The Last 20 Minutes

I started a film class today, and one of my professors said that you can do anything you want in the last twenty minutes of a movie. His reasoning was, by that time, everyone is already invested in the film and knows its going to end soon. They also want the conclusion of the story at that time, no matter how much they like it in the first place.

So, he said, basically, you can do whatever the heck you want. Totally disregard exposition, switch from day to night with no explanations, etc etc.

On some level, I think he's right, because I know this happens all the time. It's probably just the better films that don't do this, or can do this very well.

So what about the last "twenty minutes" of your novel? Can you do the same thing? Just food for thought.

Well, his thinking may be correct if you only plan to have one movie, and don't care that word of mouth will keep others from coming to the movie.

People like satisfying endings. A good beginning and middle will keep them in their seats, but a good ending will bring them back for your next movie.

That's because you don't want to leave a sour taste in their mouths, or it will come back to bite you.

AI is a perfect example of how the last twenty minutes of an otherwise good movie can be completely ruined.

A terrible ending will piss off a reader much worse than a terrible first chapter. They'll remember it longer, too.

I hate movies that do this. I'm the kind of person who will watch a good movie over and over. A bad ending will turn me straight off.

I suspect he was exaggerating for effect.

Spoilers for JAWS:

Supposedly, Peter Benchley complained to Steven Spielberg that scuba tanks don't blow up if you shoot them. The director assured him that, if he'd taken the audience that far, they'd go with him a little farther.

Hey, it's good advice if you don't take it to absurd extremes, but I would change it to: you can do anything you want as long as you don't violate narrative/emotional expectations. Logic becomes slightly less important.

Spoilers for THE ROAD WARRIOR:

At the end of the movie, the honest citizens sneak away in a bunch of lumbering busses. Is it logical for them to attempt a journey of a thousand miles in unarmed, unarmored vehicles? Not really. But seeing the little kid in a vehicle that hasn't been modified for combat tells the audience (on an emotional level) that he is safe.

It's not logical for the story, but it's emotionally satisfying.

Non sequitur endings transform books into wallbanging projectiles. A responsible author should consider the potential dangers involved. It's all fun and games, until somebody puts an eye out.

Jen

I don't think you can "do anything you want." A bad ending ruins an otherwise good movie. However, I think you can get away with a good many things if the other 100 minutes are solid.

JAWS is a good example. By the end, I really didn't care anymore -- just kill that damn shark. I'd been frightened to death for the entire movie, especially whe Rorber Shaw met his demise. It's only when I was older that I thought the ending was rushed and kind of incredulous. Your typical blockbuster ending (ironically, Jaws was the first "blockbuster.") But the rest of the film was so good it didn't matter to me.

But I don't think Spielberg could have gotten away from "just about do anything."

Maca, who's your teacher?

I read that there's another "20 minute rule" to movies - that it's always twenty minutes in that some major twist happens. The first big challenge.

Though I've never timed it, it does seem to work - like in Witness, where they head to Amish land, or Star Wars, where Luke heads to Mos Eisley with Obi-Wan.

I think you can buy yourself a little leeway if everything leading up to that last 20 minutes is good, but as mentioned above, you can lose the audience really fast if you go too far.

An example is The Bourne Identity, lots of action and so on, pretty fun movie, then there's that scene towards the end (spoiler alert) where Bourne grabs a dead body and jumps off the landing, and while falling past another landing, shoots his enemy with one shot while using the corpse first as a shield, then as a cushion for the inevitable crash on the lobby floor three or four stories down, then dusts himself off and walks away.

Idiotic. I blurted out, "Oh, come on," in the theatre and got a nice laugh from the crowd.

Maca, who's your teacher?

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Why, think you know him? (;

Anyway, yes, there always has to be the "within reason" limitation on something like this. You certainly can't do "whatever the heck you want" but I think it makes sense. You have more leeway, you don't have to spend time on the explanations, or time between big heroic scenes... it's like making everything a faster pace just so you can get the damn thing finished.

I can only speak from my own experience. As far as writing goes, things simply poured out of me within the last 1/4 of my book. It just did. It was like the flood gates were open and my muses were running around naked with thoughts. It took me less than two weeks to finish the last part of my book, while it took me months and months and months for the rest of it.

Now, the funny thing is, that part of my book also received the least editing and rewrites. Almost everything stayed the way they were written (with grammar, typo fixes, etc.) My readers also had the least negative things to say about that part... they simply read through it, turning pages after pages until it was finished. They did notice a few minor plot issues but they also said they were no big deal (and if anything, could be fixed easily). One reader finished reading the last 180 pages in 4 hours.

Now I don't know if that is the "Last 20 minutes" thing. But it does seem to me that once the readers are hooked on the characters and the story, less and less need to be set up and explained and the plot just flows like crazy. The readers also are more forgiving of minor problems -- sometimes they don't even notice them.

I started a film class today, and one of my professors said that you can do anything you want in the last twenty minutes of a movie. His reasoning was, by that time, everyone is already invested in the film and knows its going to end soon. They also want the conclusion of the story at that time, no matter how much they like it in the first place.

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There is a psychological term for this and it's called consistency. It means that if you are forced to do something that is a little outside of your normal character, you will back wards rationalize a reason for why you did it. There was a study done on betting that discovered that gamblers are much more confident that their bet will win AFTER they have placed the bet, than they are BEFORE they have placed the bet. This is their mind creating the feeling that what they did was justified by their character.

The second component to this is commitment. If there has been some cost involved in the action, then the stake in it turning out positive creates the incentive to back wards rationalize... if the commitment is slight, the need to be consistent isn't as strong. This is why fraternity's and sororities have hazing as part of the entrance requirements... it increases the commitment of it's members.

All of this is gone into much more detail in the book, Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini.

The way this applies to a movie or any other form of story telling is that by slowly increasing the reader involvement with the characters and the development of the story, by the time the story nears the end, the commitment of the reader will be high enough that in order to be consistent with this high commitment, the reader will overlook many things that fly in the face of logic because of their investment in the story.

However, this is NOT a free pass to be completely illogical. Some of the harshest reactions come not from an audience this is let down by the ending to a story that they cared little about, but by an audience that is let down by a story that they cared A LOT for. This is a backlash of their feelings of being involved in the story and it leads to feeling cheated and let down. DO NOT LET THIS HAPPEN! This creates reader resentment, which makes it more difficult to get that reader back for your next piece.

One of the more interesting things revealed in the Cialdini book is that one can increase another persons involvement by getting them to commit to something that they normally wouldn't commit to... like the Chinese having a POW contest to write an essay talking about the great things about democracy, and intentionally choosing the winning essay that mostly is favorable about democracy but is a little bit critical; then getting the winner to make revisions to the essay that are just a little more critical of democracy, and then publishing that essay in the states as the essay of someone who has defected from the US.

Once this happens, it creates the image that the essay writer is a communist and makes it easier to brainwash him completely, since he will now have the image of being a turn coat that psychologically, he will want to be consistent with.

This is called foot in the door, and it means getting someone to invest just a tiny bit to create some commitment and using that to create more commitment, which will make the other person begin to back wards rationalize consistency with beliefs that they normally wouldn't have.

In fiction, this would be the equivalent of beginning a story about an accountant who likes to read the foreign edition of the newspaper, and who also gets strange phone calls in the middle of the night, and who has a business trip scheduled in two weeks to the middle east...

See where that is leading? You can take the most normal character and by slowly adding layers that are incongruent, you can get the reader to buy into each revelation without rejecting it as hogwash, so that when the big revelation comes that is completely implausible, the reader has investment too much not to buy into it (I think the movie True Lies did something similar, but it's been a while since I saw it).

This is a powerful tool for structuring reader involvement and is important to have in the tool box.

- Anatole

Isn't that called "suspension of disbelief"?

Isn't that called "suspension of disbelief"?

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That is the literary term that Coleridge gave it, yes. He called it a willing suspension of disbelief and felt that it arose out of the minds recognizing outer truth in its own reflection, and used it to describe the process in which the reader would embrace the description of a supernatural occurrence.

What this gives us is mainly the what, but not the how... Coleridge came from a romantic paradigm and didn't have the framework on human workings that psychology has given us.

If you haven't read Influence and have an interest in the subject, I highly recommend it.

- Anatole

See

It's when films get a little too "out there" at the end that drives me nuts. I can't stand it. My disbelief doesn't suspend to anywhere. It stays firmly in my head and makes me quite frustrated with the movie.

Re: See

I think suspense of disbelief has to work within the context. Obviously if we've been witnessing elves and dragons and talking trees, a giant spider is not so out of place. Obviously if we've been playing with Aliens, the presence of the Predators is appropriate. Obviously if we've been fighting the bites of a killer shark, blowing it up with an oxygen tank is not too far fetched.

Now, if at the end of Jaws, an alien mothership flys over, beaming a giant spider down to kill the shark and then eat the main characters....

Re: See

One big difference between movies and books is that we see the movie all at once but do not necessarily read the book all at once. When life interferes with reading, it takes a bit for a reader to get back into the story. Once removed, our critical thinking rises, and logic becomes more important. A writer can not expect to control the pace with which readers read books.

then as a cushion for the inevitable crash on the lobby floor three or four stories down, then dusts himself off and walks away.

Idiotic. I blurted out, "Oh, come on," in the theatre and got a nice laugh from the crowd.​

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I think the audience got cheated with this scene only because the movie didn't bring out as much about Bourne as the novel did. He was physically enhanced. As such, he could have survived such a fall, and he didn't just dust himself off. He was injured in the fall.

And while I wouldn't want to try it from the height Bourne did, using a body to cushion a fall is a technique that's taught. It comes under "desperate measures." but a body does give a surprising amount of cushioning.

Good point about what the movie didn't reveal about Bourne, James. Some of that would have mitigated the ludicrousness of that scene. And you're right, he did get injured in the fall. My impression of the whole thing was of an impossible stunt that he should not have been able to walk away from in a million years.

There were a few other ridiculous things in that movie that set me up to be sceptical when that scene came about, such as the secret CIA listening post in Paris with what looked like a dozen satellite dishes clustered on an apartment balcony. Place looked like a CNN broadcast centre.

This is the reverse of the 'suspension of disbelief'; as these incongruities accumulate througout a story, the reader is less and less likely to buy it if you go over the top at the end, if they even get that far.

Nice one, anatole.

The second component to this is commitment. If there has been some cost involved in the action, then the stake in it turning out positive creates the incentive to backwards rationalize.

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This is, for better or worse, exactly what we're experiencing in Iraq. The more we lose in life, the more we want to see it through to the end.

One thing to remember when you're writing your novel:

Movies are short stories.

As James M says, a movie is a short story. I thought The Bourne Identity was very well done, but I doubt I might not have thought this without first reading the books. I could fill in what the movie had to leave out because of time.

They say short stories make the best movies, and novels make the best miniseries and trilogies. I think there's a lot of truth to this.

I saw Bourne Identity without reading the book first, and I'd say - I felt the empty space in that movie. I really had to supply my own imagination to fill in all the gaps of, "What must he be thinking right now?" and "How must he be capable of this?"

I wrote half the story in my head as I watched the movie.

I guess they pulled it off pretty well, considering the fact I was willing and able to apply said imagination to the task, but that's still asking a lot of a viewer. If I wasn't a writer, I don't know how it would've come off.

I liked Bourne Identity. I don't mind having to fill in the gaps. Actually, I hate movies (or books) when they have to explain everything to the audience.