I have never been a big fan of novels. I have been a fan of movies for as long as I can remember -- no later than nine years old. The movies I liked most in 1951, I still like: Cyrano de Bergerac, Scrooge, and The Day the Earth Stood Still.
One of the advantages I have is that I am an American, and Americans have been the masters of movie production. The industry began here in the early 1900's. It spread rapidly in Hollywood after 1910. The movie moguls, virtually all of whom were Jewish, and several of whom had been furriers, moved to Hollywood because it was far away from New York City, which meant it was far away from New Jersey, the headquarters of Thomas Edison's operation. Edison held patents on movie cameras, and the moguls in Hollywood were infringing on these rights. In this sense, the movies were, almost from the beginning, underground operations. They were the most visible underground operations in history.
STORIES
Entire civilizations are based on stories. So are local cultures.
As a toddler, I liked my mother to read to me. I think most toddlers like this. They learn to like stories. Stories for children have been popular ever since poets and prophets began telling them in the ancient Near East. Aesop got into the act around 600 BC.
Mothers like to read or tell stories that have moral principles undergirding them. This is the way that people initially learn moral principles. Telling stories is an effective teaching device. But the stories have to have sufficient interest to keep the attention of young children.
Storytelling really never advances much beyond this. Some of them tell moral principles openly, but all of them assume some kind of moral cause-and-effect. They have to be sufficiently interesting to keep people reading. Yes, there are still self-inflated professors of English who assign Finnegans Wake to hapless students, but anybody who majors in English deserves to be treated like a peon at some point. The piffle that passes for literary analysis today deserves to be ridiculed whenever possible.
A novelist has to be either a great storyteller or very funny to get me to read 300+ pages. I have read C. S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength several times, but I found Out of the Silent Planet boring. I re-read it two years ago to see if I had been correct in my assessment 45 years ago. I was. Perelandra was even worse. I have read the enormously humorous, out-loud laughter book by Pratchett and Gaimon, Good Omens, three times. This is rare for me.
Every so often, I to go back to reread some book I liked in my youth, but it never works. The authors just cannot maintain my attention. When it comes to fiction, I don't have a long attention span. Movies work. Novels don't.
Movies are condensed. The dialogue has to be tight to keep from running over a limit of about three hours, and three hours is close to my limit even for great stories. There are not many three-hour movies that I have watched a second time. The Right Stuff is one of them. Gandhi is another. Patton is not quite three hours. If it had been three hours and five minutes, I still would still have watched it several times. The only movie over four hours long that I have ever watched more than once is Gettysburg. These are almost flawless movies that I go back to every few years to watch again. I know the outcome of the story. I know a lot of the dialogue. It doesn't matter; I watch them because they are great stories.
I prefer movies that are about 90 minutes long. These days, most movies last two hours, but I don't watch a lot of modern movies.
I teach my Ron Paul Curriculum courses on literature by means of movies after 1915. I want to get more stories into their heads. Some of these filmed stories have become touchstones in understanding American culture. Men and women alike refer back to their favorite movies in order to make their points. Certain movie scenes are fixed in our minds as illustrating some principle of life. Of course, I have an example of this from the movies.
This gets my vote as the funniest improvised scene in movie history.
I have decided to stop watching free reruns of somewhat better than average one-hour TV shows, which are cut to about 40 minutes without the advertising. I will still watch Mary Tyler Moore reruns for another month or so until I've gone through all of the shows that I missed over 40 years ago. But I must now relearn what my wife and I taught ourselves back when The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show were on prime-time TV. We would not watch any TV show, other than news, unless one of us put a quarter into a jar. At the end of the month, we gave the money away. That 25-cent price tag kept us from watching much TV, except for those two shows once a week, and Upstairs, Downstairs on Masterpiece Theatre.
Back then, we were short on money. Today, I am short on time. My time is more valuable to me than my money. I have a lot of money and not much time remaining. This is what old age brings: a trade-off that steadily moves in the direction of time. So, I plan to spend four dollars or five dollars to watch a high-definition movie on Amazon. I have a wonderful high-definition TV. Modern flatscreen TV's are among the best deals in the world for the money. They are so much better than what existed 15 years ago. Why waste it on reruns of advertising sponsored sitcoms and crime shows. I will continue to watch NCIS, Blue Bloods, and Elementary. This assumes that Elementary finally starts running again. But in the time that I have left to be amused by stories, I want to watch classic movies. Even if some turn out to be duds, there will be some that are good. Pareto's law works in movie selection, too. So, I have ordered Roger Ebert's book on The Great Movies. If I watch or decide not to watch all of the movies in this book, I will buy his subsequent volumes on more great movies.
Time really is short. If you let it dribble away, it will do so of its own accord. While I don't expect to say on my deathbed that I wish I had watched more movies, I do not want to be tempted to say that I watched way too many reruns of crime shows.
I find it interesting that few comedy sitcoms hold up. The Mary Tyler Moore show does. I don't think The Dick Van Dyke show does, and that is considered one of the classics. The Bob Newhart Show -- the one in Chicago -- has its moments. His co-star Suzanne Pleshette was exactly right for the part. His character made him a multimillionaire. He never changed it from the time he recorded his hit 1960 album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart.
Two British comedy shows hold up: As Time Goes By and Yes, Minister. I regard Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister as the most clever comedy shows ever recorded. They are timeless. They are about the foibles of a waffling politician dealing daily with a self-interested, turf-protecting bureaucrat. This theme will last until the Second Coming.
Time really is precious. I'm not saying that reading a long novel is always wasted, but people who enjoy novels should count the cost of lost time. In the time that it takes to read a novel, most people could watch five movies. Maybe ten. Also, you read a novel all by yourself. You can share a movie. This sharing is important to me and my wife. We enjoy watching TV together, but not for very long -- maybe 90 minutes, or at most two hours.
Here is our deal. I am not going to watch An Affair to Remember. I am not going to ask her to watch The Dirty Dozen. We have compromised on Sleepless in Seattle. Here is one of my fundamental principles of American literature: if Nora Ephron wrote it or directed it or both, I'm willing to watch it. Anything she wrote, I am willing to read. There are no exceptions. I explained why in 2012. Read it here.
Count the cost. Budget your time. Your time is more valuable than money. Renting a high-definition movie for four dollars is not much money.
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