Everyone Has Reversals

Story Lessons, Big and Small (Warning: Spoilers!)

June 10, 2007

Size Matters

So I just finished watching the original Poseidon Adventure for the first time. It'll surprise no one to learn that I dug the heck out of it.

Do you know how many things happen in this movie? We quickly grow to care about some imperfect but loveable people. The wave hits, and the ship capsizes. A small group of survivors led by a (self-described!) "renegade" Reverend makes its way through the ship, trying to maintain hope while hitting obstacle after obstacle. Throughout this journey, there are small plots and threads and jokes and conflicts... and, of course, action o'plenty. This is a big, popcorn blockbuster of old.


Do you know how long this movie is? 117 minutes.


To put that into perspective, here are some recent movie lengths:


Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End - 168 minutes

Zodiac - 158 minutes

Blood Diamond - 143 minutes

Babel - 143 minutes

Spider-Man 3 - 140 minutes

Knocked Up - 129 minutes

Lucky You - 124 minutes

Reign Over Me - 124 minutes


Now, quality and genre aside, may I humbly submit that the vast majority of movies do not need to be this long? And may I further humbly suggest that crossing the two-hour mark for a movie remain the exception, and not the rule? Why is it taking us longer to tell our stories?


Our stories? Yours and mine? Can mostly be told in 100 minutes. Let that be our goal henceforth!

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6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for this Jennica; I wish the increasing length of films was somehow owing to the audiences' expanding attention span, but I saw Spiderman 3 and its interminable tedium couldn't have held the attention of a kid with Asperger's syndrome whose particular obsession was with the movie Spiderman 3.
There's a quote that I've seen attributed to a whole bunch of authors including Twain, Shaw, Kipling and others in which the purported author added the following post script to a piece of lengthy correspondence: "I am sorry for writing such a long letter; I didn't have time to write a short one". Whoever wrote it, nailed it.
Concise, economical writing takes time and energy. Hollywood is lacking in those and risks driving audiences away (and into the classics section at the DVD store).

11:12 p.m.  
Blogger annabel said...

I agree with you!

7:31 p.m.  
Blogger Tracy said...

Have you seen the remake?

8:29 p.m.  
Blogger Jennica said...

I didn't see the theatrical remake, but I did catch the TV version of a couple of years ago. (Oddly, I don't remember much of it; probably not a good sign!)

2:53 p.m.  
Blogger aggiebrett said...

Thi problem—as writers—is that at the end of teh day there's really only so much control you have over how long the director decides to make your pages run.

Case in point: Pirates 3: AT WORLD'S END runs 168 minutes onscreen, but the final draft of the script turned in by Rossio & Elliot clocked at something like 114 pages. (DEAD MAN'S CHEST showed the same disparity, BTW)

What gives there? Well, the next time you watch AWE, pay extra special attention to the long shots where they give time for saluting the eye candy of set design and FX. Pay attention to how many under-great extra pairs of dialog swaps we get from Pintel & Righetti. Pay attention to how many extra seconds are devoted to watching Depp play with the character of Sparrow.

Bottom line, you can write as tight and concise as you like, but if the director insists on padding out your tight pages with loads of extraneous shots and extended takes, there's not much you can do.

Except smile and cash those checks, baby. ;-)
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7:20 p.m.  
Blogger Pants said...

I couldn't agree more! I loved Zodiac, but many of the scenes went on for far too long given the genre of the film.

Fiction seems to suffer the same problem -- North American writers and publishers seem convinced that a novel must be at least 350 pages. Strange when the Brits and Europeans are regularly publishing books of 150-250 pages - sharp, sassy, interesting books!

4:12 p.m.  

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