"A friend to every exhibitor": National Screen Service and the British trailer industry

National Screen Service (NSS) can be regarded as Britain’s lost film studio, a film producer and distributor that monopolised the British ‘coming attraction’ trailer industry for decades. Reclaiming it from the tag of ‘service industry’, the chapter argues that while NSS may now be as historically ephemeral as the film trailers it produced, it was in fact a vibrant and vital part of the British film industry between the mid-1920s and the 1980s. Utilising primary documents, audio-visual sources and new interview material, the chapter reconstructs this lost giant of the British industry.