Midweek Update: No Patience for 'Back to the Future'

How streaming shapes story.

I’d like to share two anecdotes. The first comes from an interview with Deadline from Ghosted director Dexter Fletcher about how Apple convinced him he should change the opening the movie:

The Rocketman filmmaker continued to say that he had initially planned a long and elaborate opening sequence for Ghosted that involved Ana De Armas driving a car through a mountain in reference to a scene from the 1978 film Foul Play, starring Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase. Fletcher said he took the scene to Apple, who said they understood what he was attempting to create but raised concerns about whether it would resonate with a streaming audience.

“I thought it was great, this three-minute opening scene, and they said you can’t do it because if it [the opening sequence] goes on and something doesn’t happen in the first 30 seconds, we know the data shows that people will just turn off,” he said. “I don’t want that, so I make the compromise.”

The second anecdote comes from Caseen Gaines’ book We Don’t Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy. During the first test screening, the audience was a little restless for the first 25 minutes of the movie. The first 25 minutes is all the necessary exposition for the film. You get not only how time travel works, but also a litany of important plot points like lightning striking the clock tower, the Enchantment Under the Sea dance being where George and Lorraine fall in love, and more. All of this is essential setup because the rest of the movie is payoff. You need to know that Marty getting hit with the car alters the timeline because George was supposed to get hit with the car. You need to know that lightning striking the clock tower is the only thing that can generate enough power to send Marty back to 1985. The screenplay is a masterclass in storytelling right from its opening credits, but audiences were a little impatient watching the first act unfold. However, by the time the test screening ended, Back to the Future received some of the highest scores Universal had ever received in its history.

Poster for Back to the Future [artwork by Drew Struzan] | Image via Universal Pictures

The problem we have now is bounce rate. For people who work online, you probably already know that term, but for those who don’t, it’s a measure of retention. You see it on YouTube, but you also see it for regular websites. The idea is that you must hold on to the viewer’s interest for as long as possible. If you come to my website, and then click away ten seconds later, that would be a bad bounce rate, but it may not be a bad outcome for you as a viewer. Sometimes you want a quick answer, but a website wants to hold your engagement because that’s how it can feed you ads. Furthermore, to quote the Bo Burnham song “Welcome to the Internet”, you’re getting a little bit of everything all of the time. If I’m not holding your interest at this very second, you’re only a click away from giving your attention to something else.

On a streaming landscape, everything has to work immediately and never prompt you to watch something else (or, at the very least, lull you into indifference where you’ll keep the content playing in the background while you play around on your phone or fold laundry). I first noticed this when I was watching Netflix movies for review and noticed that if it wasn’t a prestige title (e.g. Roma, Mank, The Power of the Dog) a film would typically start in medias res. The story would move the most exciting part—perhaps the climax of the movie—to the very front, and then essentially be like, *record scratch* “Welp, I bet you’re wondering how I got myself into this situation.”

It is one way to tell a story, and sometimes it’s a good way to tell a story. But as seen from Fletcher’s anecdote, streamers know that their audience isn’t captive like they are in a theater. People typically don’t drive to a theater, buy a ticket, sit through twenty minutes of previews, and then punk out after 30 seconds¹. But at home, there’s no need to have patient storytelling. While it’s tempting to place the blame on shortened attention spans, streamers are simply trying to adapt to the shape of their platform. Just as TV shows developed the cold open to prevent you from clicking over to another channel, streamers know that in your own home, you have so much competition for your attention and they fear that an audience won’t hang around unless they know the immediate stakes.

While filmmakers may think that streaming may offer more flexibility than theatrical distribution (which currently has a donut-hole problem of only allowing for indies or blockbusters but nothing mid-budget), streaming clearly has its own incentives where the storytelling must adhere to certain narrative choices because the viewer can click away at any moment. Not every streaming movie will fall victim to these demands, but it is something that once you start looking for it—a major event happens in the first five minutes of a movie—you start seeing it far more often.

There are a lot of reasons why Back to the Future (one of my favorite movies of all time) wouldn’t get made today, but it only occurred to me recently that audiences today may not have the patience to sit through the sad McFly family scenes even though they’re the entire reason the film has any emotional impact.

What I’m Watching

My wife and I started watching Jewish Matchmaking on Netflix. I was curious about how Judaism would be depicted on a major streaming platform, and at least on Netflix, the answer continues to be mostly Orthodox Judaism, which I get. It’s a visual medium, and Orthodox Jews have visual distinctions (wearing yarmulkes, going to synagogue, etc.) whereas it’s more difficult to depict Conservative/Reform Jews. Also, for a Matchmaking show, it’s Orthodox Jews who are going to emphasize marrying within the faith whereas Conservative and Reform Jews tend to be a little more flexible and likely wouldn’t utilize the services of a matchmaker. The show does have some non-Orthodox Jews, but they don’t seem to fit as seamlessly into the overall vibe.

So is the show “Good for the Jews?” It’s fine. On the one hand, I don’t think it provides any unique insights into Judaism, but that’s not its intent. It’s a reality dating show first, and by that metric, it works. Some of the participants you’re rooting for, and others make a strong case for why they’re still single. If the show gets some non-Jewish viewers to realize that Jews are like anyone else and not some shadowy cabal that runs the world (“We couldn't even get that meeting started!” as Jon Stewart once quipped), I’ll count that as a win.

What I’m Reading

I finally finished reading We Don’t Need Roads, and now have moved onto The Wager, and in its first 25 pages, it’s already hooked me. I can’t imagine the patience of someone like author David Grann, who not only has to sift through countless historical records, but then has to be literary enough to craft it into a compelling narrative. The Wager has a great hook, but I’m also surprised at how quickly I shift from normal guy to someone who needs to know everything I can about 18th century British naval history. The book also reminds me I am long overdue for a rewatch of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

In other reads:

Xbox Is Running Out of Time to Get It Right by Ethan Gach [Kotaku] - It didn’t quite click for me why I, a once avid Xbox user, was now primarily spending my time on Playstation 5 and Nintendo Switch until I read this article. Basically, despite the allure of Xbox’s Game Pass plan (a kind of Netflix for video games), the system isn’t competing where it needs to in exclusives. For a long time, I didn’t even really care about exclusives, and it’s not like I was eager to play Resistance or even Infamous on PlayStation. But then PlayStation started spinning out exclusive hits like God of War and Spider-Man, and now I find that that PlayStation 5 is my system of choice. The controller alone sets it apart from the Xbox, and there’s little pulling me over to Microsoft’s console in terms of its game selections.

What’s the Path Forward for Haiti? by Marlene L. Daut [The New Yorker] - Haiti is a fascinating nation because it was birthed through slave rebellion to self-governance only to be quickly subjected to Neo-colonial plunder for almost two centuries. The nation’s current instability stems from its repeated exploitation by major powers who have created a cycle of intervention and corruption. I don’t know if Haiti will ever pull out of this cycle, but Daut makes a good point that they need the sovereignty of self-determination rather than a “helping” hand that only guides the nation back to the same problems they’ve faced for decades.

A New Kind of Monster by Matt Singer [Slate] - I finally watched Peter Bogdanovich’s excellent 1968 film Targets last week (the film arrives on Criterion next week), and so I was happy to read Matt Singer’s 2013 article about the making of the film and what it says about the Old Hollywood/New Hollywood dynamic. What makes Targets unique among its contemporaries (aside from its dark subject matter of a mass shooter) is that while other New Hollywood pictures reveled in the counterculture, Bogdanovich was both mournful of what was being lost with Old Hollywood and fearful of the world to come. If Targets is the death of one kind of America, then Boganovich’s follow-up, The Last Picture Show, is the funeral. Both are well worth your time.

We need to take away children.” by Caitlin Dickerson [The Atlantic] - This piece won the Pulitzer yesterday for Explanatory Journalism. It’s a long read, but one that demands your attention.

What I’m Hearing

Terry Gross is one of the best interviewers of all-time. Considering the sheer volume of people she’s spoken to over the course of her career, you would think she had heard it all. But in interviewing journalist Will Sommer about QAnon for his new book Trust the Plan, you can tell she’s stunned by the sheer whackadoo of this conspiracy theory. I also learned that Qists whole adrenochrome fascination comes out of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which coupled with their slogan of “Where We Go One We Go All” (a line from the 1996 Ridley Scott movie White Squall), shows the influence of Hollywood on the group even though they also think Hollywood is comprised of a shadowy cabal who torture children to suck out their adrenochrome in order to stay youthful (an evolution of the blood libel claim from the 12th century, but also what the bad guys do in the Stephen King book Doctor Sleep).

What I’m Playing

I finally hit a stopping point in Hitman, which is good because we’re only a couple days away from Tears of the Kingdom. Me and the boys are ready:

1. They may start playing on their phone, which is its own problem, and an article for another day.