The Greatest Trailers of All Time: NAKED LUNCH

It was pretty incredible that a film version of William Burroughs' NAKED LUNCH ended up getting made in the first place. Despite the film's lack of adherence to the actual novel, the resulting film (one of David Cronenberg's finest) is a pretty extraordinary achievement in it's own right. No, what truly strikes me as most surprising about the film version of NAKED LUNCH was that the film was distributed by 20th Century Fox, whose marketing department astonishingly came up with a trailer that not only did a remarkable job of selling the film, but also sold it properly. Not only did they not hide the film's literary origins, but they also didn't make the film out to be anything that it wasn't. They could have sold it as a thriller, a horror film, or even a straight drama, but instead they sold it as what it was: NAKED LUNCH, a weird, one-of-a-kind hybrid of the visions of Burroughs and Cronenberg and a damn great film. Even stupid people would look at this trailer and say to themselves, "Damn, this I gotta see!". Although the film was nothing more than an arthouse success in the U.S.(unsurprisingly, much more successful overseas), you sure as hell can blame the marketing department for the box office on this one.