IN THEATERS, DOES LONGER MEAN BETTER?

Byline: Bruce McCabe Boston Globe

The couple seeing ``Leaving Las Vegas'' on a Saturday night were restless. Finally, after watching Nicolas Cage drain his umpteenth glass and bottle of alcohol, the man turned to the woman and said: ``He says he's going to drink himself to death and he's doing it. Do we have to stay and watch him do the whole thing?''

The next moment they got up and left.

The couple are part of an audience that's getting impatient with movies, especially with the time it takes for too many movies to make a point. Movies are taking too long, they say. A lot of people who watch them for a living agree.

The long and short of the opinions about movie running times these days is really more of an impression, but it appears to be grounded in fact. An examination of one category of movies - those nominated for best picture since the Academy Awards began, in 1928 - reveals that their average running time has dramatically increased over the years. More precisely, the survey (conducted by Creative Research Solutions Inc. of Brookline, Mass.) shows that these prestige films reached a peak running time in the late 1950s and early '60s and then, after several decades of up-and-down movement, have recently inched back toward that record length.

The previous increase occurred around the time that the television industry was coming into its own as a mass medium and competing with the movie industry for the leisure-time audience. Vying with TV meant giving viewers something they wouldn't see on the tube - which often meant big-theme entertainments to show on bigger screens, which often meant longer running times.

Television is still the competition, of course. But these days the theory is that TV reduces our attention span. That makes people in the movie industry very conscious of running times: They fear the ``too long'' critique of a movie, equating it with ``boring.''

A. Alan Friedberg, the retired chairman of Sony Theatres, says he's familiar with the complaint about long movies. It reminds him of producer Samuel Goldwyn's admonition to prospective filmmakers: ``Don't tell me how good it is, tell me how long it is.''

``Ideally, an exhibitor likes movies to be long enough to fill and spill twice a night,'' Friedberg says, using the industry shorthand for ``turning over'' the audience in a given theater.

Lots of other industry observers share Friedberg's perception that movies are longer these days. What they don't share is a common explanation for why. Among the various theories is movie historian/critic Leonard Maltin's opinion that present-day studios, directors and writers just don't know how to make movies. ``Take `Primal Fear,' '' says Maltin, citing a two-hour, 11-minute thriller released this spring. ``I liked it but it's too long. Two of the plot threads go nowhere. Whenever I discern this in a movie, I sigh. I find myself wanting to leave.''

But the sigh factor is nothing new. Donald Spoto is the author of a number of film biographies, most recently one of actor James Dean. Spoto says that ``Giant,'' the 1956 film starring Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson, ``was three hours long and it's boring - except when Dean and Elizabeth Taylor are on the screen. Then it's wonderful.''

Michael Schlesinger is director of repertory for Sony Pictures, and another professional observer. (His own paraphrase of the Goldwyn observation, by the way, goes: ``It's not how good is it long, it's how long is it good.'') He says his opinion as a moviegoer is that high-profile movies like ``Heat'' (with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro) and Martin Scorsese's ``Casino,'' both of which are just short of three hours, ``seem longer.''

``Maybe movies about Las Vegas are long,'' he says. ``Or just seem long.''

Indeed, some moviegoers found ``Leaving Las Vegas'' (one hour, 51 minutes), in which Oscar winner Cage announces his intention to drink himself to death and then does it, interminable. ``A lot of people went to `Leaving Las Vegas' because of the good critical reviews but they turned out not to be the audience for the film,'' says Bo Smith, head of the film program at the Museum of Fine Arts. ``It was a little like `The Deer Hunter' (three hours, three minutes), a personal, big-budget production in the '70s that got good reviews but threw people off.''

Which brings us to filmmakers' egos, often cited as a cause of longer running times.

``They've forgotten that brevity is the soul of wit,'' says Maltin, referring to prestige directors. ``The idea is, or should be, always leave the audience wanting more.''

Maltin thinks studios are part of the problem because they hurry a lot of movies through post-production. ``A lot of movies are released prematurely because the studio tells the filmmakers, `We're releasing this a week from Friday,' '' he says.

Once it was the studios that enforced certain conventions about movies' lengths. ``The '30s and '40s were the golden age,'' says Schlesinger. ``In the old days, films were under two hours and B films'' - the second movie in a double feature - ``were about an hour. After the demise of the double feature, running times became less crucial in exhibition.''

With the rise of television, he notes, ``a one-hour television drama replaced the B movie.'' Studios were convinced that they would win larger audiences with bigger movies, the so-called ``road shows'' of the '50s and early '60s. They were ``technologically dramatic,'' says Schlesinger, citing such titles as ``How the West Was Won'' (two hours, 45 minutes), ``Lawrence of Arabia'' (three hours, 36 minutes) and ``Around the World in 80 Days'' (two hours, 47 minutes).

Some movies were so long there had to be intermissions. ``In the early '60s, `Cleopatra' ran 2-1/2 to three hours with an intermission,'' recalls Bo Smith. He is among those who are philosophical about the lengths to which some movies go. He says that running times are ``fashionable, like skirt lengths.''

``Back in the '30s they had this wonderful length, one hour, 19 minutes. Warner Bros. genre flicks had to be that length,'' says film critic Gerald Peary, a Suffolk University professor of communications and journalism. ``Then those films went up to one hour, 32 minutes. In the early '40s, `Citizen Kane' and film noir ushered in longer running times. Films became more baroque and filigreed. They added curlicues. `Kane' is about two hours long. Films in general started adding half-hours.''

Dan Kimmell, Boston correspondent for Variety, the entertainment trade publication, says the rule of thumb used to be that comedies and genre movies should run one hour, 30 minutes. Today, times run the gamut. There are movies like ``Mr. Holland's Opus,'' he points out, which came in at 2-3/4 hours because ``you're seeing everything of his life.'' Then there's Disney's ``James and the Giant Peach,'' which is less than one hour, 30 minutes.

Peary says the problem is that ``filmmakers equate length with seriousness: `If it's over two hours it's art.' For years at film festivals I've found myself constantly bombarded with incredibly long art pictures that, it turns out, are being tried out on you. Later, if and when they open, they turn out to be 20 minutes shorter.''

Spoto thinks mistaking length for seriousness applies to Hollywood movies, too. He blames the studios' ``blockbuster mentality - the idea that if you're spending $140 million on a picture, it must be good. It's a theory that's contrary to good moviemaking.''

And according to Kimmell, blockbusters make us think differently about average movie times. He says the impression of greater length is heightened especially near the end of the year, when Oscar contenders are released close to the deadline for nominations. He cited the longer ``prestigious'' movies of last December, like ``Nixon'' (three hours, 11 minutes). And during summer, we get blockbusters like last year's ``Waterworld'' (two hours, 16 minutes) or this year's ``Independence Day'' (two hours, 25 minutes), ``A Time to Kill'' (two hours, 25 minutes) and ``Courage Under Fire (two hours, 35 minutes).

When you get right down to it, the impression of length is more important than clock time. As Spoto pointed out, ``Hitchcock's `North by Northwest' is two hours, 16 minutes and it runs so smoothly it seems like half an hour.''

Sony Pictures' Schlesinger supplied a whole list of examples: ```Once Upon a Time in America' was four hours. `Schindler's List' was over three hours. Producers would always rather have one of those long hits than a short flop. (Director) Walter Hill did `Trespass' in one hour, 44 minutes and `Wild Bill' in one hour, 37 minutes. I don't think anyone went to those movies and came out saying, `Thank God, he's still under two hours.'

``Then there was Bernardo Bertolucci's `1900.' It came in at five hours. Paramount cut it to four hours for release. They did it by shortening the scenes internally. The result was that the film seemed even longer. So the studio put 11 minutes back in. The movie just flew. It's a matter of rhythm and patterns in the editing.''

Rev. Edward Marks, minister at Harvard-Epworth United Methodist Church, presented classic movies at the church for three decades, until ending one of the area's most beloved film series this year. From that perspective, he makes the same point: ``I loved (Jacques Rivette's 1974) `Celine and Julie Go Boating,' which was more than three hours long, and I liked `GoodFellas' at two hours. I liked `Once Upon a Time in the West' at 2-1/2 hours and I liked `Shoah' at all eight hours. It took a couple of days to see that one and I've never recovered from the experience.''

Leonard Maltin has his own list like that. ``I stayed with `Braveheart' and `Malcolm X,' '' he says, naming a couple of prestige pictures from recent years. ``With them, you don't look at your watch. They prove that you can make a three-hour movie that's not too long. I took my daughter to see `Pagemaster' last year, with Whoopi Goldberg and Patrick Stewart as the voices. It was one hour, 15 minutes long, but I was bored to tears.''

Alan Friedberg concurs: ``When a movie's good, like `Bridge on the River Kwai,' `My Fair Lady,' `Around the World in 80 Days' or `The Godfather' - these pictures are all three-hours-plus, but nobody complains. When a picture is bad, one hour is too much.''

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) The subject matter of ``Leaving Las Vegas,''starring Elisabeth Shue as a prostitute and Nicolas Cage as an alcoholic, doesn't disturb some viewers as much as does its one-hour, 51-minute length.

(2) ``Heat,'' with Al Pacino as a detective, runs just under three hours, but seemed longer, according to one Sony Pictures executive.

Chart: Movie time

The running of films has increased since the late 20s, however, over the past fourty years, the running time has been volatile

Boston Globe Graphic