18 hours- will it turn out to be too long? (NO SPOILERS)

[mtwentz]

It's Frost and Lynch, it's Twin Peaks, the trailers have been great, what could possibly go wrong?

My only slight hesitation in declaring this an instant classic before it airs is the length. Somehow, when I hear 18 hour movie, I get images of 'Heaven's Gate', which as it turns out was actually very good movie, but which at the time was a big bust.

Does anyone else have this concern- that Lynch might have bit off more than he could chew and maybe Showtime will turn out to have been right to push for a more focused 9 hour series?

[Skip Bittman]

So your worst case scenario is a very good movie that loses money for a corporation that I don't own stock in? Sounds fine to me.

I'm sure many people will be twitchy and bloggers will drone, but my god - 18 hours is so much room to play. It's going to be such a treat.

[laughingpinecone]

Given the mind-boggling pacing issues I'm seeing in so many current prestige miniseries, I think this is actually a very legitimate worry. But we also don't know a damn thing about this show's pacing yet, so I'm staying cautiously optimistic for the next few weeks at least!

[mtwentz]

So your worst case scenario is a very good movie that loses money for a corporation that I don't own stock in? Sounds fine to me.

I'm sure many people will be twitchy and bloggers will drone, but my god - 18 hours is so much room to play. It's going to be such a treat.

I'm still a little fuzzy on how it moved from 9 hours to 18 hours- whether Showtime misunderstood a 400 page script would take up 18 hours instead of 9, or whether Lynch and Frost expanded upon the original 400 pages.

But you're basically right- it's not so much the actual quality I am worried about- it's the ability of all of us to digest what could end up being a very slow paced 18 hours. So much so that many people, including many of us on this board, won't make it through the whole show.

Now do not get me wrong- I am superpumped and still plan to watch ever second over and over...but if I did have any concern, it would be this.

[Dom834]

whether Showtime misunderstood a 400 page script would take up 18 hours instead of 9, or whether Lynch and Frost expanded upon the original 400 pages.

There's no hard rule, but from experience a 400 page script would usually be for a 5h30 to 7h miniseries, depending on the amount of dialogue and how descriptive the writer is. Scripts for movies usually run around 75 to 140 pages for your 90 to 120 min features.

I'm a bit baffled every time I heard Frost describe the script as if it was a lot of material for the total run time. You'd rather expect something in the 1100 to 1300 pages range for 18 hours. If the final script really is 400 pages long, then it's around a third of a page per minute. It must have not much beside lines, and even then...

[Agent Earle]

The longer the better, as far as I'm concerned. We've been existing in a Peaks-less world for far too long - now that it's finally back, I'm ready to let it stay for as long as it pleases. If anything, I worry that it'll be too short!

[Calderon]

I also think that this is the biggest question. Otherwise Lynch turned Eraserhead from a 22 page script into a 90 minute movie and shot Inland Empire without script. So I can easily imagining that Lynch can turn a script sentence like "a man is in a room" into a wildly hypnotic 10 minute scene. There is no evidence from recent interviews that they expanded the script considerably.

[TweetPeak]

Heavens Gate was too long for viewers in the Cinema. It flopped also because of that.
Lynch said in "Beetween two worlds" that FWWM was too long for the cinema audience, so
he had to chop some stuff.

I dont think S3 will be like an ongoing movie that has been cut into 18 pieces.
Lynch will have some cliffhangers, albeit sometimes maybe just a light at
Sparkwood and 21 that follows a big scene.

[saygoodbyetojack]

The longer the better. If we had 50 hours to look forward to this season it wouldn't be enough for me

[Snailhead]

I am not too worried - I am relieved. If there were only 9 hours, we might not get to see all that much of the town itself, with all of the other locations that are gonna be featured.

[Mr. Reindeer]

I'm a DKL true believer, and I have near-complete faith in him based on my prior relationship with his work. But this is the one thing that gives me a slight tinge of pause. DKL typically overshoots more than almost any other director (see FWWM, BV, W@H), then trims the fat in editing. The deleted material is frequently terrific, and arguably one or two scenes from TMP should have made it in to FWWM. But by and large -- while I love having that "bonus" material -- BV and FWWM are almost unarguably stronger, tighter films without the excess. He has spoken about how he believes enforced runtimes are a good thing because they force him to take a step back and see what the narrative is truly about. I really hope he kept that in mind on this project.

That being said, I'm way more excited than nervous at the prospect of seeing what DKL does in such a huge sandbox. It's almost impossible to envision what this damn thing is going to be. It's gonna be a hell of a ride.

[Ashok]

Idk, call me old fashioned but I really prefer the pacing of older TV shows like Twin Peaks, Babylon 5, The X-Files, Farscape, etc versus these newer flashy "prestige" cable/On Demand shows. They may have a bit less "filler" but I feel like you really lose a lot of characterization and world building when you restrict yourself to an 8-13 episode cable season. I think 24 episodes would be a huge mistake but 18 feels about right to me. I think 18 gives Lynch plenty of time to flesh out the characters and mythology and keep things clipping along without the show feeling like a runaway freight train.

[Henrys Hair]

How long from the pilot to Bob being revealed as the killer/Maddy's murder? That's got to be reasonably close to 18 hours and everything about the show seems spot on to me during that run.

[laughingpinecone]

I'm a DKL true believer, and I have near-complete faith in him based on my prior relationship with his work. But this is the one thing that gives me a slight tinge of pause. DKL typically overshoots more than almost any other director (see FWWM, BV, W@H), then trims the fat in editing. The deleted material is frequently terrific, and arguably one or two scenes from TMP should have made it in to FWWM. But by and large -- while I love having that "bonus" material -- BV and FWWM are almost unarguably stronger, tighter films without the excess. He has spoken about how he believes enforced runtimes are a good thing because they force him to take a step back and see what the narrative is truly about. I really hope he kept that in mind on this project.

That being said, I'm way more excited than nervous at the prospect of seeing what DKL does in such a huge sandbox. It's almost impossible to envision what this damn thing is going to be. It's gonna be a hell of a ride.

A thought: Lee and Fenn originally said "18 hours", then Showtime said "not sure how long it's gonna be", then the grapevine said a number of things between (iirc) 15 and 20+ , and then it turned out to be exactly 18.
Maybe he did give some consideration to the concept of enforced run-time after all!

[heLL paso]

If this was a typical rush job season of a show, beginning with the start time of the writers getting together to the end of the filming (which would take roughly 9 months), 18 hours would be way too many. But, thankfully the new Twin Peaks took 5 years or longer to produce, so this can easily work.


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