value contributes to this emerging art form?

Adam Cushman: I think what it comes down to is quality and care. The bottom line is that most authors spend one to two years writing a book. That anyone would then advertise the book with one of these still frame montages or anything less than stellar makes no sense to me.

Nathan Goldman: What inspired this Kickstarter campaign?

Adam Cushman: Two things. First, we want to use Kickstarter the way Kickstarter was meant to be used: collaboratively. We feel that the Kickstarter platform is a way to bring legitimacy to this new form and for people to feel like they’re involved in creating it. Second, we’re hoping to create a platform that indie publishers can use in the future. The idea being that if you take four of your titles and create a campaign, offering books, eBooks, workshops, etc., as rewards, everybody wins. The authors and publishers get a cool book trailer. The supporters get awesome and affordable rewards and a chance to connect with authors. Plus, you’re automatically building your fan base and marketing your titles. The best Kickstarters are ones where everyone wins. I hope that our campaign lives up to that. I think it will.

Nathan Goldman: If someone hired you to produce a literary short film for any work you wanted by any author, living or dead, what work would you choose?

Adam Cushman: It’s my dream project to do a series of these for the classics.

Nathan Goldman: What classics do you have in mind for that series?

Adam Cushman: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, the Black Rider poems, Walden, Last of the Mohicans, Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, to name a few. I imagine doing them in a similar vein as the Criterion Collection covers, just with video.

Nathan Goldman: Does your background in fiction writing inform the process of making these films, since they’re inspired by and tied to texts? If so, how?

Adam Cushman: I don’t think my fiction background informs the filmmaking so much as it makes me passionate about finding and filming awesome stories, and often getting to work with fiction writers I admire.

Nathan Goldman: You’ve made films for many kinds of books, from novels to short story collections to a book on writing. Does your approach vary according to these different genres? What different challenges do the different genres present?

Adam Cushman: The non-fiction books are trickier because you have to find different ways to communicate the idea of the book than you would if you were filming a novel. With a story collection we focus on one story, usually the title piece. With the book on writing, we had to express the idea of the book using imagery that isn’t necessarily in the book itself, so that was a different process as well. But the truth is every book presents its own challenges, and the fun part is figuring out how to use those challenges positively. For example, we did a trailer for a book called Executive Command. It’s a political thriller with lots of characters and action. Every time we sat down to figure out the approach, it ended up being too expensive. That’s the thing with these, they’re not actual film adaptations and there’s often the temptation, either with the writer or the filmmaker or both, to treat it as such. This can end up being prohibitively expensive. With Executive Command, we ended up shooting a small scene from the book as a found footage piece, a scene that happens to encapsulate the plot and conflict of the novel. So sometimes it’s about finding new and creative ways to say more but show less.

Nathan Goldman: Would you be interested in working with wildly different kinds of books—cookbooks, textbooks, coffee table books, doctoral dissertations—or do you think that there are certain genres for which this medium doesn’t make sense?

Adam Cushman: I can’t think of any genres that we wouldn’t take on. I’m not particularly interested in religious fiction, but that’s me. So the answer is definitely yes. I think the difference is that with a cook book or a coffee table book you’re limited in the sense that it will serve one purpose, and that purpose is to be a book trailer. With the literary shorts we make for novels. they exist as a film first and happen to make for good book trailers as well. With the novels and collections there’s also the opportunity to use the films to promote the movie rights, something you wouldn’t really need to do with a cookbook or dissertation.

Nathan Goldman: Who are some of your favorite living writers? Filmmakers?

Adam Cushman: Aside from the four brilliant writers in our Kickstarter campaign? Right now I’m into Alissa Nutting, Denis Johnson, James Ellroy, and Patrick Dewitt to name a few. My favorite writers change all the time though. On the film side, I really like some of the Australian filmmakers like David Michod, Andrew Dominik, Cate Shortland, and Justin Kurzel. I could go on.

Nathan Goldman: What would you say to someone considering contributing to the Kickstarter campaign?

Adam Cushman: That apart from the rewards, you’re helping pioneer a new art form that can benefit established writers, new voices and filmmakers worldwide.