We have a rough cut, and I'm drinking black coffee out of a glass while watching something on Netflix instant, looking up directions, talking to Carolina Astrain (you may remember the radio piece she did about us for KBIA), and of course, writing a blog post.
I'm drinking coffee out of a glass because we filmed part of Loss For Words in a coffee shop that served its 16oz that way.
I'm doing everything else, because, well, like everyone else I know, I'm a pathological multitasker.
Much has been written - including a song by the Limousines - about how we're increasingly a nation of Very Busy People.
We've heard about the dark side of this ad naseum: a generation that Tweets nonsense all day but doesn't read. And sure, some of it's alarmism, fear of change, infectious blather...
But there's also a point to all of this.
The point to all this
The rough cut of Loss For Words is 116 minutes long. It's the best movie we've ever made. It's also 5 minutes longer than Salad Daze, and I'll be honest, Randy and I are a little worried about this.
Inception ran 2 hours and 28 minutes without me so much as checking my watch, The Social Network is two hours on the dot without anyone complaining, but Randy isn't David Fincher, and I'm not Aaron Sorkin, and it's much harder for an independent film to ask for that much of your time.
The data says
When I redesigned BeTheShoe.com, I decided to make all of our feature films free for anyone to watch online. I don't regret that decision, but we learned a lot from it.
When you go to see a movie in a theater, you pay $9 (or $5 if its one of our shows), and you watch it. When you rent a movie, you pay $4 (or $1 for Redbox) and probably watch it.
In fact, when you downloaded a copy of Salad Daze for $5, you probably watched the whole thing.
Yet, when we put all of our movies on the web for free, people stopped finishing the damn movies. They'd watch some, then go back to Facebook.
There are two reasons I know this:
- We collect a lot of data.
- If you tell me you watched American Gothic and fail to accuse me and Randy of being sick, twisted people, there's no way you saw the ending.
This is a problem.
Stories without an ending
The idea that stories have a beginning, middle, and end is so fundamentally obvious that I'm not going to insult your intelligence by explaining the premise. Instead, I'm going to insult your intelligence with a short list of movies that probably would've sucked if you switched to Facebook before the ending.
- Fight Club (obvious choice)
- The Sixth Sense (suggested by Brian Paul)
- Magnolia (suggested by Joe Weil)
- Just Friends (suggested by Carolina Astrain)
- Inception
- The Social Network
- True Grit
- Stranger Than Fiction
- The Hurt Locker
- Almost Famous
You get the picture.
It's not me, it's you... and all of us
I know that Salad Daze and American Gothic can hold your interest. I know this because I've been in theaters watching as 150 people hold their breath, die laughing, and bring their friends to the next show.
I also know Loss For Words is a better movie than both of those combined. And as our friends and audience scatters across the country, I know that for a lot of people, the first opportunity that they'll have to see our new movie will be on the web.
As a developer, I don't think the web is inherently a bad way to watch movies. But I realize that, even on my own Netflix account, I pay a lot more attention to movies that come as DVDs than the ones I instant-view. I watch them on the same TV screen using the same streaming-enabled BluRay player. So the device isn't the problem.
It's the effort.
When it takes no effort on my part to watch something, whether it's paying for a ticket, physically going to see it, or waiting for it to come in the mail, do I really have less stake paying attention to it?
Making Digital Work For Features
We're not smart enough to sort out global attention span issues. And while we'll be experimenting with methods to help people stay invested in a good story, ultimately we need the audience to realize that you haven't watched a movie if you haven't seen the ending.
So, I'd like to ask you a favor.
When you watch Loss For Words, or any of our other movies, please give us at least 30 minutes of your undivided attention.
I promise you, we'll earn the rest.
