Bloody Romans! What did they ever do for us?
(Well, besides the aqueducts, and…)
I believe that in some places Titanic was advertised as 2 hours and 70 minutes becuase they marketers thought there were enough moronic people who would think " Oh at least it isn’t 3 hours long". With a movie as boring as Titanic was you do not want people thinking “3 hours !”
What evidence do you have for that claim?
I’m not sure, but I think this has something to do with the way prints of film are shipped around the country.
They would go on either half reels (10 min) or full reels which hold about 20 minutes. So if a film was 80 minutes long it would be shipped on four reels.
I used to work in film distribution btw and they keep track of not only how long the film is in minutes and how many reels but how many FEET of film each title has. Probably Adolph Zuckor asked for this info and they have done it that way ever since.
I don’t have a linkable cite, but I was under the impression that this was common knowledge.
One half-assed cite would be the commentary track on Fight Club, when Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, and David Fincher were talking about all the flack they got from the studio because it was over two hours.
I suppose that’s better than the cite I offered to a friend way back in highschool one time. He asked why I was cleaning seeds out of the weed, and I told him they make you sterile. He asked for a cite, to which I briefly paused, and then replied: “Widespread hearsay.” hehheh.
But I could also use the “widespread hearsay” cite for this one, too.
The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.
Alfred Hitchcock