Hollywood is trying on some shorts for the summer.
The brief movies that disappeared from theaters decades ago have started to make comebacks in new ways–often as marketing tools to hype feature-length films such as “2 Fast 2 Furious” and “The Matrix Reloaded,” or to help sell DVDs of movies.
One hook is that many of these mini-films fill in important plot points necessary to understanding elements of the bigger pictures.
For instance, how does Paul Walker’s rogue police officer get from Los Angeles in “The Fast and the Furious” to Miami Beach in the sequel “2 Fast 2 Furious,” which opens Friday? And where did he get his new Nissan Skyline racer? Only the short film on the new “tricked out” DVD of the original film has the answer.
“It’s a little glimpse of what he was going to see in Miami and two of the cars from the first race of the sequel,” said the short’s director, Philip Atwell, whose other credits include the music videos for Eminem’s “Stan” and “Lose Yourself.” “It’s just more of a connecting-of-the-dots.”
Atwell took a music-video approach to the six-minute short–depicting Walker in street races, cross-country escapes, a romantic encounter and a pursuit by state troopers under the pulse of brooding dance beats without dialogue.
Similarly, the series of nine shorts linked to “The Matrix Reloaded” also foreshadow events in the movie and expand the story beyond the limits of the planned trilogy. “The Animatrix”–featuring Japanese-style anime cartoons–made its debut June 3 on DVD after being originally distributed through theaters and the Internet.
One of the shorts, “Final Flight of the Osiris,” depicts what erotic foreplay is like in the digital world of the Matrix and shows how humans discover an army of machines burrowing toward their stronghold of Zion. The computer-animated segment appeared in theaters in March before screenings of the horror film “Dreamcatcher.”
“We thought the fans should be able to watch this and see it on the big screen,” said Joel Silver, who produced the anime shorts along with the feature “Reloaded.” “We really felt if we could get this out and up before the movie opened, it would give people a chance to see it and understand it and kind of lead them right into ‘Reloaded.’ “
Not every recent short release is aimed at promoting a blockbuster.
Disney-Pixar’s computer-animated fish feature “Finding Nemo” is preceded by the 1989 computer-generated short “Knick Knack,” about a snowglobe-imprisoned snowman who wants to break free. With no trinket-themed feature to hype, the short is mainly a bonus for moviegoers while allowing Pixar to showcase one of its little-seen experimental flicks of yesteryear.
Even amateur short-film makers are finding new interest in their work as digital technology lowers the cost of filmmaking, said Jeff Consiglio, a commercial editor and co-founder of Los Angeles’ Group 101, a filmmaking collective whose members pledge to make one indie-short per month.
Group 101’s shorts have played on AMC’s Halloween “MonsterFest” marathon, on the Internet and at the Los Angeles Film Festival. Consiglio predicted coming years would bring more festivals and DVD collections celebrating short films.
