ABSTRACT
National Screen Service Ltd (NSS Ltd) was arguably one of the biggest studios in Britain. Between 1926 and the mid-1990s, almost every film trailer shown in Britain passed through its doors; most British films had trailers written and produced by the NSS production team; NSS re-edited all American (and other international) trailers to meet the censorship requirements of the British Board of Film Censors/Classification (BBFC), or the different promotional needs of British distributors. NSS teams worked closely with David Lean, the Boulting Brothers, John Huston, Michael Winner, Stanley Kubrick and Ealing Studios, and produced the James Bond trailers. At its peak, from the 1940s to the late 1950s, NSS Ltd produced around 600 unique trailers a year, distributed almost 9,500 trailer prints a week (and 4-5,000 titles and teasers) to over 4,000 cinemas, to be seen by 25 million people each week, or over 1.3 billion people a year (“760,000 Feet of Trailers” 1953: 6; “Notes on the Month” 1943: 194). It is fair to estimate that more audiences saw these NSS short films than any other film in British cinema history. Yet despite this activity, few audience members would have known they were watching a National Screen Service production, and fewer still would have been able to identify the company. In the years since, NSS Ltd has remained as ephemeral and elusive within British cinema history as its main output, the film trailer.
