Hollywood's latest four-letter word? Edit

[KiwiCoromandel]

We hope you're sitting comfortably. Blockbuster season is upon us, which means lots of long films.

Do films really have to be so long? Just recently we have seen some whoppers. The Da Vinci Code was a pitiless 2½ hours. Surely a few minutes could have been clipped here or there. Then there's Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, which is way too long at 150 minutes, and Superman Returns at 154 minutes.

Last year we had the indecently long King Kong, while soon we'll see Michael Mann's Miami Vice at 146 minutes long.

The vast number of films in differing categories, and with wildly different releases and audience masses, makes screen-time averages all but meaningless. But King Kong is certainly a case in point: at three hours, Peter Jackson's film was almost twice as long as the 1933 original, made at a time when movies were shorter because they had to fit either side of a double-bill - that quaint cinema tradition that has all but vanished.

One reason films are conceived at this gargantuan size is that this is supposed to be an integral part of the "event movie" experience - and event movies like The Lord Of The Rings trilogy are supposed to have that extra-special something to tempt people away from their plasma screens and home cinema systems.

Gone With The Wind, Lawrence Of Arabia, The Sound Of Music - they were all event movies of three hours plus, which, when the lights went up afterwards, left you with a feeling of achievement simply for getting through them. And, at well over three hours, Titanic was the event movie that set a new pace.

But why should the industry tolerate long films, which presumably mean fewer ticket sales? Industry observers note that the preponderance of multiplex theatres means this is not so much of a problem these days: they can schedule the same movie in different screens with staggered start times. Others note darkly that with the studios being owned by infotainment conglomerates, there are lots of product placements to shoehorn in and songs to boost soundtrack record sales. And for Bollywood, long movies have always been seen as value for money.

But for modern Hollywood, a lot of it is down to ego. The bigger the film, the bigger the clout: the producer and director must have sheer conspicuous power to unload such a long movie on audiences. The primal scene in movie history is an anecdote recalled by Hollywood mogul Robert Evans, who sat down to a first screening of The Godfather, and was outraged to find it was only two hours and six minutes.

He wanted grandeur, he wanted epic. Evans yelled at Francis Ford Coppola: "Schmuck! You short-changed yourself. What studio head tells a director to make a picture longer? Only a nut like me. You shot a saga, and you turned in a trailer. Now give me a movie."

Harvey Weinstein was the heir to Evans's attitude in allowing Quentin Tarantino to extend Kill Bill into a two-part movie. Directors like long films, and producers can be persuaded that tolerating and even encouraging long films is a sign of their own machismo-patronage. Despite our eroding attention span, the three-hour film is here to stay.

source:The Guardian

[Shawn]

I can't stand the 70 minute movies. Gimme 2 hours of entertainment please.

[DudeAsInCool]

Editing is an artform, and most filmmakers can't tell a story economically - it has more to do with that than their ego

[rainbowdemon]

:D

I've always thought it was kind of funny. The theaters try to sell you 4 gallons of soda, and then sit you down to a 3 hour movie!!

:D