A few days ago I was exercising in the fitness facility at the apartment complex where I live, and turned on one of the TVs installed there. I scanned the channels and came across a movie channel showing “Titanic.” Now, those of you who read this blog and know me personally may also know I’ve railed against this movie since it came out. My objection to the movie is that it places a silly fictitious love story in what was one of the greatest disasters of the 20th Century. Why, I cannot fathom. The love story interrupts the flow of the main story, the sinking of the ship, like commercials interrupt a TV movie. I have never been interested in the love story; I want to see what happens to the ship. I want to see how they handle the disaster itself; how the passengers and crew react; how they show the newest information of how the ship sank, and I dislike cutting into the main story to watch two people have sex in an old car. I really couldn’t care less. If the producers of the movie wanted to write a love story on a ship, then they should have done so, and not insert it within an unrelated highly dramatic situation. The two don’t go together at all. Get on with it, I say. Keep the action moving.
I’ve talked about this subject before; you may remember reading about it after it was posted on 2019/6/23. In writing, or making a movie or TV show, or whatever, keep the action going. Don’t interrupt. Allow the action to flow of its own accord. Action will ebb and flow naturally, and may even come to a stop all by itself. If so, go with it. The teller of the story should stay aloof.
Here’s another example.
I left “Titanic” after only a few minutes and scanned a few more channels and came to a women’s singles tennis match. I like tennis; I played it a lot in my younger days. At one point, the coach of one of the players talked to his charge during one of the changeovers. No problem there because the match had entered one of its normal rest points. But after the action resumed, the director of the show found it necessary to cut down the size of the image of the match, and put beside it a rerun of the coach talking to the player. Why? I never did find out. This forced the viewer to watch the action on what was essentially a screen about one-quarter the normal size. My God! I couldn’t believe it. The coach talking to his player is unimportant. The important thing is the tennis match. It’s the action. Always the action. Never interrupt the action.
Tennis is an example of a sport with built-in pauses that TV coverage can use for commercials without causing serious interruptions. That’s okay, it’s part of the game, though it does make it hard to watch sometimes. All those breaks can become wearisome . . . Perhaps that’s why soccer is such a popular sport around the world. Forty-five minutes of non-stop action each half. The clock keeps running. No interruptions. Writers and TV producers take note.