The length of books and movies

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

When I was a kid the average movie ran to 90 minutes and the average book to less than 200 pages. I mean Agatha Christie wrapped up the most complex murders in less than 200 pages and the Dam Busters covered the planning, design and delivery of the bouncing bomb in less than 2 hours.

Goddamit, even Morse solved the most complex of murders in 90 minutes.

To be sure, academic tomes were often longer but that’s a different matter.

It seems this art has been lost nowadays in the world of the so called ‘blockbuster.’ I look at the books on my shelves, not many fiction I know, and what do I see? The brighter and more recent ones are much thicker whilst the slimmer ones are old and stained. Not so easy to discern with movies because you have to look on the back of the DVD box but it’s the same story. You’d expect summat like ‘The Longest Day’ to be on the long side but why it took 2.5 hours to knock off Meryl Streep in ‘The Bridges of Madison County’, I’ll never know. I think they call it ‘characterisation.’

Yes, yes, I know that ‘War and Peace’ was very long and Dostoyevsky could not pack a story into anything less than an inch thick. But they were 19^th century Russians and I was not their audience so maybe they were appealing to others. Today, I blame Stephen King for he cannot express anything in less than a book at least one inch thick. Same with Dean Koontz but he is even more superficial.

Moving on to music – well in the 60’s we could have a damn good pop song which sold millions and lasted just 2 minutes and say 54 seconds. Now that brevity is lost, they have to pad it out a while.

At work, I used to get ever larger emails with multi megabyte attachments and a note saying something like, ‘You may find this interesting.’ That was easily sorted. Just bounce them back to the sender with a note saying that it was far too long to read and a request for the key points to be summarised in no more than 2 pages.

Same with emails from Cardiff County Council - huge attachments on strategic planning or the price of biscuits in down town cafes. And being in Wales, they were double the normal size for everything had to be written in English and Welsh. Emails I just deleted and hard copies went in the bin. It didn't seem to bother them. They could claim that I'd been consulted and it mattered not if I had not replied.

I am conscious that I am guilty of TMI and natter too much but as I have grown older I just simply prefer succinctness.