H/T to Jamie Schaffner, one of my screenwriting students, who sent me this link from Physorg.com:

Psychologist Professor James Cutting and his team from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analyzed 150 high-grossing Hollywood films released from 1935 to 2005 and discovered the shot lengths in the more recent movies followed the same mathematical pattern that describes the human attention span. The pattern was derived by scientists at the University of Texas in Austin in the 1990s who studied the attention spans of subjects performing hundreds of trials. The team then converted the measurements of their attention spans into wave forms using a mathematical technique known as the Fourier transform.

They found that the magnitude of the waves increased as their frequency decreased, a pattern known as pink noise, or 1/f fluctuation, which means that attention spans of the same lengths recurred at regular intervals. The same pattern has been found by Benoit Mandelbrot (the chaos theorist) in the annual flood levels of the Nile, and has been seen by others in air turbulence, and also in music.

Cutting made his discovery by measuring the length of every shot in 150 comedy, drama and action films, and then converted the measurements into waves for every movie. He found that the more recent the films were, the more likely they were to obey the 1/f fluctuation, and this did not just apply to fast action movies. Cutting said the significant thing is that shots of similar lengths recur in a regular pattern through the film.

Fortunately they’re talking about editing and not story. The day they come up with a computer program to generate stories… oh, wait, they already have (sports stories, that is).

One look at the chart above proves something everyone of us who is north of the 40 year-old mark knows to be true: There are way more editorial cuts in movies today than there were in movies 20+ years ago. And despite Baby Boomer complaints about the annoying “MTV” edit style, evidently the young whippersnappers sitting at their Avids were more in tune with human attention span than we were.

I’d go even one step further: I don’t have any scientific evidence to support this claim, but I’m positive movie scenes have shrunk in terms of page count. It used to be a screenwriter would figure 2 pages per scene (on average). Now maybe 1 1/2 pages.

Actually if you watch films from the 30s and 40s, many of them have scenes that go on and on, probably a reflection of the fact that American cinema was still in the shadow of stage plays.

In today’s scripts, there may be occasions for a 4-5 page scene, but not often — and it’d better be a damn fine scene or else.

And as long as we’re talking about editing, it gives me a chance to pimp one of the best screenwriting books I’ve read – only it’s not about screenwriting, it’s about editing. It’s called “In the Blink of an Eye” and it’s written by the great film editor and sound designer Walter Murch. I blogged about the book here:

While it’s interesting and informative to read about Murch’s experiences editing such movies as Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, Part II, and The Talented Mr. Ripley, what I found most engaging was how Murch grappled with the very concept of an editorial cut, asking why viewers are willing to make the hundreds of ‘jumps’ from one shot to the next when watching a movie. The question baffled him for a long while until he finally zeroed in on a mechanism in the human experience that essentially ‘trains’ people to be comfortable with editorial cuts: Dreams. When we dream, what we often experience is not one dream, but a series of dreams or layers of dreams that we cut together in our mind, give them coherence (or at least try to). Making those jumps from one dream sequence to another prepares us for movies and their myriad of editorial cuts. As screenwriters, we can apply that understanding to our writing as we ‘cut together’ the movie we see in our head and translate that onto the printed page.

The post has some great embedded videos featuring Murch, so check it out here.

The rest of you can join me in a prayer session out back to beseech The Powers That Be to keep programmers from inventing a movie story-generating machine!

UPDATE: This post made its way to slashfilm.com.