Hey guys and gals, please keep in mind that OP is looking for an explanation of why movies from the 80s ended abruptly; not for examples of movies that did.

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Thanks!

POST 1 OF 2:

Just for clarity, let's start with the proposal that your question is based on some actual phenomenon that is demonstrable across major motion-picture releases, occurring or increasing in the 1980s: namely, that movies started to have (or simply had) shorter dénouements (the relatively short space between the end of the drama, when conflicts are resolved, and the actual end of the movie, when the credits roll), and that this feature is jarring to audiences 20-30 years later who have different expectations. We'd assume, as well, that this is unique to the decade in question, or at least far more prevalent then, because you named that decade specifically. One has to assume that this is not as much a characteristic of earlier films, either, even though you imply only that it is no longer a characteristic of more recent films.

With that premise, I'm going to say I think you're on to something. It's worth mentioning that foreign, arthouse, "high concept," and even comedy films had used the abrupt "roll credits" as a device before, but in those cases it was intentional. The technique was meant to elicit a response, and one must assume the filmmakers in those cases thought they would get a response precisely because the choice was uncommon. Some examples would be Chinatown (1974) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). In both cases the abrupt endings are often cited as a part of the films' greatness. Most of the films that are remembered, at least in part, for the abruptness for their endings, appear not to be from the 1980s, but from the decades before and after, and come from higher-concept genres. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/179euu/most_abrupt_movie_endings/

What you're referring to is less of a device or technique, and more of a trend toward a new standard. Perhaps the films you reference were drawing on the precedents set by earlier, higher-concept films, but the decisions to end them abruptly don't feel as imperative to the entire film—less like they're making some point and more like they're simply wrapping things up conveniently.

While I don't have any data about the length of film dénouements in the 1980s (I'd love to know if there is any), we do have data on the overall length of films in the 1980s. According to Dr. Randal S. Olsen, the average lengths of the most popular films were in fact shorter during the 1980s than in the decades preceding and following it. He posits that this may be because of the emergence of VHS and Betamax home movie formats, which introduced new restrictions on movie lengths.

I believe this is at least part of the story, but probably not all of it. Even if films had to become shorter, this doesn't explain precisely why it is the dénouement, as opposed to any other part of the film, that becomes shorter.

I believe that "BAM! CREDITS!" effect you are referencing, if it is real, would be due to the influence of the 1979 book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting by Syd Field, and the way that work impacted the major motion-picture industry ("Hollywood").

This book was (and is) hugely successful and influential. It is regularly cited by successful screenwriters and directors in Hollywood, has been incorporated into the syllabi of screenwriting classes in high schools and colleges, and is the basis of numerous seminars and workshops for professionals and general audiences alike. (There's a pretty fantastic scene in Adaptation when the main character attends one of these seminars.)

Briefly, it's important to put Screenplay in the context of the broader sweep of American film history to understand its importance. In the very early days, film (silent at the time) was experimental and very few norms existed. There was substantial backlash from some sectors of the public, from the religious community, about the immorality of film.

As film studios began to dominate the landscape and vertically integrate movie production (including establishing monopolized movie theaters until the courts broke them up in 1948), local and state governments responded by introducing a patchwork of inconsistent censorship laws.

This all eventually led to the Motion Picture Production Code (or the "Hays Code") in 1930, which established moral standards for major motion-picture production. It was essentially an agreement by the major studios to self-regulate in exchange for avoiding the chaos of dozens of local censorship boards scattered across the country.

The Code was in use well into the 1950s, but it began to fall apart due to First Amendment challenges, including a Supreme Court case that overturned the earlier case establishing censorship as legal, and competition from television and foreign films. The Code was eventually abandoned in 1968, when the MPAA rating system was introduced (now G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17).

Under the new MPAA system films became more experimental, as individual screenwriters and directors pushed boundaries. More major films were produced in New York and elsewhere outside of the Hollywood sound stages, further loosening studios' control. More "auteurs" emerged and established distinctive styles.

When Screenplay emerged, it created a template for predictability and structure in a filmmaking landscape that had been through a chaotic decade—at least from studios' points of view. While certain audiences may think the 1980s marked a return to "formulaic" movies, those formulas helped the major studios to reassert more control over the production of movies in a post-Code world. The book introduced two concepts that would have a major impact on screenwriting, both inside the industry and in the broader general public through screenwriting seminars and classes that were not directly linked to any major studio.

• The "1 page = 1 minute" concept, and

• The "Paradigm" of 3-Act / plot-point structure.

It is almost certain that before Screenplay there were formulas that studios and screenwriters could rely on to structure their stories, but the book was the first time that a broad audience both inside and outside of Hollywood had been given a single, coherent structure and vocabulary. The book came at a moment when technological and economic influences were putting pressure on the industry, and the structure presented in the book became incorporated into the overall structure of the film production.

Let's take those two concepts introduced by Syd Field and examine how they impacted the production of major motion-pictures:

1 page = 1 minute: Screenplay introduced what Field called his "paradigm" to understand how successful films presented their stories. To do this, he introduced the concept that each single page of the screenplay would translate, on average, to one minute of screen time. This general rule is critical to Field's explanation for how the paradigm works (which I'll discuss below).

I don't know if screenwriters and studio executives had any rules specific to their studios or across the industry before Screenplay about the ideal length of a screenplay, but after the book was published almost everybody in the industry and many outside of it developed an opinion that the ideal screenplay was no more than 120 pages. Terry Rossio (Little Monsters, Aladdin), in Wordplayer "Column 17" says that "Any script with a page length over 125 is suspect," when being considered for production. There are any number of reasons that studios may want to make shorter films, or "pass" on longer screenplays, but in any case Field's 1 page = 1 minute rule has been adopted as an industry-wide standard that incentivizes screenwriters to keep their screenplays below a certain page count, and within a certain acceptable range.

The "Paradigm" of 3-Act / plot-point structure: In Screenplay, field proposes that successful films follow a 3-Act structure and identifies a number of "plot points" that move the story forward. He identifies the length of each Act and the location of plot points in relation to the page number, which is equivalent to the specific minute in the running time of the film.

In summary, the ideal structure presented by Field is:

• Act I (20-30 pages) — the "set-up" that introduces the main character(s) and conflict(s) of the story.

• Act II (60 pages) — the "confrontation" where the drama plays out. This Act is divided into two 30-page halves with a plot point called the "Midpoint" ("about page 60") that divides both the Act and the entire film in half.

• Act III (20-30 pages) — the "resolution" that resolves the various conflicts and ends the story.

Numerous films beginning in the 1980s can be reverse-engineered using Field's paradigm, and most likely were written using it. So let's explore how Field's paradigm and 1 page = 1 minute rule could have influenced specifically the length of dénouements in 1980s films.

END OF POST 1 / CONCLUSION IN POST 2

POST 2 OF 2

We have established that films in the 1980s were shorter than films from either the 1970s or 1990s, in general, and that beginning in the 1980s there was a common vocabulary and more widely-accepted consensus that there was a such thing as a screenplay that was "too long" to be made.

If you are a screenwriter employing Field's paradigm, you have limited options for how to condense your story to an acceptable length to increase the chances that your screenplay will be optioned, bought, and produced (all of which equal revenue for you). Obviously, the first thing you can do is write "well" for the medium of film—conveying as much information as you need to in as efficient and economic way as possible. There are also the tricks Rossio references to "fudge" your page numbers, making your screenplay "shorter" without sacrificing content.

If you've done all that and you still have 126 pages and you want to cut it down slightly, the dénouement is the obvious place to cut in Field's paradigm.

Most of the content you have in a fully-edited screenplay is essential to the overall story. Cutting from Act I will remove establishing information that may make the rest of the story incoherent. Act II is the action, the main conflict, the "meat" of the story. Once you've made this part as lean as you can, there's a limit to what you want to cut. In Act III, you are trying to resolve the conflicts, most likely with similar efficiency as your writing in Acts I and II.

Imagine that, for whatever reason, you are seeing that 120 pages is becoming the upper limit of screenplays that are being produced. You're starting to see screenplays with as little as 80-90 pages turning into blockbusters now. You might have a 120 page screenplay that you feel really good about, but you want to get it down to 90. Using Field's paradigm, you can get it down to about 100 by having 20-page Acts I and III (instead of 30), and maybe with some fudging you can get it down a little more, but you want to make just one more cut to give yourself an edge.

Eliminating the scene in Firefox with the plane landing safely in the US with that last memorable Eastwood one-liner might eliminate an entire page of screenplay. Similarly, that one last joke in the Crocodile Dundee ending that happens in the stairwell of the subway station might have taken up one-too-many pages.

I don't know if those speculative endings ever existed. It could be, as we established, that these "BAM! CREDITS!" moments in the 1980s were specific, intentional allusions to the arthouse or comedy films of the previous decade. I think it's more likely, though, that in the highly competitive Hollywood world, screenwriters in the 1980s would have cut dénouements specifically to be more competitive in an era of shortening running times, because it's the least important part of telling a satisfying story. In a world of 90-page screenplays, you're unlikely to find anything but the most necessary content, and the dénouement seems the obvious place to cut, especially if you're not intentionally trying to set up a sequel.

That would be my last speculation on this point: In the 1980s, screenwriters probably weren't thinking of trying to establish "franchises" nearly as much as they might be in later decades. Ironically, Crocodile Dundee did have a sequel, but I would bet that they weren't thinking about it as they wrote the first screenplay.

You can see more about Syd Field's paradigm on his website.

This is, at this point, merely a theory that might be part of the answer. I'd propose some specific questions to help us figure out if this theory holds any water. I would certainly love to hear from the community if any of this research already exists, and if not maybe it could make for a fun future project.

• Can we establish objectively that dénouements were shorter in the 1980s, either in general or in a higher instance of specific cases?

• What was the impact of genre? Did specific genres (comedy, action, etc...) have a higher instance of "BAM! CREDITS!" incidences? Were these genres more popular, either in production or consumption, in the 1980s versus other decades?

• What factors contributed to the contraction in film lengths during this time? VHS and Betamax seem like likely suspects, but there are other possibilities: What were commute times like, and in general what did Americans' leisure time look like in the 1980s compared to the 1970s and 1990s?

• What was the overall role of film in American leisure in the 1980s? How many people went to the movies? How often? What was the distribution of particular titles within the overall movie consumption diet? (Were fewer films watched by a higher percentage of the total audience compared to the previous or following decade? Did the biggest movies of the 1980s have a bigger "market share" of all tickets sold or home videos purchased?)

• How did the physical film distribution landscape influence the length of films? What market share did home videos have overall? What percentage of movie theater audiences were in single-screen theaters compared to multiplexes? How did the emergence of shopping malls influence movie consumption and production?

• And of course, what was the influence of Screenplay? What do people from inside the industry say about its influence at the time? Was it simply supplying something to a general audience that everyone inside Hollywood already knew? (Who is "everyone?" Executives and screenwriters, sure, but what about writers' assistants and other front-line employees who exert some level of control as "gatekeepers?" When did they start thinking 1 page = 1 minute?)

• More concretely, when did Screenplay hit certain sales benchmarks? It has certainly sold millions by now, but when did it achieve 100,000? 500k? That first million? When was it introduced into screenwriting curricula? When did Syd Field and others begin selling tickets to those seminars and workshops? When did it become an industry?

Thanks for the question! This has been a lot of fun and I hope we can follow up on some of these questions.

A tangential but related question: sometimes in popular music the band jams out the ending and the jam is faded out (eg, many Led Zeppelin songs), and sometimes the song reaches an end of a final verse/chorus and/or their is a quick outro and the song ends naturally. Is there any rhyme or reason historical (or otherwise) about how either of these scenarios come about?

The ending to Firefox appears to be similar to the ending of the book on which it is based- 'Firefox' by Thomas Craig. The last paragraph is as follows:-

While he remained capable of effort, he switched in the auto-pilot and then punched in, hesitantly and with a vast effort of memory, the coordinates of his course. The Firefox banked round, steadied, and headed for Finland, while he lay back in the couch, weak, empty, shaking. Eventually he knew he would recover. Then he would take over the manual control of the plane. But not yet, not just yet... The Mig-31, NATO codenamed Firefox, and the single, priceless example of its type, cruised at 80,000 feet, at a speed of Mach 3.7. towards the hidden coast of Finland.

Accordingly, the abrupt ending of Firefox is likely more due to its source material than filmmaking trends at the time.

'Crocodile Dundee' is an original screenplay. However, it was shot on a relatively low budget, and tight schedule - even by the standards of the time. The trend since has been for longer 'blockbuster' films with higher budgets, even adjusting for inflation. A comparison of 1989s Batman- which was considered expensive and lengthy at the time, to the latest iterations of the franchise illustrates this. This likely gives filmmakers a bit more leeway to expand on the endings of their films.