Failings of the 3 hour film.

Few films need to be over 2 hours. Some rare exemptions are "Titanic" and " The Lord of the Rings." When a film starts creeping over the hour and a half mark, people start looking at their watches, yawning, start thinking about what they are going to do after the film and begin wishing they hadn't had so much soda to drink.

King Kong, I couldn't finish watching but I did skip to the end, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the story of a man who ages backwards, was so long, I began to age with him. Lawrence of Arabia, considered one of the great films, is still an unwatched film by me. I have the dvd, but the movie is 216 minutes long and it is taking forever to get to the meat of the story, the action instead there are a bunch of scenes of him riding through the desert.

When a screenplay is over 90 pages, there has to be a reason for it to be longer otherwise, you end up with a lot of unnecessary filler scenes that slow the story down. But then you don't want a story to be so short, it feels as if there is no tension or drama. For example, " The Seeker: Dark is Rising" started off so slow, then when it kicked in to gear, the seeker found everything so easy, it didn't seem as if he had to work for anything at all.

The classic page length for a screenplay is 120 pages, but not many people these days want to sit two hours in an uncomfortable seat. Especially if your target audience is teenagers.

When I write, I want the story to immediately dive into the deep end of the pool, no wading slowly through back story. I find there are more interesting ways to establish backstory and characters.

Prelude - Psychological Thriller

Prelude is one of my screenplays. The idea came when I was searching through pictures on my laptop and discovered a picture of my Mom and myself at a Soap Opera event. Behind us was a guy who would later become my coworker. I thought it was interesting that I managed to captured the image of someone I would later meet. I started thinking what if someone had taken a picture and ended up capturing something else, for example a wife and coworker in the background in an intimate embrace?

That is how the idea of "Prelude" was born. A picture would be taken and in the background a private moment between a wife and another man would be captured. I intended it at first to be a horror story, but it became a psychological thriller, so still contains elements of horror.

When I write, I like to imagine what the audience would imagine the ending to be, then write something completely different. For a story containing a love triangle, I would imagine a fight at the end with the bad guy getting killed which is the ending of MANY movies out there, so I wrote something different.

I needed characters who weren't 100 percent good or 100 percent evil because not everyone is all good or all bad. Even evil people have someone who love them, someone they show kindness to and even "good people" are capable of evil. And how does someone become evil? These were the themes I wanted to explore in "Prelude."

Below is a brief synopsis.

"Prelude" is a psychological thriller which tells the story of Sam Miller, whose life unravels after he is shown a photograph of his wife, Lola, with another man, Michael Lush. Sam's suspicions consume him and he soon realizes that Michael's plans for Lola and the world are much darker than he ever imagined.