Cliff’s Notes for the silver screen
TV guides have long condensed tv shows and movies to half-sentence capsule summaries. While for some shows (and even some films) like Seinfeld half a sentence is more
than enough to capture the essence of the plot, generally it is lacking sufficient detail to describe a movie. What, then, is the atomic “size” of a movie? A couple pages? The entire screenplay? It is this very question that Rod Hilton seeks to answer with The Editing Room: Abridged Scripts for Movies, though he doesn’t know it yet. On his site he publishes distilled screenplays for popular movies, ranging from a mere one word of dialogue (for Guy Richie’s
href=”http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00007ELEP/mikelietdotor-20/”>Lock, stock and two smoking barrels) to comparably long discourses (as for Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence). They’re pretty funny.
He of course would explain the scripts, few longer than a page, to be some sort of humorous discourse. He claims to be writing them as screenplay practice, but in the ratings system lies the truth about his (subconscious) research. He rates scripts lower that offer less meat, such as the aforementioned Lock, stock and two smoking barrels and he gives high marks to brilliant abridgements such as his version of Being John Malkovich, excerpted below.
JOHN CUSACK finds a portal into the mind of JOHN MALKOVICH.DIRECTOR SPIKE JONZE Look, this film is bizarre. It is, therefore, good!
JOHN CUSACK Wow, this creates so many questions about the essense of self. (pause) Audience, please take notice of all of these thought-provoking questions raised by the film.
AUDIENCE This film must be brilliant. I mean, to just consider the notion that a human could enter the mind of another hu–
Suddenly, the AUDIENCE’S PROVOKED THOUGHTS are interrupted by something EXTRAORDINARILY BIZARRE.
