--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, I explained to Sean Ramos from when I went to see Killers of the Flower Moon, it was an experience. And I'm not even talking about the movie experience. The experience started the night before when I had to make sure I got enough sleep to see a three and a half hour movie on Saturday.
--:-- [Sound effects: A movie theater ambiance]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it continued all day that Saturday when I had to make sure I didn't do too much so I wasn't exhausted by the time I got to the three and a half hour movie. And the experience really started to hit in the hours before the three and a half hour movie when I had to think about eating and drinking.
--:-- [Sound effects: A movie theater ambiance]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Don't eat too much or you'll be tired but eat enough that you'll not be hungry and don't drink too much or you'll have to leave for the toilet but drink enough to not be parched and I pulled it off I didn't fall asleep I didn't need the bathroom but I was still wanting an intermission.
--:-- [Sound effects: A movie theater ambiance]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Marty, I don't know I don't know what you said but it must have been Indian for handsome devil why does it seem like movies are so dang long now?
--:-- Sam Adams: That's coming up on the show. Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's right. While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business. And with AI agents working together autonomously, Anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most.
--:-- Sam Adams: I've never met an AI agent. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com. AI agents are getting pretty impressive. You might not even realize you're listening to one right now. We work 24-7 to resolve customer inquiries. No hold music, no canned answers, no frustration. Visit sierra.ai to learn more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And now on with the show. Today explained. Sam Adams, you write about culture at Slate. Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, Napoleon now. All three hours long or approaching three hours.
--:-- Sam Adams: I think there's like a seven hour cut of Napoleon or something. It's got a lot of people saying movies should be shorter. Is that what made you write an investigation about long movies for Slate?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As long as I've been reading about movies, certainly people have been saying that they've been too long. It comes up especially this time every year because this is when we get the sort of like big prestige releases from the studios, which tend to be longer and more epic.
--:-- Sam Adams: So I went into this with the assumption that, you know, movies are getting longer. And I was prepared to argue, at least in defense of that, because some of those long movies I think are really great. I like that feeling of a big expansive story that takes you places.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then when you actually look at the data, it's true that movies have gotten longer over the last hundred years or something. But basically peaks in 1960 for several reasons.
--:-- Sam Adams: 1960? Yes. That's when we start to get the 90-minute to two-hour movie that we sort of think of as like a regular length now. And it really hasn't changed in the last 60, 70 years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let's just start with the fact that this complaint isn't new because it feels like this is very much a contemporary issue. But how long have people been complaining about movies being too long?
--:-- Sam Adams: Yeah, I couldn't find the first time that people were complaining about movies overall being too long. I loved the arrival of a train. C'est magnifique. But I don't see why it had to be 50 whole seconds.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think certainly when you had this period in the 1950s where the studio started to roll out what they called roadshow versions of movies, sort of, you know, big, overblown, often musicals like Oklahoma or The Sound of Music, they would do them as a sort of all-evening affair.
--:-- Sam Adams: They would have intermissions. They would have printed programs because they were trying to emphasize how movies were different from TV. That often meant movies that were just longer than they needed to be just because they needed them to feel big.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So people complained about those specific movies being too long. When people started complaining about movies overall being too long, I know at least as early as the early 1990s. So it's, you know, 30, 40 years at minimum.
--:-- Sam Adams: And what were people complaining about in the 90s? Well, it's almost quaint. You know, in the 1990s, this article I found in Entertainment Weekly was saying, well, you know, these movies are 121 minutes long. They're over two hours.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was like, oh, you sweet summer child. Here's the short of it. A Few Good Men, 138 Minutes, is the latest of a literally growing group of really long movies.
--:-- Sam Adams: In fact, a little investigation proves that running times for feature films have stretched from an average of 90 minutes in the 1930s to 121 minutes today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because now we're looking at, you know, the average movie in the box office top 10 this year is two hours and 23 minutes. If you look at the all time, you know, top 10 box office movies, the top four are all over two hours and 40 minutes.
--:-- Sam Adams: So it does feel like these certainly the biggest, noisiest movies that take up the most space are getting longer. People have been feeling this way for decades. What does the data say? What is actually going on with movie lengths? Are they getting longer?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, so people have been feeling that movies have been getting longer for a long time. But if you look at the numbers, that isn't really true. There's a period sort of at the beginning of the sound year, sort of 1930 to 1960, where average running times do go up significantly.
--:-- Sam Adams: Then when morning you wake up, the guy's gone, the saxophone's gone, All that's left behind is a pair of old socks and a tube of toothpaste.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then in 1960, it basically plateaus. I think there are a couple of reasons for that. One is just, you know, filmmakers and studios kind of getting used to this new medium, finding a kind of comfortable monoform that's roughly the same length as a stage plate.
--:-- Sam Adams: Also, what happens in 1960 is that you really start to lose the double feature structure of movies, which is where there was sort of an A picture, which is basically what we would think of as sort of regular movie length now. And then this whole separate class of B movies, which were a little over an hour, sort of 60 to 75 minutes long.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Those basically get phased out in the 1960s. So you just lose a whole class of short movies, and that's why the average plateaus at that point.
--:-- Sam Adams: But since 1960, it really hasn't changed very much. You find the sort of average movie length is basically now what it was then.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So almost no matter what age you are, the movies now are, on average, at least the same length as they were when you were growing up.
--:-- Sam Adams: Wait, what was going on in the 1960s that people would want to go see two movies at once?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I know that's still a thing that you can find at like a repertory cinema, but for the most part people just want the one movie these days obviously
--:-- Sam Adams: You know you would spend a day at the pictures and there would be you know newsreels December 7th 1941 No American will ever forget this Sunday morning in Hawaii And cartoons and multiple movies playing and you would just kind of wander in when you felt like it and leave when you left.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if that was in the middle of a movie at either end, that was just how it was. You would come in and stay until you got to the point when it played the second time and then you would leave.
--:-- Sam Adams: So you might be there for three, four, five hours, but it wasn't just for one film.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In 1960, one of the things that happened is that's the year that Psycho came out, and there's this very famous advertising campaign where they said, I've suggested that Psycho be seen from the beginning.
--:-- Sam Adams: In fact, this is more than a suggestion. It is required. And here is what Broadway saw. No one, but no one will be admitted to the theater after the start of each performance of Psycho.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, supposedly to preserve the surprise, and it was a brilliant marketing move on Hitchcock's part. But the reason why they had to take out those ads is because that was not how people watched movies then.
--:-- Sam Adams: This, of course, is to help you enjoy Psycho more. We really have only your enjoyment in mind.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it was kind of the advent of a single movie as a discrete event. So rather than just like spending the day at the pictures, you were going to one movie.
--:-- Sam Adams: And that really changed the way that people related to the whole experience.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You want to see it again? Can we?
--:-- Sam Adams: So Alfred Hitchcock was powerful enough to, one, sort of scold people into showing up on time when that wasn't the norm, and then powerful enough to change the way the entire country saw movies?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, it's funny because Psycho was, I think people don't realize this now, but it was a pretty sort of low budget, not quite underground picture for him.
--:-- Sam Adams: But it was not sort of a big major release. They needed to do something clever to get people's attention.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So this was a gimmick no different than William Castle putting electric buzzers in people's seats to give them a jolt.
--:-- Sam Adams: At any time you are conscious of a tingling sensation, you may obtain immediate relief by screaming.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Don't be embarrassed about opening your mouth and letting rip with all you've got because the person in the seat right next to you will probably be screaming too but it's just brilliant marketing and people were so intrigued by this idea my god there's a surprise in this movie so big that if you don't see it all the way through you're gonna it's gonna ruin it you know lines around the block for and the lines themselves then became advertising for the film as well okay
--:-- Sam Adams: So that's the sea change moment in the movie going experience in the United States. It's back when Psycho comes out in the 1960s.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But you're also saying that since then, there's no major difference in the average runtime of movies. But you did point out that in the 90s, there was an article in Entertainment Weekly complaining about a two hour movie and that all of the top box office movies of, say, 2022, 2023 are running longer than that, more or less.
--:-- Sam Adams: What's going on then?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, so what I've found when I looked at the numbers is that the average length of a movie has not changed since 1960. What has changed is the most popular movies have gotten much longer.
--:-- Sam Adams: If you look at that box office top 10 from 1993, 30 years ago. Didn't you see Fatal Attraction? You wouldn't let me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, I saw it. I didn't kill my wife. I don't care. He moved.
--:-- Sam Adams: If you average all the movies in the top 10, in 1993 together, the average length is about two hours. This year, it's two hours and 23 minutes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And while movies overall have not gotten longer, the movies that are making the most money, that are taking up the most attention, that occupy the biggest place in the culture, have gotten a lot longer.
--:-- Sam Adams: And I think that's why it feels like overall they have, because the ones we're paying the most attention to have.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You're talking about all of the top grossing movies, which certainly involve some people wearing tight suits and flying around.
--:-- Sam Adams: Can the Spider-Man come out to play?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, I think superhero movies, certainly when you're talking about the box office top 10, I think superhero movies and big sort of sci-fi adventures like Avatar as well are more responsible for that because Killers of the Flower Moon is a great movie, I think, but is not a box office champion, is not making huge ripples there.
--:-- Sam Adams: And so it's not driving what the industry does in the future, but a movie like Avengers Endgame or Avatar 2, those are really going to determine sort of what the studios are making in the future.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And audiences are, you know, by and large, turning out, spending the most money on those longest movies.
--:-- Sam Adams: What was interesting to me, this is not a conclusion I would have come to before looking through this, is that, I mean, the data sort of says this like unequivocally, the reason that movies keep getting longer is because the longer movies are more popular.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Those are the movies that most people are going to see. So people may complain or they may feel that movies are too long, but when they vote with their box office dollars, those are actually the ones that they are preferring to see.
--:-- Sam Adams: Which means, you know, if we're rewarding studios and directors and writers for the longer movies by going to see them, we're going to get more of those, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes. I mean, Hollywood is extremely reactive that way. So they will make more of what people go to see. So as long as people keep spending the most money to go see these longer movies, they're going to keep making them long.
--:-- Sam Adams: Enjoy the show. Can we at least get an intermission, though?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm going to ask Sam when we're back on Today Explained.
--:-- Sam Adams: Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards. These days, it seems like everybody has a rewards program. You swipe your card and you get one cent on the hundred dollars.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But with your rent, frequently, you just pay month after month. You never get anything from it other than that roof over your head. Not anymore, says Built Rewards.
--:-- Sam Adams: Built Rewards says it lets you earn points on your rent. By paying rent through Built, they say you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, perhaps a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and so much more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Your home isn't just where you sleep, it's your community, and Bilt wants you to go out and do things in the community.
--:-- Sam Adams: You can eat at your favorite local restaurants, then earn more points. You can get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios. You can enjoy exclusive experiences just for Bilt members every month.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When you're ready to travel, they say Bilt points can be converted to miles or hotel points all around the world.
--:-- Sam Adams: You can earn points on rent and around your neighborhood wherever you call home by joining built slash explained That J dot com slash explained
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to.
--:-- Sam Adams: Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin? Or what that clunking sound from your dryer is?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one.
--:-- Sam Adams: You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for the show today comes from LifeKit, the podcast from NPR.
--:-- Sam Adams: What's in your LifeKit? I'm asking, they didn't ask that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Every day you have to make choices that might shape the direction of your life, but you can't flip to the back of the book to find an answer key.
--:-- Sam Adams: Instead, you can listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR. Life Kit offers real stories about common issues like relationships, finances, parenting, and your career.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you're looking to move with more intention or just need thoughtful guidance on living better, Life Kit delivers strategies to help you make meaningful, sustainable change.
--:-- Sam Adams: From fitness routines to mental resilience, navigating personal goals to tackling burnout, each episode is full of relevant insights and clear takeaways about things we all could use a little help with.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: LifeKit wants to help you approach your own life with confidence and clarity and walk away with a game plan you can implement right away.
--:-- Sam Adams: Enough from me. Go listen to the show, LifeKit. It's a podcast from NPR.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Have you ever seen a movie? It's amazing. Welcome to the movie. Sam Adams, Slate.
--:-- Sam Adams: So it seems like movies aren't going to get any shorter anytime soon based on the fact that people keep going to see the long movies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But can we at least get intermissions? I think the short answer is unfortunately no, for a couple of reasons.
--:-- Sam Adams: One is that as far as I can tell, the theaters don't want them. It seems like it would work to the theater's benefit if you give people a little break in the middle of the movie to go out and buy another popcorn, another soda, whatever.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Delicious things to eat. The popcorn can't be beat. The sparkling drinks are...
--:-- Sam Adams: But, you know, intermissions are, you know, six to ten minutes. That is not a ton of time if you've waited in line at a theater for food.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it really does not, as far as I can tell, add to their bottom line in any significant way.
--:-- Sam Adams: And it does make the whole experience take longer. It's sort of a funny thing that people are complaining about movies being too long and then requesting that the experience actually be longer by putting a break in the middle of it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But like if 200 people get up to go buy a popcorn that costs like five bucks and a soda that costs like five bucks, how is that not adding to the bottom line? That's like $2,000.
--:-- Sam Adams: I think maybe that, you know, the break is just too short for that. Or it's, you know, people buy more if they're stocking up for a three hour movie than they know they'll have another chance in the middle.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't know exactly what it is, but theaters, I think, have not found that it's worth certainly the hassle of having crowds spill out into the hallway and come back in in the middle of the movie while they're seating 12 other screens.
--:-- Sam Adams: It just doesn't seem to work out to their benefit. And I don't think the studios or the directors really want to add them either.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It does fundamentally change the experience. And I think what they would rather do is what James Cameron said when people asked him about adding an intermission to Avatar 2.
--:-- Sam Adams: He said, you know what? Go run, pee whenever you want to. Then you can see the part you missed when you come back and pay to see the movie a second time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that's the strategy. That doesn't feel like a winning strategy.
--:-- Sam Adams: I saw Avatar outside the United States and they threw an intermission in the middle of the movie at a perfect moment that made so much sense that you would have thought that James Cameron came up with this intermission himself.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And a bunch of people went up, went to the bathroom, got snacks, came back, and it felt like a good deal for everyone.
--:-- Sam Adams: Was that like a rogue intermission? I mean, it was a rogue intermission as far as that movie is concerned.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, every Hollywood movie goes out with an exhibition contract, which says essentially you have to play the movie that we gave you.
--:-- Sam Adams: And this goes back to theaters in more conservative areas, sort of, you know, cutting out sex scenes, cutting out interracial kisses, things like that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So no change in the movie. That includes putting a break in the middle of it.
--:-- Sam Adams: I don't know if they send it to a country like India, for example, where intermissions in the middle of a long movie are par for the course.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's sort of how they're regularly exhibited. Maybe they have the permission to do that in Avatar or something like that because that's the tradition.
--:-- Sam Adams: That's the movie culture there. So it's a totally different experience.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, you know, if a movie certainly is built in two parts, if it comes with an intermission and it's, you know, built to kind of go to a climax in the middle and start over again, you know, by all means, take that break.
--:-- Sam Adams: It's a two-act experience. That's how you should watch it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's more the matter of putting that into the middle of something where it's not meant to be.
--:-- Sam Adams: Well, it's powerful. So we need to be quiet for a while. It's good for the crops, that's for sure.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Just be still. You know, it is funny to me that this comes up with Killers of the Flower Moon so intensely.
--:-- Sam Adams: You know, it's like, you know, 10 or 15 minutes longer than Avengers 3 or Avatar 2.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It is almost exactly the length of a show on Taylor Swift's Aeros tour.
--:-- Sam Adams: You know, so we're perfectly capable of sitting through these things as single experiences without feeling like there needs to be a break in the middle.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think it just feels like, possibly because of the nature of what Killers of the Flower Moon is, it feels like a bigger ask to have to sit through this thing without a pause.
--:-- Sam Adams: Martin Scorsese himself has said Avengers movies, Marvel movies, superhero movies aren't really cinema.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The value of a film that's like a theme park film, for example, the Marvel-type pictures, where the theaters become amusement parks, that's a different experience.
--:-- Sam Adams: And it's like, it's not even, I was saying earlier, it's not cinema, it's something else. You know, whether you go for that or not, but it is something else and they shouldn't be, we shouldn't be invaded by it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he obviously was trying to make some cinema and his movie is at times very difficult to watch You got to watch innocent people being murdered over and over and over again without any respite without a release
--:-- Sam Adams: That is the point. I mean, I certainly understand wanting a break from that. I wanted it to. I definitely have seen sort of new Native American viewers talking on social media about this just being this unrelenting assault and really feeling kind of traumatized by the experience.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: By the experience. And I'm certainly not going to tell them not to feel that way. I understand why they do.
--:-- Sam Adams: But I think the relentlessness of, you know, essentially genocide that you're watching in this film is part of the point.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It is not something that he wants to give people an out from a chance to like catch their breath.
--:-- Sam Adams: He really wants the kind of really numbing regularity of these murders against the Osage to pile up and get to you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so I think that's part of the design.
--:-- Sam Adams: Turning the lens, turning the big lens, the most golden lens into areas where our communities, you know, we're speaking of the 1920s, Osage community.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're talking about Black Wall Street in Tulsa. We're talking about a lot in our film.
--:-- Sam Adams: And why the hell does the world not know about these things? Our communities always have.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The theatrical experience that They were designing it for, you're really not meant to have an escape from that.
--:-- Sam Adams: You have to sit through it and feel the full weight of what's happening in the story and what happened in real life.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That really struck a chord with me when you pointed that out in your piece for Slate.
--:-- Sam Adams: The thing that made me want an intermission is the exact reason that he didn't give me one.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then it occurred to me that maybe the real solution here for all the people who want an intermission, who want shorter movies, is to see different movies.
--:-- Sam Adams: Yeah, I mean, there are obviously plenty of shorter movies out there that are ones that are much easier to watch than Killers of the Flower Moon.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You have an endless array of choices at your local cinema.
--:-- Sam Adams: But I do think there is something at least potentially special about the experience of watching a certain kind of long movie when the running time is used intelligently by a smart filmmaker who is really thinking about the kind of experience they are putting you through in the seats and not just kind of letting the story run long as a sort of cheat code to make something feel epic or important.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I love your name. Marilyn Monroe. So totally phony.
--:-- Sam Adams: I love it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think that happens a lot too. And that's part of the reason why it feels like movies are getting too long, because some of them definitely are.
--:-- Sam Adams: There are movies that are essentially using bloated running times as a kind of, just a way of signifying that they're important without actually being important, making you feel like something you have to see.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't think the reason that, for example, the Marvels is, you know, the biggest box office bomb in the Marvel Cinematic Universe's history is because it's the shortest film.
--:-- Sam Adams: And there's the numbers right there. Fifty four point eight million, a full million dollars shy of what the Hulk did 15 years ago.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But does the fact that it's an hour and 45 minutes, whereas Avengers Endgame is over three hours, does it make it feel a little more skippable? Probably.
--:-- Sam Adams: And then and then when it comes to like the Napoleons and the Oppenheimers and the killers of the flower moon, you feel like these are the movies that are maybe earning it? Some of them are, yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Napoleon's an interesting case because that's a two and a half hour movie that actually feels way too short.
--:-- Sam Adams: It feels sort of weirdly cut up and sort of sliced and diced because there is a four hour cut of it that Ridley Scott is going to be putting out on streaming.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's his preferred version. So that's a case where this pretty long movie feels like there's not enough of it.
--:-- Sam Adams: There's a quote from Roger Ebert that is required to use when you have this discussion, which is that no good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think that's indisputably true.
--:-- Sam Adams: If you watch a movie like Napoleon, which is two and a half hours long, I want to see the four-hour cut of that, even though it was kind of iffy on the two and a half hour version.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It just feels like there's not enough. It feels like there's things missing.
--:-- Sam Adams: So I'm curious to see the full version of that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can't wait to see a four-hour version of that movie. I can't.
--:-- Sam Adams: I mean, maybe I'm a glutton for punishment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That is a perfectly fair conclusion here.
--:-- Sam Adams: One of the reasons I sort of advocate for this, you know, particular theatrical experience of seeing, you know, all three hours and 20 minutes of Killers at the Flower Moon in the theater without a break is it's kind of the last place in our society where you can do something for that long without interruption.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, I have a teenager and two dogs, and there's no way I'm getting through a three hour and 20 minute movie at home without some sort of interruption.
--:-- Sam Adams: It's just not going to happen.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And movie theater is the only place where I get that amount of time to concentrate on one thing for that long.
--:-- Sam Adams: And I think that is an important experience to preserve.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How many times do you think you'll get interrupted during the four-hour cut of Napoleon at home? 85.
--:-- Sam Adams: You can watch it over the course of two weeks, maybe.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes, I mean, yes. I mean, that will definitely not be watched in a single sitting, probably not in a single day.
--:-- Sam Adams: Long live the Emperor! Long live the Emperor!
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sam Adams, read him at Slate. His piece that inspired our episode is titled What the Debate Over Long Movies Gets Wrong.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today's show was edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Isabel Angel, mixed by David Herman, and produced by Victoria Chamberlain, who had to bring a breast pump to Oppenheimer because it was so dang long.
--:-- Sam Adams: But she says it was worth it. Totally worth it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The rest of us at Today Explained are Halima Shah, Avishai Artsy, Hadi Mawagdi, Amanda Llewellyn, Miles Bryan, Siona Petros, Patrick Boyd, Rob Byers, and of course, Noelle King.
--:-- Sam Adams: Our supervising producer is Amina Al-Sadi. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. And Today Explained is distributed by WNYC.
--:-- Sam Adams: WNYC. The show is a part of Vox, which is free. Thanks in part to contributions from our listeners. Join us at vox.com slash give. And thank you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And thank you.
