There is still an audience for long-form content

Russell McDermott, columnist
Russell McDermott, columnist

The release on Netflix last week of Martin Scorsese's long-awaited film "The Irishman" has raised a question:

Has our attention span fallen to the point of no return?

"The Irishman" is an epic story. It traces the life of Frank Sheeran, a Mafia associate and Teamsters union official who claims to have killed Jimmy Hoffa.

Starring Robert De Niro as Sheeran, Al Pacino as Hoffa and a subdued Joe Pesci as Northern Pennsylvania mob boss Russell Buffalino, the film unfolds over 3 1/2 hours. I found it riveting. I enjoyed ever minute and the film left me wanting more. But apparently the running time was just too much for a lot of viewers.

The most common complaints I've heard about "The Irishman" were that it is too long and doesn't have enough action. (There were also plenty of complaints about De Niro's political views, but I'll leave that alone.)

A lot of folks are trying to compare it to Scorsese's earlier mob films like "Goodfellas" and "Casino." Those are great works, classics. But "The Irishman" is a different type of film. It's a character study better compared to Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America," which also stars De Niro. "Once" was a saga about Jewish mobsters that spans the 20th Century. That one clocked in at nearly four hours in the original cut.

Many consider "Once Upon a Time in America" a masterpiece. I think "The Irishman" succeeds on many levels where Leone's film fails.

But that's just my opinion. The bigger question is why so many cannot or will not follow a film that stretches much past two hours. Has technology changed the way we consume information or entertainment so radically?

It's a question that applies to the newspaper business as well. Journalists like long-form pieces. They enjoy being able to connect the dots, tell the whole story. And that takes a lot more space than the average story.

Magazines still get away with it. You can read some great, well-researched, in-depth stories in magazines like Vanity Fair, for example, or Texas Monthly. But for years now newspaper "gurus" have been telling us the public has a much shorter attention span. More stories, shorter stories are what the people want.

We see it online, too. Short videos are the way many consume their news these days. Easy to view on their smartphone. No effort required.

And we're told, it's only going to get worse.

I wonder though.

For all the complaints about the length of "The Irishman," it's getting a lot of views. And a lot of praise. Many who find the genre of interest are enjoying the film.

We live in a society where viewers who find a series they like streaming on Netflix or Hulu will binge-watch episode after episode, often spending far more than 3 1/2 hours in front of the TV at a stretch.

And how many Star Wars or Marvel fans have enjoyed two, three, four or more movies in a single sitting? I'm guessing millions.

So maybe it's not our attention span - at least not entirely. Some folks undoubtably can't or won't focus for much longer than a standard Hollywood film or a brief newspaper piece. But there is still an audience out there for long-form storytelling, be it entertainment or news.

The key is to find and produce content that attracts and keeps that audience. You can't please everybody, but if you give people what they want, they will watch. And they will read.

If that ever changes then our culture will truly have lost something vital.

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