The Death of the Intermission

Recently, I watched "The Godfather Part II" for the first time. Needless to say, it is a fantastic movie. One of the best, in fact. Everything from the acting to the lighting is phenomenal. There is one aspect of this movie that may deter people from watching it, though. The length. At a total run time of 200 minutes, this isn't just a normal story, it's an epic. At nearly three and a half hours, I have a few friends that have refrained from seeing this great film, and I had to think that even some people in the 70s may have felt similar. Then I realized while watching it; there is an intermission.

Movies having intermissions is now a somewhat of a foreign concept to my generation. There is no break in the movie. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, I can not say, but "The Godfather Part II" piqued my interest in the concept of movie intermissions.

A lot of what led to the death of intermissions at the movies was not on the creative end, but the theater end. We are now almost in the era of entirely digital cinema. This means the role of projectionist is slowly, but surely, dying out. Now, it is being automated by computer. And with the death of this, comes the death of the intermission.

Doing some research I found that some of the most recent movies to have an intermission were "Titanic" and "Schindler's List". If you're not familiar, that's the 90s. Film was still the primary medium to shoot with in the 90s. So, what happened? The audience changed. The action films overtook the drama, and soon, 3 hours was too much for anyone's attention span. There wasn't a need for an intermission. If you left the theater for a bathroom break, chances are you left the theater for a crucial piece of story.

So, where does this leave us? Worse off? I don't think so, but we certainly are in a much different place then from where we started. Don Corleone is not amused either way.