Epic Burnout

More power to film makers can be a pain in the butt to audiences.

Charles Oliver from the March 1995 issue

Two hours into the Kevin Costner film Wyatt Earp, I wondered if it would ever end. Over an hour later, it did.

One of the most conspicuous trends in movies over the past three years has been the increasing number of very long films: Wyatt Earp, 181 minutes; Wolf, 125 minutes; Clear and Present Danger, 141 minutes; True Lies, 141 minutes; Renaissance Man, 129 minutes; Being Human, 125 minutes; and Color of Night, 121 minutes.

Going back over the past couple of years, we find other examples: The Bodyguard, 130 minutes; Malcolm X, 201 minutes; Scent of a Woman, 157 minutes; Chaplin, 144 minutes; Hoffa, 140 minutes; and Lorenzo's Oil, 135 minutes. There are many others. Todd McCarthy, a critic for the show business trade publication Variety, pointed out this trend three years ago. At that time, he noted, "Now, I automatically perk up upon learning that a film runs just 89 minutes." Today, a movie that short still stands out from the pack.

Most critics who have commented on this trend toward longer movies suggest that film makers today just don't know how to make a tightly focused movie. There's some validity to this argument, but the key factor behind bloated, lengthy films is the increasing economic power of the talent behind them.

When is a long movie too long? Traditionally, theaters have preferred a 90- minute running time. Anything more cuts down on their ability to clear out the theaters and clean up between screenings. Lengths much greater than 90 minutes force theaters to eliminate screenings. A 90- minute film can be shown six times on one full day of screenings. A three- hour film such as Wyatt Earp can be shown only three times on one screen on one working day.

But for the purposes of this article, I'll use a more elusive concept of length. Namely, a film is too long when it isn't tightly focused, when scenes could be cut, when it feels padded. As Harry Cohn, the longtime head of Columbia Pictures, once said, "When my butt begins to hurt, the movie is too long."

Judged by this criteria, Schindler's List was fine at 195 minutes. At 120 minutes, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York could have been seriously trimmed. And even at a mere 87 minutes North was way, way too long.

Now, in some of the instances we have mentioned, the length of the film was a deliberate decision. Wyatt Earp and
Malcolm X were supposed to be epics. Yet their stories ultimately did not support the length imposed upon them. At some point, this should have been pointed out to the films' creators. But most of the films listed above were not explicitly trying for epic stature. They were just flabby.

In the so- called Golden Age of Hollywood film making, the business of movie making was a study in vertical integration. Large theater chains owned the major studios. And these studios locked up the major talent with long- term contracts. They were the only game in town, and they exercised tight control over film makers.

If an actor balked at playing a role assigned by the studio, he could be loaned out to the small independent studios, banished to the world of cheap serials and B movies. Or worse, he might be suspended, unable to work and receiving no pay.

Directors often did not have any input into the writing of scripts. They sometimes did not even see them until the day they were to start shooting them. Nor did they have the right to determine the final shape of their films. In fact, they often were not even allowed into the editing rooms where what they had shot was shaped into a film. By that time, the director might be off shooting another movie.

This system was geared toward tight films. Not only because that is what theaters, the ultimate owners in this system, preferred to show, but also because that was what maximized the use of resources. Tighter scripts meant tighter shooting schedules. This in turn allowed studios to rush actors from film to film, amortizing their yearly salaries over several movies.

Off the top of my head, I looked up several films from this era in a movie reference book. Their running times were: The Public Enemy, 84 minutes; Red Dust, 83 minutes; The Bride of Frankenstein, 75 minutes; The Champ, 87 minutes; and Flying Down to Rio, 89 minutes.

But in 1947, the U.S. government busted up the old studio system, forcing the studios to divorce themselves from the theater chains. In addition, television began to draw away a large portion of the cinema audience. Soon the studios could not profitably maintain the contract system. Eventually, actors, directors, and writers became free agents bargaining with studios on per- film employment.

One of the ways that Hollywood responded to those developments was with the production of huge spectacle films that television couldn't emulate. The theaters of the 1950s were filled with epics such as Quo Vadis, The Ten Commandments, and Ben- Hur.