The ‘shortening’ of movies
In my conversations with fellow screenwriters, there is a general consensus that the typical movie scene is getting shorter. Whereas scenes 50 years ago might have 3–4 pages long on average, when I first broke into the business in the late 80s, the rule of thumb was 2 pages. Nowadays it feels like the average scene is more like 1 1/2 pages long.
Likewise there is a sense that what used to function as the end Act One plot point now is more likely to occur at the midpoint of the first act.
The same seems to be at work with page count. A quarter-century ago, a normal script might run to 120 pages. Nowadays I talk to writers who like to hit 110, even 105 as an ideal length.
In thinking about this phenomenon of ‘shortening’ movies, there’s really nothing more than anecdotal evidence. Sure, we can screen the 1984 original version of The Karate Kid, note that Miyagi doesn’t officially start training Daniel until nearly midway through the story (although he has been teaching him basic hand motions in a surreptitious fashion), and realize that could never happen in a contemporary movie.
Audiences are smarter. They need less setup. They want to get into the action quicker. Everything about social media is about fast, faster, fastest, and that seems to be reflected in contemporary movies.
But again, no hard evidence… until now. From a recent Wired magazine article:
As filmmaking technology has advanced, films have changed to take advantage of it. The 2005 version of King Kong looks and feels nothing like the 1933 version. The newer Kong appears in vivid color, and thanks to CGI he’s a convincingly lifelike beast. The original soundtrack is tinny and shrill; in the newer one, the great ape’s snorts and growls are deep and realistic.
Movies have changed in less obvious ways too, says James Cutting, a psychologist at Cornell University who’s been studying the evolution of cinema. Cutting presented some of his findings at a recent event here sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “All these things are working to hold our attention better,” Cutting said.
The average shot length of English language films has declined from about 12 seconds in 1930 to about 2.5 seconds today, Cutting said. At the Academy event he showed a scatter plot with data from the British film scholar Barry Salt, who’s calculated the average shot duration in more than 15,000 movies made between 1910 and 2010. That’s a lot of shots. In a 2010 study, Cutting found an average of 1,132 shots per film in a smaller sample of 150 movies made between 1935 and 2010; the King Kong remake, incidentally, had the most: A whopping 3,099 shots packed into 187 minutes.
Here is a chart visualizing that data:
Why this trend?
Cutting says some people have tried to pin declining shot lengths on MTV, by invoking a sort of video-killed-the-attention-span hypothesis. He doesn’t buy it. For one thing, Salt’s graph of declining shot durations has no obvious inflection point in or after 1982, the year MTV was born. Shot durations were declining before that, and they kept declining at a similar rate after.
Cutting isn’t sure what’s driving the change. One factor could be that older films tended to pack more characters into a shot. As a result, film makers had to allow more time for viewers to look around to see who was there. In one recent study Cutting found that each additional character added 1.5 seconds to the length of a shot on average.
So here is actual empirical evidence that at least one respect, there is some shortening effect going on in movies: the length of camera shots.
Does this buttress the argument that there is a shortening effect at work in movies: scenes, Act One, page count? What do you think? And if this is a trend, why do you think it’s happening?
For the rest of the Wired article, go here.
HT to Franklin Leonard for surfacing the article.
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