The Trailer Trash (2002-2004)

June 8th, 2006 Posted in 2006

Two years ago I learned a Very Valuable Lesson about being a webmaster: back up your site, often. In 2003 I ran a weekly updated website devoted to reviewing (read: mocking) films based exclusively on their trailers, called The Trailer Trash. A lot of really funny people contributed to it during its run, and we even managed to garner, over the year and a half that I updated it, a healthy if not mind-blowing fanbase. Then a payment to my webhost bounced, due to some credit card expenses I’d made that weekend. Rather than contact me about the issue, my webhost sagely decided it would be easier simply to erase the entire site out of existence.

It was pretty devastating to me, for a few reasons: for one, I’d last backed up the site four months previously, so it’d be an incredible amount of work going through various drafts trying to piece together everything; and for another, at the time I (stupidly) edited pieces live on the server, meaning that in some cases, the only copy of the final draft I had was online.

Restoring The Trailer Trash, then, has been one of those nagging personal “eventually I must do this” things of mine, even though I freely admit: probably not a lot of people are honestly clamoring for the restoration of a bunch of snarky reviews to trailers — trailers that aren’t even online anymore — for films released years ago. Getting it live again was more for my own personal edification, undoing my collosal mistake of years past. But you know how it is: it’s not like sifting through all that shit was a pressing matter. There was always something more important to work on, and invariably a good excuse not to bother.

Last weekend I finally bit the bullet and got it online. It’s anyone’s guess whether all of these are the “final” final drafts; I wasn’t anal enough about it to visit the WayBackMachine and copy out code on hundreds of old reviews. So are they perfect? No. But honestly, this late in the game: good enough.

The Trailer Trash represents, I say with no modesty whatsoever, a creative watershed for me. Looking back on the reviews, I can actually read myself finding my own voice through the forced repetition of a weekly update schedule. Every Sunday for a year and a half I forced myself to write or edit several 1000-word reviews on awful movie trailers. Scanning through the archives now, I have to admit: some of them are probably among the funnier things I’ll ever write.

I’ll also say this, at the risk of veering into a dangerous level of self-congratulation: I think that we, the Internet population, all lost a little something when everything moved to blogs, Content Management Systems and database-driven content. Sure, it’s easier to categorize and file everything — but you lose the inventiveness of plain ol’ html. Looking back at some of these html-driven pages, and especially the feature articles, I’m struck by how visually interesting they all look compared to the uniform blandness of most database-driven pages these days, mine included. Such is progress.

You can find the Trailer Trash archive here. I didn’t bother recreating the site design. This is just a bare-bones list of the site’s contents. For those of you likely to enjoy this sort of thing (you know who you are): enjoy. For the rest of you, don’t sweat it.