Slow-Moving Pictures

...By the time Coppola made the sequel two years later, he had got the idea: The Godfather, Part II is three hours and twenty minutes long...

...They make an unholy mess, these amphibians, but when the frog storm is over none of the movie's twenty-five speaking characters seems all that struck with surprise...

...Before the success of Titanic, at three hours and twelve minutes, the conventional wisdom was that short was good and long was bad...

...But in the 1950s and 1960s, while television programs typically ran thirty minutes or an hour, movies became the home of the epic...

...The Godfather, at almost three hours, was the first of the new VLMs— though new-wavey Coppola was so concerned about its potential stodginess that his first cut was forty-five minutes shorter than the final release...

...And then, one afternoon, Gilbert and his wife take in an exhibition intended to show Londoners what life in a Japanese village is like...

...Anderson's previous picture, Boogie Nights, heralded a major talent, and New Line Cinema gave him carte blanche to make his major statement on the human condition in a three-hour VLM...

...Producers needed to offer audiences something they could not get at home...

...Ripley, about a charming psychopath, takes two hours and thirty-nine minutes of your time, only twenty-three minutes fewer than The English Patient, the previous VLM from writer-director Anthony Mingh-ella...

...But the movie doesn't even get to The Mikado until more than an hour has passed...

...And movies got longer...

...So leaden did these Hollywood epics become that an entire European film scene arose in ideological opposition to them...

...Frank Darabont, the writer and director of The Green Mile, should have heeded Adler before he concluded his movie with the words: "Sometimes the green mile is so long...

...But Titanic changed all that...

...Guess what...

...Why should they...

...That's Magnolia, which purports to tell the story of a day in the life of a bunch of people all connected in some way to a game show called What Do Kids Know...

...Movies moved off the backlot and into the open air...

...It doesn't matter how long a movie is if a single customer is willing to buy three tickets instead of one over the space of a few weeks—that's a captive audience, the most desirable in the world of retail...

...Cecil B. de Mille liberated the Jews from Egyptian slavery in three hours and forty minutes in The Ten Commandments...

...The Talented Mr...

...Oliver Stone's hysterical football film Any Given Sunday body-slams you for over two and a half hours, as does the screen version of Shakespeare's bloodiest play, Titus Andronicus (billed as simply Titus, perhaps to give viewers the illusion that it's shorter...

...Part of the magisterial quality of The Godfather is its length...

...The Muse takes hold, and for the next hour and a half we watch as this popular classic is written and staged— how the two men work together harmoniously, how the seemingly petulant Gilbert directs the show with deep care and concern for the feelings of the actors, even how this incredibly stubborn man makes a disastrous decision on the night before the opening but is able to reverse it when the entire company politely but firmly challenges him to do so...

...The Godfather is the movie every Hollywood director today thinks about when he says he wants to make a three-hour movie...

...Darabont wants his viewers to think about the inexorable journey toward the grave, but it's equally likely, after three hours and eight minutes of moviegoing, that they are thinking instead about the inexorable journey to the restroom...

...Sure, you can make a classic that runs only ninety minutes...

...Sullivan, an affable libertine with an American mistress and a taste for French bordellos, believes he should be writing more serious music and recognizes that the operetta format he and Gilbert have mined so successfully is beginning to wane...

...It could have been cut in half and would remain as insubstantial and pointless as it is at 188 minutes...

...They, in turn, influenced the new generation of young American directors who learned their trade in the 1960s while Hollywood was turning out overlong epic (In Harm's Way) after overlong musical (Doctor Doolittle) after Rule number one, whether a movie lasts for five minutes or twelve hours: It's got to have a plot...

...There's not a single major plot point revealed in the first twenty minutes, which depict the wedding of Don Corleone's daughter...

...New technologies were invented that took advantage of the horizontal sweep of the movie screen: VistaVision and CinemaScope and Todd A-O...

...Rule number one, whether a movie lasts for five minutes or twelve hours: It's got to have a plot...

...The sequence gives Coppola the space and time to introduce fifteen different characters, fix them firmly in our minds, and give us a sense of the world we're in...

...overlong comedy (It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World...

...Like any VLM, the movie builds to a huge climax it keeps signaling with posters and billboards throughout the film reading "Exodus 8:2"—and, sure enough, at the end of the day a whole mess of frogs starts raining down on the San Fernando Valley...

...Instead, Ride with the Devil is weirdly lopsided, with a long setup, a short burst of action scenes in which you can barely make out who's who, and then a long denouement...

...In a world of cable television, Pay-Per-View, and the Internet, the motion-picture industry has been feeling in recent years the same kind of threat as it did in the early 1950s, when television invaded American homes...

...Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson never makes clear just what these people did to deserve this biblical wrath except that they aren't very nice to one another...

...And since television was a little box that sat in the living room while movie screens back then were twenty feet high and forty feet wide, Hollywood decided to fill those screens...

...That's also true of a new movie that isn't a VLM but ought to be—Ride with the Devil, a fascinating and complicated story of Civil War guerrilla fighting in Kansas, which feels as though it had cut out of it the thirty minutes it needed to make it more balanced and comprehensible...

...Somehow, Coppola got hired to direct one of those overlong musicals, Finian's Rainbow, which was every bit as bad as every other overlong musical—but it put him on the map when Paramount Pictures went looking for an Italian-American to direct The Godfather...

...At a pre-opening screening, the comedian Mort Sahl stood up in the third hour and hollered, "Otto, let my people go...

...The Hollywood producers and the theater owners learned anew that if you make a movie memorable enough, people will watch it over and over again...

...You can even make a great movie that runs sixty-four minutes, the length of Dumbo...

...The languor of its camera movements, the care and detail with which even the most minor of characters is introduced—these qualities instill an odd confidence in a moviegoer that a director knows exactly what he's doing and won't confuse us or trip us up on the way there...

...The directors of the French "New Wave," most famously Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, believed in making movies with short, punchy scenes in everyday settings without all the grandiose folderol...

...The Green Mile is an example of a burgeoning film genre, the Very Long Movie...

...They're not just telling a story...

...But directors think differently when they're working on a three-hour canvas...

...The Insider—a movie that asks its audience to decide which it hates more, a tobacco company or the CBS television network—is three hours long...

...Frogs are optional...

...Six of the last twelve movies to win the Academy Award for best picture are VLMs: Schindler's List, Braveheart, The English Patient, Dances With Wolves, The Last Emperor, and Titanic...

...Instead, we find ourselves in a meticulously recreated 1880s London, getting to know these two very different characters and the theater they inhabit...

...Theater owners, too, want many different people passing through their multi-plexes—not so much because they want the ticket sales, which they have to split with the studios, but because they want to sell popcorn and soda at the gouging prices with which they make their profit...

...But there is one current VLM that doesn't justify its length...

...Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan came to write their most distinctive operetta, The Mikado...

...The young director most powerfully influenced by the French new wave was Francis Ford Coppola, who made a couple of unwatchable little movies where people either gamboled about tiresomely in the stacks of the New York Public Library (You're a Big Boy Now) or visited stark Midwestern towns in the company of brain-damaged football players (The Rain People...

...Gilbert, one of the wittiest men who ever lived, is irascible and melancholy, with a doting wife he cannot bring himself to touch and a ghastly ancient father whose only mode of conversation is invective...

...The Very Long Movie—the VLM, for short—is loosely defined as any film that runs longer than two and a half hours, though a full-blown VLM has to reach the critical three-hour mark...

...There were occasional exceptions, such as the nearly four-hour Gone with the Wind or the three-hour Best Years of Our Lives, but when you consider that Hollywood was cranking out six hundred movies a year in those days, you can see just how rare it was for a studio chief to allow a movie to go on at length...

...It's a gorgeous movie and might have profited from being even longer...

...they're attempting to put something definitive on film—something with scope and heft that will engage the audience's deepest emotions...

...Four years later, in Exodus, Otto Preminger told the story of the founding of the modern state of Israel in about the same amount of time...

...Take, for example, Topsy-Turvy, which opens across the country in January...

...Sullivan says in exasperation...

...John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Post...

...Frogs are optional...

...We meet the cast of the D'Oyly Carte company and get to know them...

...So is an unusual costume drama about Gilbert and Sullivan called TopsyTurvy...

...It turns out he had nothing to say and no story to tell...

...In theaters now, aside from The Green Mile, there's an epic about San Fernando anomie called Magnolia that clocks in one minute shy of three hours...

...Posters promised never-before-seen spectacles with thousands of extras in movies about the battles of Alexander the Great or the fall of Rome...

...We see the premiere of Princess Ida, which nobody really likes—"Really, Gilbert, another magic potion...

...Written and directed by Mike Leigh, the movie is about how W.S...

...A long film can't be shown as many times in a day, and since Hollywood determines whether a movie is a hit almost exclusively on the basis of the box-office receipts from its first weekend, a film that screens four times a day instead of six is risky...

...The classic Hollywood studio film of the 1930s and 1940s ran ninety minutes...

...Three hours allow for character development and the unfolding of subplots that begin to suggest something of the experience of reading a novel...

...by John Podhoretz In the forgotten 1979 film Natural Enemies, the narrator informs the audience, "My life stretched out before me like a bad movie"—to which the critic Renata Adler responded, "It is precisely the sort of line no author should attempt...

...But the desire for Oscars is not the only reason for the increasing number of VLMs...

...It was the Hollywood producer, Robert Evans, who insisted that he let the movie take its time...