“A great film reveals itself in five minutes”
A pair of smart folks at the New Yorker — Richard Brody and Emily Nussbaum — have been engaged in a back-and-forth about whether we really find ourselves in the midst of the Next Golden Age of TV. Amidst all of their analysis, Brody in his latest article makes this observation:
Put in the DVD of “Vertigo” or any of the other top-ranking films in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics poll — “Citizen Kane,” “Tokyo Story,” “Rules of the Game,” “Sunrise,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “The Searchers,” “Man with a Movie Camera,” “Passion of Joan of Arc” — and fast-forward ahead randomly, then watch for five minutes. Those five minutes won’t show you everything you need to know about these movies, but they should suffice to do the essential thing: to arouse admiration, astonishment, and love, as well as the hunger to see the whole movie and anything else that Hitchcock, Welles, Renoir, Dreyer, and company have to offer. In fact, any five minutes of such movies would show something fundamental about movies themselves, about the essence of the art.
He goes on to ponder the question if the same quality pertains to television, an intriguing question, but…
That’s not what my takeaway from the article was. Rather I zeroed in on the very idea of how a “great film reveals itself in five minutes.”
Doesn’t that sound familiar to the admonition directed toward screenwriters about grabbing a reader’s attention in 10 pages… 15 pages… however many pages?
If we take Brody’s idea and apply it to screenplays, we are faced with two intriguing notions:
First, what if a baseline challenge is to sell a reader on our story not within 15 or 10 pages, but 5, basically compelling us to hook them with our story’s opening, and not only grab their attention, but “reveal” something essential about the movie in those 5 pages.
The second thing is this: What if we took Brody at his word and shifted the focus to any set of 5 pages in a script? That is, we could flip to any point in a script, ask a reader to go through the next 5 pages, and our expectation would be that those 5 pages would “reveal” something compelling about the story.
This test, if you will, may not work for all types of stories, but my gut tells me it’s a great way to force us to make interesting, engaging, and entertaining stuff happen on a tight recurring basis: Never go more than 5 pages without giving the reader something worthwhile and exciting to read.
Of course, every scene should stand on its own two feet from an entertainment standpoint, so I guess this 5 page challenge is more about plot points… or distinctive occurrences… character reveals… something that reminds the reader, “This story is a movie.
What do you think? Is the idea of a 5 page test, based on the corollary assumption to Brody’s thesis that a great story reveals itself in 5 pages, a valid one? Helpful or formulaic?
Let me know your thoughts. Click on Reply and I’ll see you in comments.
For the rest of the New Yorker article, go here.
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