This paper analyzes the production of a one-and-a-half-minute film trailer edited from a thirteen-minute segment of Orson Welles' 1958 film noir masterpiece, Touch of Evil, using Adobe Premiere Professional. The paper provides background on the film's status as the last great classical film noir, its cinematographic and musical techniques, and its treatment of race and border identity. It then examines the principles behind effective motion picture trailers before detailing the editorial choices made — including cast introductions, musical transitions, and scene selection — to communicate the film's essential tone within severe time constraints. The paper concludes with reflections on the challenges of distilling a complex film into a compelling short trailer.
The paper demonstrates the use of secondary source synthesis to justify creative decisions. Rather than simply describing what was done, the editors cite film scholars, cultural critics, and marketing researchers to explain why specific shots, musical cues, and sequencing choices were made. This bridges practical media production with academic film studies discourse.
The paper opens with a brief introduction situating the film and the assignment, then moves through four substantive sections: a background section on the editing process and software; a film analysis section covering plot, cinematography, music, and racial themes; a section on trailer theory and marketing; and a production rationale section detailing specific editorial choices. A short conclusion reflects on the challenges encountered and lessons learned.
According to Gary Arnold (1998), Touch of Evil is "a lurid but stylish crime thriller cherished by numerous movie freaks as Orson Welles' trashiest masterpiece" (p. 3). The movie was ultimately directed by Orson Welles after some negotiations with the studio, with the screenplay also written by Welles. Jeff Shannon reports that this movie is widely regarded as "the greatest B-movie ever made; the original-release version of Orson Welles's film noir masterpiece Touch of Evil was, ironically, never intended as a B-movie at all — it merely suffered that fate after it was taken away from writer-director Welles, then re-edited and released in 1958 as the second half of a double feature" (p. 2).
Touch of Evil was Orson Welles' fifth Hollywood production and his last American film. According to Tim Dirks, it was the last great film noir of the so-called "classic" era, which spanned from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. The movie was made in 1958, before the introduction of the rating system; however, it is characterized by adult subject matter, with numerous episodes of graphic violence and allusions to drug abuse and sexual depravity. The movie was based on the novel Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson, as well as an uncredited screenplay by Paul Monash.
The editors were provided with thirteen minutes of film edited from Welles' masterpiece, Touch of Evil. Using this 13-minute segment, the editors produced a one-and-a-half-minute trailer using Adobe Premiere Professional. The production process is described further below, followed by a summary of the project in the conclusion.
Neither of the editors had any previous experience with Adobe Premiere Professional, although both were proficient with Windows XP. The only knowledge of editing brought to the editing room came from lecture notes and reading materials reviewed in prior sessions. The editors attended three sessions; the first consisted of a viewing of Touch of Evil. On the morning of the second session, the editors watched a critical review of the film lasting approximately 15 minutes. Following this presentation, the editors were separated into groups, given instructions on what was required, provided with the 13-minute edited film segment, and instructed in how to use the Adobe Premiere Professional software. The remainder of that day and half of the following day were spent producing the trailer. Throughout the process, the editors attempted to create a trailer that incorporated all the salient elements of an effective film preview.
A brief summary of the movie is provided below, followed by a discussion of how the trailer was developed and the supporting rationale behind the choices made.
In this black-and-white motion picture from 1958, Mexico's chief narcotics officer, Mike Vargas, finds himself in a border town on a brief honeymoon with his American wife. Vargas is compelled to testify against Grande, a drug lord whose brother and sons are tracking him in an effort to intimidate him into changing his testimony. When a car bomb kills a wealthy American developer, Vargas becomes embroiled in the investigation, putting his wife in danger. "After Vargas catches local legendary U.S. cop Hank Quinlan planting evidence against a Mexican national suspected in the bombing, Quinlan joins forces with the Grande family to impugn Vargas's character. Local political lackeys, a hard-edged prostitute, pachucos, and a nervous motel clerk also figure in the plot" (Plot Summary for Touch of Evil, 2005, p. 2). The picture belongs to the film noir genre, wherein "sudden upwellings of violence in a culture whose fabric seems to be unraveling" can be observed, with nothing available to repair the damage — "such is the fictional world projected in films noirs such as Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958)" (Merrill, 1993, p. 241).
Alfred Hitchcock reportedly reworked the "quirky" motel clerk character from this film for Psycho (1960). The role of the Mirador Motel night manager was written specifically for Dennis Weaver, because Welles admired his work on Gunsmoke (1955) and wanted to collaborate with him (Nowell-Smith, 1997). The music used throughout the movie was drawn from sound sources embedded within the narrative itself — radio transmissions, jukeboxes, and a player piano. "Around 1960, film music also began to turn towards non-classical idioms, and it looked for a while as if jazz, both swing and bebop, would make major inroads into the cinema. The 1950s saw jazz appear in a number of movie scores, almost all of them associated in some way with crime narratives" (Nowell-Smith, 1997).
The music in Touch of Evil was composed by Henry Mancini. According to Nowell-Smith (1997), "The fate of jazz as film music strongly resembles that of classical music: it was taken over by established film composers like Henry Mancini, Lalo Schifrin, Dave Grusin, John Barry, and Michel Legrand, who took elements of its basic language and integrated them into a 'mod' style tailored to the flow of the film" (p. 563).
The film is set in a fictional Mexican border town, "Los Robles" — described on a billboard at the edge of town as the "Paris of the Border" (Case, 1996) — but it was actually filmed in Venice, California, because the location looked "convincingly run-down and decayed" (Plot Summary, p. 3). The black-and-white medium of the film reinforces this quality. There is also an ongoing undercurrent of racial and sexual tension throughout the movie communicated through a combination of musical, visual, and narrative elements: "The anxiety about borders and the threatening ambivalence they raise along the divisions of sex, race, and gender are conveyed through the narrative and its relation to the sequence of shots" (Case, 1996, p. 221). The movie develops a sense of foreboding early on through these very elements, a process reinforced by the performances of Dennis Weaver and Charlton Heston as they react to the strange events unfolding around them. Not all of this is entirely believable, but the storyline is sufficiently compelling to overcome these constraints: "The phoniness is well worth putting up with, though. Any movie fan interested in visual storytelling — or the underutilized power of crafty sound work — can sit back and enjoy this, even if some of the nuttier aspects of the story don't wash" (Tatara, 1998, p. 3).
From a cinematographic perspective, Welles makes clear from the outset that two powerful forces are in conflict, though the setting in which they meet is highly contrived. "As good Mexicans are played by familiar white actors in shoe polish, such as Charlton Heston, the border is recognizably Venice, California — the pun from Paris to Venice part of the typically ironic, layered references in avant-garde treatments. The repeated shots of the Venice arcade, along with its canals, the town's trademarks, have multiple functions" (Case, 1996, p. 221). These multiple functions include providing the audience with a "good-cop/bad-cop" cross-border approach to crime-solving. "This strategy of location is conjoined with the positive hero, Vargas, played in shoe polish," Case notes. There is also an important series of scenes that illustrates how this dynamic is accomplished. For example, Orson Welles as the corrupt Hank Quinlan is the bad white cop; when he first encounters Miguel "Mike" Vargas (Charlton Heston), the "good Mexican cop," the following sequence unfolds: Quinlan, talking to his associates at the crime scene, says, "I hear you even invited some kind of a Mexican"; there is then a cut to Heston entering in front of a billboard that reads "Welcome Stranger to Picturesque Los Robles Paris of the West" (Case, 1996, p. 221). Case emphasizes that it is important to note that the white actor portraying a Mexican enters the scene immediately after a racist line delivered by the villain, with a play on the Venice, California location visible in the background. According to Case, "The compound of elements reassures us that racism, national agendas, and the 'real estate' of properties are here only devices employed by avant-garde cultural producers to shock us with the seeming radicality of taboos, but save us through the aestheticizing of them" (p. 222).
These early exchanges between key characters and the highly prominent signage serve very distinct purposes in this movie. According to Telotte (2000), prologues "essentially cinematize us, point directly towards the following narrative, establish certain signposts that will prove useful for evaluating it," and "even suggest we see it within a lineage of popular thought, one that often couches commentary about the most pressing cultural concerns in a fantastic and disarming context, at both a temporal and aesthetic distance from our world" (p. 45).
There are also important racial issues examined throughout Touch of Evil, accomplished through what Nericcio (1992) terms "visual representations of 'indeterminate' spaces, both physical and corporeal" — "the bordertown and the half-breed, la frontera y el mestizo: a space and a subject whose identities are not fractured but fracture itself, where hyphens, bridges, border stations, and schizophrenia are the rule rather than the exception" (Nericcio, 1992, p. 54). There are important musical and visual elements present in the opening scenes of Touch of Evil that help set the stage for what follows, and it quickly becomes clear that highly charged oppositional forces will create serious problems for the characters as well as the audience. The cinematographic elements, however, helped make these issues more digestible for the America of the 1950s, where racial segregation was still common and Hispanics had not yet assumed their pronounced demographic presence in the United States.
At that time, "Any lingering reminders of exclusionary practices became titillating as they played into the complexity of the signification. Screening emphasized its entertainment value in order to make palatable its structuration of social space" (Case, 1996, p. 221). Capturing these essential elements in a motion picture trailer is therefore an important part of any production effort, and these issues are discussed further below.
The research showed that Touch of Evil (1958) was directed by Orson Welles and was based on a novel by Whit Masterson. There is much more than a "touch" of evil in this movie, and it manifests itself in a wide range of ways. Capturing this essence in a one-and-a-half-minute trailer was challenging, but the editors found Adobe Premiere Pro to be a robust and intuitive program that allowed them to become productive in relatively short order.
The editors also determined that although a motion picture trailer is an incredibly important component of the production and marketing of virtually any film today, there is far more involved in the process than was originally envisioned. Identifying those elements of a 13-minute segment that would communicate the film's essential character to an audience — without revealing too much about the plot — proved to be a genuinely challenging enterprise. Applying these same techniques to a feature-length production would represent an enormous endeavor, and the editors will watch film trailers in the future with a more critical and appreciative eye.
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