I have a proposal so daring, so provocative, it may change the face of movie presentations for the rest of the 21^st century:  bring back the Intermission! 

Viggo Mortensen, Orlando Bloom, and Ian McKellen in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Surely the actors had bathroom breaks when they were making the film...

Long before the Age of Bloat, when most movies came in under the two-hour mark (and some B movies ran as short as 65 or 70 minutes), on those occasions when a film was deemed worthy of three to four hours’ screen time, a break was planned and inserted somewhere around the half-way mark.  This wasn’t exactly an innovation:  most plays are presented with intermissions between the acts. 

I don’t think anyone could have sat through the four hours of Gone With the Wind without a respite, nor should anyone have to.

Nowadays, no one seems to care about our attention span, our physical comfort, our alertness, or our bladders.  When I attended a screening of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, there was a constant parade of people going back and forth to the bathroom and/or the refreshment stand.  No one wants to miss a couple of minutes of a really good film, but sometimes there is no choice.

So far as I can tell, the last film to be presented with an official intermission was Gandhi, back in 1982.  The last time I remember experiencing a break was at the last revival of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.  Although I had seen my share of epic films with intermission breaks when I was growing up, I had become so unaccustomed to an interruption in the flow of a movie by this time that, at first, I resented the intrusion.  I was enjoying the film so much, and was so caught up in the momentum of its story, that I didn’t want to leave the theater.  But, like most of the others in attendance, I did get up to stretch my legs and use the bathroom.  I worried about whether or not I would be able to get back “into” the movie again right away.  I needn’t have feared; it only took a minute or so to get lost again in the wonder of that spectacular film. 

Intermissions used to be a part of what were called road show attractions.  Films like Ben-Hur and West Side Story and How the West Was Won were presented as if they were theatrical events, with two showings a day; you paid a higher  (or “advanced,” to use the euphemism of the day) admission fee, and in return you received a ticket for a specific seat in the theater.  After their lengthy runs in the larger, classier downtown movie palaces, the

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films would be sent into general release in the neighborhood theaters, but even then, the intermission remained.  (Film composers often provided music for the intermission titles, and sometimes added introductory music to the second act, again taking a page from Broadway.)

Today, movies have become an endurance test, which serves neither art nor entertainment.  I loved Gangs of New York and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, but I made sure to be well-rested, and took care not to drink too much before or during the screenings. 

At a time when exhibitors are competing to provide the most comfortable and user-friendly auditoriums, and filmmakers are fighting  to make sure their vision is maintained in the final release prints (or digital copies, as the case may be), it’s absurd that the most elemental, common-sense aspect of film presentation is being ignored:  making people sit too long.

I’m not asking filmmakers to arbitrarily shorten their movies.  Just give us a thoughtfully placed intermission.  The theater owners will sell more soda and popcorn, and moviegoers will have a better experience overall.  It worked for years and years and years; why not try it again?