A slick new mashup trailer for a nonexistent movie is turning heads in Hollywood. The promo clip for hypothetical thriller The Five Senses “stars” The Hangover’s Bradley Cooper, thanks to snippets of his past work cribbed from Alias and other productions.

“A ‘ripped’ trailer is an amazing way to get attention for a property, particularly one that doesn’t have a pre-existing following,” Glassgold told Wired.com, describing the fake film as “a mind-bending thriller in the vein of David Fincher’s Se7en but with a supernatural twist.”

Glassgold and Pitts have reason to be optimistic about their latest example of the “if you build the trailer they will come” school of movie-pitching, which hit YouTube last Monday. (See the Five Senses trailer above.) “By Tuesday afternoon we received calls from studios, other producers, a videogame developer and virtually every agency in town,” Glassgold said. “This trailer begins a dialog with the creative community as we start looking for screenwriters and financiers.”

The same strategy worked last year when their English-language faux trailer for Technotise, inspired by an obscure Serbian animation feature, persuaded screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis (Avatar, Shutter Island) to script a live-action adaptation for Legendary Pictures. (See the Technotise trailer below.)

The Five Senses clip has likewise triggered plenty of rubbernecking from industry insiders as Glassgold prepares to bang the drum for the film and its companion graphic novel at Comic-Con.

The comic book version of Five Senses debuts at Comic-Con International this week.
(Image courtesy Viper Comics)

Glassgold and I Am Entertainment producing partner Raymond Brothers powwowed at Comic-Con last summer with Viper Comics publisher Jessie Garza, hatching a multiplatform strategy for Five Senses.

To make the trailer, video artist Pitts spent 10 months sorting through 50 movies before he arrived at bits that would form a coherent story. He initially had Captain America star Chris Evans in mind as the lead, “but there just wasn’t enough content from his past work,” Pitts said.

“Raymond mentioned Cooper as a possibility and I remembered he had done the TV series Alias,” Pitts said. “That was the launching pad. Then I stumbled upon Midnight Meat Train, which I had never heard of before, and it was decided.”

Citing The Game, Panic Room and Phone Booth as stylistic guides, Pitts drew from 30 different sources to compile the 2-minute, 17-second clip.

“With this type of project, there’s no way to streamline the process,” Pitts said. “You have to dream up a type of dialog, then find something close to that, then dream up something else and either make it fit together or start over. It’s like mixing several jigsaw puzzles together and trying to make them fit together.”

Pitts, who earns his living as media director for a Dallas-area church, indicates that mashup expertise requires patience and an unflagging eye for the killer snippet.

“You can’t go into it with a preconceived plan, because the pieces you were hoping for may never materialize,” he said. “You just take it as it comes.”