Never-ending movies

There’s a lot of concern these days about inflation. The cost of everything is going up.

But there’s another type of inflation that bugs me too. It’s the length of movies. They’re getting exponentially longer — but not necessarily better.

I worked as a projectionist at the Vista and Corral theaters during high school and college in the 1960s and saw plenty of movies. In those days nearly all movies ran between 95 and 110 minutes. That was plenty of time to tell a story, while getting the show over before everyone had to go to the bathroom. It also allowed theatre owners to get in two shows a night. You could run the first show at 7 p.m., it would be over by 8:50 or so and you’d have 10-15 minutes to clear the auditorium and bring the next group in, for a second show at 9:15, maximizing profits through turnover of customers.

Take a look at some of the classic movies. “Casablanca,” the 1942 classic considered by many critics the best movie ever, ran just 102 minutes. “The Maltese Falcon,” 100 minutes. “Psycho,” Alfred Hitchcock’s classic, 104 minutes, “The Graduate,” 106 minutes. “Bullitt,” 114 minutes. “Goldfinger,” which introduced us to James Bond, 110 minutes. “Bonnie and Clyde,” 111 minutes. “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” 110 minutes. “The Odd Couple,” 105 minutes. “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” 108 minutes. “A Fistful of Dollars,” 99 minutes. All under two hours.

Now you go to a movie that isn’t half as good as these and you’re stuck in your seat for two and a half or three hours. You need a bladder the size of Montana to wait it out.

I don’t know why producers and directors make their movies so long. Maybe they get paid by the minute. Maybe it’s ego. But there isn’t a movie longer than two hours that couldn’t benefit from an editor’s scissors.

There have been a few epic movies that required more than two hours, like “The Sound of Music,” “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Longest Day.” We used to call them “road shows.” If they ran longer than two and a half hours, they’d include an intermission so movie-goers could get up and stretch and answer the call of Nature. And buy some more food at the concession stand.

It’s not just movies in theaters. TV shows, especially those streaming in multiple episodes on Netflix, get bloated over time too. We’re watching “Breaking Bad” on Netflix. The first two seasons of seven and 13 episodes each were pretty tight, but after the show was extended three more seasons, they started getting fat. We’re midway through season four now, and we’ve already had to sit through a couple episodes where the characters just talk on and on, with moribund party scenes that don’t move the plot forward, plus flashbacks and dream sequences. They’re just killing time in between killing drug traffickers.

Movies, just like newspaper columns, need good editors to tighten them up and make them better. So my editor tells me to quit writing now so you can go to the bathroom.