b'NATIONAL SCREEN SERVICE HISTORY1920-1940Weve all heard the story about Herman Robbins getting the idea of NSS while selling projector lamps (yeah we heard it too). While thats a great story and it could be true of one of the owners, (Pollak, Weinberg, or Gruen) records tell otherwise. It was two years before Herman Robbins came on board.Robbins was general sales manager for Fox Film, and when he came onboard, he became the face and the name that represented National Screen Service. Some argue that trailers had come out earlierand they did. In 1912, at Rye Beach, New York, the series Adventures of Kathlyn was shown. At the end of the reel, Kathlyn was thrown in the lion\'s den. After this in text title cards was shown "Does she escape the lion\'s pit? See next week\'s thrilling chapter!"And in 1914, Nils Granlund produced an actual trailer for an upcoming Charlie Chaplin film to be shown at the Loew\'s Seventh Avenue Theater in Harlem.But these were individual projects for specific films and not a service that could be used by all theaters. In 1920, National Screen Service (NSS) was formed and began creating crude 35mm film ads from transferred film stills (quite often without the studios approval) and sold them to theaters to show after their feature film. This became so popular that by the mid-1920s, National Screen Service had exclusive contracts with many major studios. The studios supplied clips of major scenes during the filming and NSS created the trailers and sold them to the theaters. The studios LOVED this because it was promoting their films with NO cost to the studio at all. NSS made their money strictly from the exhibitors. The trailers during this time were pretty drab and were basically scenes from the upcoming film spliced together in a newsreel fashion. This changed in the late 1920s with the coming of SOUND.'