Latest / Secret Movie Club Podcast / SMC Podcast #223: Movie Structure-The 3 Act, 5 Act, Symphonic structure & beyond

Transcript

SMC Podcast #223: Movie Structure-The 3 Act, 5 Act, Symphonic structure & beyond · Secret Movie Club Podcast

0:02
Hello, Secret Movie Clubbers, and welcome to Secret Movie Club Podcast 223, Movie Structure.
0:15
My name is Craig Hamill. I'm the founder programmer of Secret Movie Club.
0:19
It is wonderful, as always, that some of you guys and gals out there are listening,
0:26
giving me a chance to blather about my love of movies.
0:30
Today's podcast is going to be,
0:34
about movie structure, specifically what a lot of us are taught in film school,
0:39
at least in America, which is what's known as three-act structure,
0:43
which is actually not all that different from Aristotelian structure,
0:47
which we're going to get into.
0:48
But what I wanted to talk about today are.
0:52
Many of the movies that deviate from that. And what's interesting is that,
0:56
yes, they do very clearly deviate from that.
0:59
But ultimately, you could also bring everything back to Aristotelian structure
1:04
if you want to. It's a very interesting and fluid thing, and I wanted to have a discussion about it.
1:10
We are gearing up for our August 1st, 2026 triple header at the Palace Theater
1:18
in downtown LA, one of LA's oldest theaters.
1:21
This was actually built as a vaudeville theater in 1911 as part of the Orpheum circuit.
1:27
It was later converted into a movie palace. It's beautiful. They've put a lot of love into it.
1:33
And we are going to be showing in the afternoon, The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable at 1 and 3.30.
1:40
And then we're going to be showing in the evening at 7.30, The Big Lebowski,
1:44
followed by a party upstairs where they shot the movie in Maude's apartment,
1:49
the location that was Maude's apartment.
1:52
And we do have a few passes left. You're either going to find them at secretmovieclub.com
1:57
slash events, Or if that's sold out, we may have a few left.
2:02
If you Google Secret Movie Club Eventbrite, The Big Lebowski,
2:05
make sure it's the August 1st, 2026 date.
2:09
As of this recording, and I'm recording this on Wednesday, about two days from
2:14
when you're going to hear it or a day and a half, we only have 30 passes or
2:18
so. So it is possible that those passes are going to be gone.
2:21
That being said, we are holding 10 passes.
2:25
And if you come to Lebowski, you get, if you just want to see the movie,
2:28
come see the movie in a movie palace. That's a gift.
2:31
That's a, I mean, I love the film. So I, hopefully you'll come and see the movie
2:36
and we will give 10 passes to people.
2:39
In the best costume or people who know the deepest trivia.
2:45
And we'll try to do it in a way where if you're with like one or two other people,
2:48
we'll get the whole group in because we don't want to be dividing groups.
2:51
But we'll have 10 of those passes, but they'll be given out at the movie.
2:55
So you're not going to know if you get up to the party until the movie's happening.
3:00
But even if they are sold out, what I'm trying to communicate is there's still
3:04
a chance. We're going to hold 10 passes.
3:06
Hope Springs Eternal. And Sixth Sense and Unbreakable are on 35 millimeter film.
3:12
We are working to get Big Lebowski on 35.
3:15
Secret Movie Club 224, which will come out next week, is going to be about movie twists.
3:22
So don't listen to that one. And I'll give this this disclaimer at the beginning of that one, too.
3:27
Do not listen to that podcast if you don't want to hear some of the biggest
3:30
twists talked about, because I am going to talk about Psycho.
3:34
I am going to talk about Sixth Sense. I am going to talk about other really
3:38
satisfying movie twists, but we're going to get into all that next week.
3:42
As always, you can find out more about us by going to secretmovieclub.com,
3:46
sign up for a free account.
3:48
You can also email us at community at secretmovieclub.com.
3:53
We are a small organization, but we do try to respond to everything,
3:57
good, bad, or ugly, And we'd love to hear your thoughts, ideas,
4:01
criticisms, Jeremiah ads, whatever you have. OK, let's get into some movie structure.
4:10
So, you know, I wanted to talk about this because I find that the great movies,
4:20
I don't know if it's reverse engineering or armchair quarterbacking,
4:24
whatever they call that, Monday quarterbacking, looking sort of backwards.
4:28
Or the hindsight being 20-20. I don't actually think it is.
4:32
I would actually posit this theory that, and it's going to be a little ethereal, so forgive me.
4:39
There are structures in the universe, like I believe that Indians and Indian
4:44
music, classical Indian music, as in from India, they actually believe that
4:49
the melody is always going on
4:51
and that when the musicians start to play, they're sort of locking in on a kind
4:57
of cosmic melody that's always there if you want to intuit it and lock in on it, different ones.
5:03
And I tend to believe that with structure too, which is that you may not even
5:07
realize you are forming a movie or adhering a movie or that a movie will eventually
5:13
have a recognizable structure.
5:15
But if a movie works, there's a structure to it, even if it's a new structure
5:21
or even if it's revolutionary.
5:23
And I find that fascinating. But I don't think it's always a three-act structure.
5:27
But I do find the three-act structure is a good base.
5:31
And I am somebody who does believe you should know the rules and be good at
5:35
the rules before you break them. I didn't practice that when I was younger.
5:39
So I've made a lot of pretentious bad movies and bad things for sure.
5:45
Written a lot of bad scripts. But as I get older and I am the full blossom of
5:50
my decaying middle age, I do find that I believe, you know, know the rules,
5:54
get really good at the rules.
5:56
And then you actually get way better at breaking them in fascinating ways, i.e. look at Picasso.
6:02
It probably helps us to start all the way back with Aristotle in Greece in something like 300, 400 B.C.
6:11
This is not to say that Aristotle is the only or the best book.
6:15
Sort of theoretician on story structure or dramatic structure.
6:20
I am sure that all over the world, there are amazing people who've written on
6:23
structures. So please forgive me because I come from a Western tradition and
6:28
just happen to know the big wigs, the muckety-mucks of the Western tradition.
6:33
But Aristotle certainly is one of them.
6:35
And Aristotle in his poetics basically said that any good story,
6:41
any good drama has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
6:44
And it doesn't take a big leap to realize that that's what three act structure is.
6:50
And what I mean by that is act one is you're setting up your characters and
6:56
the conflict or the dilemma of your story.
7:00
And then once you've done that, that's act one.
7:02
Act two is complicating all of that and seeing all of the ups and downs of the
7:08
characters trying to deal with the conflict that you've set up.
7:11
And act three is the resolution, whether that be happy or tragic or somewhere
7:18
in between of everything that has happened.
7:21
I heard someone once say that they said in a very great way,
7:25
they're probably a good writer, that you can also think of three-act structure
7:29
as act one is you get the person up the tree.
7:32
Act two, you throw stones at them in the tree. And act three,
7:36
you get them out of the tree, even if that means they fall and break their neck.
7:40
So that's another way of looking at three-act structure.
7:44
One thing that is interesting, and actually I'll just I'll try to go through
7:48
this history of structure quickly.
7:50
A little after Aristotle, a critic named Horace wrote in Rome,
7:57
the Roman Empire times, Roman Republic, Roman Empire, basically introduced what
8:01
he felt was the five act structure.
8:04
And many of the playwrights of the Roman times, like Seneca,
8:09
wrote in five-act structure.
8:10
Interestingly, I always thought Shakespeare intentionally wrote in five-act
8:15
structure, but when I did my research for today, because all of his plays,
8:19
if you read the plays, they're all in five acts.
8:22
It turns out that he never did that. He never broke up his plays into five acts.
8:26
And in fact, it was one of his basically editors after his death in putting
8:32
together one of the folios who just decided, you know, let's break these plays
8:37
up into five acts and even introduce locations and things like that.
8:41
My understanding is that Shakespeare didn't do that and that his plays so.
8:46
Neatly fit into five act structure in a way is telling that structure is both
8:52
more amorphous and more enduring than we think it is.
8:56
But in doing my research, which Shakespeare was not an intentional five-act structure playwright.
9:02
But I want to discuss five-act structure because I personally prefer it to three-act
9:08
structure. And that may just be because I find three-act structure to be a bit reductive.
9:12
But five-act structure is essentially a kind of.
9:17
Elaboration or a slightly more complicated three-act structure,
9:20
if you want to put it that way, or a more nuanced three-act structure.
9:24
Act one is still introducing the characters in the conflict.
9:28
Act two is complicating all of that.
9:31
Act three is your first climax, what many people call the midpoint in three-act
9:36
structure, where the fortunes of the character take a real sharp turn for the better or for the worse.
9:43
And then act four is the de-escalating conflict, how that all resolves itself one way or another.
9:50
And then act five is the climax, the denouement, either the resolution or the
9:54
catastrophe, depending on, again, whether you're a comedy, happy ending,
9:59
or you're writing a tragedy.
10:00
That's essentially three-act structure, but act three serves as the midpoint sequence.
10:06
And then you're just breaking up. Basically, Acts 2 through 4 are a sort of
10:11
within themselves three-act structure of Act 2, if you want to look at it that way.
10:16
But five-act structure was the dominant structure for centuries, maybe even millennia.
10:23
And then in 19th, 20th, 21st century theater, as with so many things,
10:28
there was trying to move past that.
10:30
But that's your basic introduction to three-act structure.
10:33
And one thing that I would posit right here is that everything can be broken
10:38
down into three-act structure.
10:39
Even the movies we're going to get into in a moment, even though people talk
10:42
about them not being three-act structure or intentionally breaking from it,
10:47
it's still three-act structure.
10:49
Any movie that works has a beginning, middle, and an end, even if that's—I mean,
10:55
first off, they just factually do. There's no movie that goes on forever.
10:58
You turn it on, you watch it, you turn it off. But or, you know,
11:02
you come into the theater, you watch it, you leave the theater.
11:04
But you could also view three act structure if you wanted to be really general,
11:10
but not try to be cute as initiation, escalation and either sublimation.
11:19
Culmination, frustration.
11:21
Basically, it's a musical thing. And I've said this many, many times,
11:24
but I actually think that movies are much closer to music and dreams than they
11:29
are to the novel or to theater or to.
11:33
Art or architecture, although obviously all the art forms play a role in cinema.
11:38
And if you think about music...
11:40
Music, and really just anything with energy, even our life cycle.
11:45
It starts, the engine gets going, and then it cuts out.
11:48
And if it works, it's satisfying in some way.
11:52
And again, I'm not trying to be cute there, but even movies that intentionally
11:56
fight the three-act structure, they're still introducing something,
12:00
they're exploring it, and then,
12:03
whether they're abandoning it or resolving it or whatever, there is something
12:07
to that beginning, middle, and end that Aristotle identified.
12:22
That many people have seen. One would be Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.
12:27
Now, the reason that Pulp Fiction is always held up is now what's interesting
12:31
is it's three stories. So right there, and I didn't even think of this until
12:35
this moment that I'm talking to you, right there is something that belies,
12:40
the notion that it's not three-act structure. It uses the number three for its structure.
12:47
You have the first story, which Sam Jackson and John Travolta are hitmen,
12:52
and Sam Jackson survives and miraculously thinks he's been given a second chance at life.
12:58
Act two, or story two, The Watch, is really what seems to be a mostly different
13:04
story with Bruce Willis as a boxer.
13:06
Who's paid to lose a fight and then ends up, even though he's hiding out,
13:11
saving the guy who wants to kill him because he didn't flop when he was supposed to flop.
13:16
Although there are characters that reappear from the first story.
13:20
And then act three or story three in many ways is really the second part of the first story.
13:27
We meet up again with John Travolta and Sam Jackson, but they feed into a story
13:32
that we saw right at the beginning.
13:33
So in some ways, it is clearly different than three-act structure because there's
13:39
something like four stories being told in that movie.
13:43
And what happens is that the stories all come together or overlap or intersect.
13:48
The other big thing that Tarantino does in the movie is the chronological end
13:54
of the movie happens in the middle of the movie with the Bruce Willis story,
13:58
in which you see one of the main characters die, but then that.
14:02
Character reappears in the final part of the movie because it's technically
14:06
chronologically before the middle part of the movie happens.
14:09
And a lot of people will talk about, oh, you know, they put the middle at the
14:13
end and the end at the middle or whatever. I don't actually think that kind
14:16
of reordering or reshuffling necessarily negates three-act structure.
14:21
I think, interestingly, the reason that you can argue if you wanted to that
14:25
Pulp fiction is still a three-act structure movie.
14:28
And my point here, again, I want to restate my thesis, is not,
14:32
to disprove that there's other structures. In fact, it is to prove that there's
14:36
other structures than the three-act structure.
14:39
But it's also to point out that, interestingly, you can often look back and go, well,
14:45
it still adheres to some kind of beginning, middle, end, whatever that is,
14:48
however you define that, because it is satisfying in some intuitive, cosmic way.
14:54
And I would argue that with Pulp Fiction, what you're getting is really Sam
15:00
Jackson's story in many ways and his arc and his arc doesn't really resolve
15:06
until the end of the movie.
15:08
And so you weirdly classically get a character arc that resolves at the end
15:13
of the movie in a very interesting, satisfying way.
15:16
And so you have Sam Jackson and that arc.
15:18
But also there is probably a emotional and thematic arc to Pulp Fiction as well, which is.
15:30
You meet all the characters, things get really complicated, and then things resolve.
15:36
In the way that they resolve at the end.
15:39
Memento is probably Christopher Nolan's 2000 Memento, in which a man played
15:45
by Guy Pearce has a condition where he can no longer form long term memories.
15:50
So to solve the murder of his wife, he tattoos things on his body.
15:57
He has a very ornate Byzantine way of communicating with himself because he
16:02
knows he's always going to forget things.
16:03
And the way that Christopher Nolan structured that movie was actually very similar
16:08
to the way he structured Oppenheimer, although in a more Byzantine way,
16:11
which is that one story is telling itself in chronological order,
16:15
another story is telling itself in backwards order.
16:18
And so the scenes are alternating until we finally meet at a certain scene.
16:24
But what I would say is even in Memento, and it's funny, the three act structure
16:29
again boils down to character.
16:32
The guy Pierce character does have a kind of realization.
16:37
Realization now i haven't seen memento in a while and i don't know if christopher
16:41
nolan he very well may he's such an intelligent movie maker may imply that he's
16:45
had this realization multiple times before
16:48
but there's a big twist reveal about who the killer is and what's been going
16:54
on and how the guy pierce character has been manipulated in certain ways
16:58
and i would just argue that the three-act structure here is his making a kind
17:04
of incremental forward progress despite his condition of.
17:09
Realizing what's going on.
17:12
Even easier than Pulp Fiction and Momento, you can say they definitely don't
17:15
adhere to three-act structure. Terrence Malick movies.
17:18
And I want to talk about the ones that I love. There are a few that I haven't
17:21
seen, and there are a few that I don't think are as successful as others.
17:23
But my favorite Malick movie is The Thin Red Line, The movie he made after something
17:28
like a near 20-year absence from having a directing credit.
17:33
After Days of Heaven in the late 70s. But Thin Red Line, which is based on a
17:38
novel, a World War II novel, is about the taking of Guadalcanal in the South
17:43
Pacific during World War II.
17:45
But it's a movie where, one, it was a movie discovered in the editing.
17:49
You've probably heard this story, but Adrian Brody was meant to be the main character of that film.
17:54
And I guess all that stuff was shot.
17:57
And Malick cut everything out, like cut out all of Brody's lines, Brody's whole story.
18:03
You just see Brody's face and you see Brody in a few shots and scenes and a
18:09
great terrified shot towards the end.
18:12
And Brody does actually make an impact on you.
18:15
So it's funny when you find out he was originally the main character,
18:18
but one of the side characters, Jim Caviezel, became the main character, Wit.
18:24
And then so this is actually a good transition to movies that are discovered in the editing.
18:30
Malick, especially in Thin Red Line, it's a movie that's more impressionistic.
18:35
You're really dropping in on characters and their thoughts, the soldiers,
18:39
different soldiers get voiceovers or monologues.
18:42
But nevertheless, you can apply a third act structure to that movie.
18:48
And I'm just doing this now. But one is you meet all the characters and And
18:52
there are primary characters in that film, Nick Nolte, Sean Penn,
18:55
Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, I think.
18:59
These are characters that were with the whole picture.
19:02
So you meet them. We understand that we're about to land on Guadalcanal and
19:06
we're about to take this island or actually try to take it from the Japanese.
19:10
Act two is very much all of these soldiers.
19:15
Going up the hill and eventually taking the Japanese camp.
19:19
It's an amazing sequence. And it's actually very classical.
19:23
It does in many ways adhere to a classical World War II kind of structure as
19:28
they take the hill, but it's also really beautiful.
19:30
And then act three is after they've taken the hill, they come back,
19:36
there's a bit of R&R, and then there's a final raid and some of the characters
19:41
get killed in this final raid.
19:44
And who knows, that could have been the middle of the movie.
19:46
Who knows how Malick actually reconfigured the whole thing.
19:50
But it's very powerful because it does resolve, again, one of the character
19:56
arcs, specifically the wit, the Jim Caviezel character arc that really started the movie.
20:02
And the movie had a profound impact on me. I would probably argue for me,
20:07
it's probably the most successful Malick's ever been at both telling a story
20:12
and exploring the spiritual themes that I love that he explores.
20:16
But you can look at other Malick films. Tree of Life is very impressionistic
20:20
to The Wonder is very impressionistic. And in fact, I think the movies have
20:23
probably only gotten more impressionistic in a certain way.
20:27
There's another real famous movie maker, Richard Linklater.
20:31
His movie that catapulted him to fame, Slacker, just follows one character,
20:37
all these characters in Austin.
20:39
And you get one little episode, and then the camera goes, and you follow another
20:42
character, and the camera goes, you follow another character.
20:45
And you're with something like 10 to 20 different characters before the end of the film.
20:50
That's very much a different structure than three-act structure.
20:54
Although certain characters do I believe reappear but there is definitely a
20:58
beginning middle and end to that movie in the last sequence of the movie
21:02
which is interestingly when I think about it something that Linklater has done
21:05
a few times like in Dazed and Confused which is another kind of slice of life
21:09
movie or boyhood although very different,
21:12
is the very last sequence is a kind of celebration,
21:16
of a character,
21:19
in nature or a character realizing something or a character heading into a whole
21:26
new chapter of their lives.
21:29
And so that's, I know I keep coming back to character, but it's interesting
21:33
to think about those things.
21:35
There are movies that are even easier to point out that are just clearly not
21:39
three-act structure movies.
21:41
And these are movies like what I don't know what you would call them,
21:44
like movie essays, movies like The Great Silent Film Man with a Movie Camera,
21:50
by Ziga Feritoff, which is essentially a it's not really a documentary,
21:55
but it's not a fictional narrative either.
21:58
It's a bunch of amazing shots edited together about motion, about movies,
22:04
about the 1920s, about really what the title is, what it's about.
22:10
It's about all these things you can do with a movie camera and it becomes its own story.
22:16
Now, it certainly doesn't have a character that you can hold on to,
22:19
and it certainly doesn't have a narrative beginning, middle or end.
22:22
But it does have that acceleration three act structure and narrative that I
22:27
was I was trying to discuss earlier, which is like a car or a train or even us.
22:32
We get up, we start moving, then we're at the full heat of our movement and
22:37
then we start to slow down and then it ends. And that in itself is a kind of story.
22:43
And I think movies like Koyaanaskatsi, which is very much like Man with a Movie
22:47
Camera, although it's looking at the earth and the world and things in modern society.
22:54
Our separation and cutting off from the natural world, our abuse of it,
22:59
that's telling a thematic story, to be sure.
23:02
And that thematic story is probably the three-act structure when you look at movies like that.
23:07
And you can even then carry that into avant-garde movies like Stan Brakhage's
23:11
Dogstar Man, which I love, which is over an hour. I think it might even clock in near to 90 minutes.
23:18
And even though it's a movie where he's intercutting...
23:23
Footage he took at an observatory of solar flares with him climbing a mountain
23:31
with superimpositions of his dog, with images of driving up a hill.
23:35
I shot a lot of this in Colorado.
23:38
Images of a baby. And he's talked about how in Dog Star Man he was trying to
23:42
form a pre-verbal language, how we might perceive things when we're a child
23:47
before language is introduced.
23:49
Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man is five parts.
23:52
You might argue it's a prologue, three acts and an epilogue,
23:56
or you might argue that you could probably look at it as five act structure, but it definitely has.
24:03
A initiation, escalation and then sublimation for sure.
24:08
For sure. Which is why it's satisfying. And that's fascinating in and of itself.
24:13
There are also movies that are, I don't know what, I hate calling a movie an art house movie.
24:21
I just, I mean, I love art house movies, but I just don't dig that title personally,
24:27
because I think a good movie is a good movie, whether that movie is as commercial as Terminator 2
24:32
or as arty as the movies I'm about to talk about, like Sergei Parondroff's Color of Pomegranates.
24:38
Parandrov was a filmmaker in the Soviet Union, Armenian, and he made a number
24:45
of movies and then he was jailed for a long time for being subversive.
24:49
But Color of Pomegranates is incredible film where there are many different scenes and sequences.
24:57
A lot of them are more about the aesthetics of what's within the frame.
25:02
There are shots of like a hundred books on a,
25:06
roof that where the pages are blowing in the wind or a homoerotic sequence in
25:11
a bathhouse where the men
25:14
seem to be painted in silver glitter or images of people in traditional dress
25:21
in front of traditional architecture.
25:23
And I believe, and then there are crazy shots where there are like a hundred sheep in a room.
25:29
But you watch these images and it's very poetic. It's like poetry for sure,
25:34
but it is a very satisfying cinematic experience.
25:38
And the three-act structure there may be closer to poetic three-act structure,
25:42
but you do get, in some ways, the three-act structure there is an introduction
25:48
of new rules, which Peredronov does.
25:52
Is, you know, he lets you know from the very beginning, this is going to be a poetic movie.
25:57
That might be act one. Okay, I get the rules. I get the structure.
26:01
Act two is the complication and exploration of that structure.
26:04
And act three is the sublimation and the termination of that structure and or
26:09
the transcendence of that structure.
26:20
Which I actually think a lot of the best movie makers adhere to more than what
26:25
you would call the three-act structure.
26:27
And I think that may be because the symphonic structure, for some reason,
26:31
and people can take me on about that.
26:33
I'm sure there are the people in the world would be like, that's just an arbitrary
26:36
structure that got codified in orchestral music, and you're being an idiot.
26:41
They're probably right. They may be right.
26:43
But Kurosawa often talked about how So movies are much more like music than
26:49
any other art form. And I completely agree with them.
26:51
I think that as long as a movie works musically or a movie works according to
26:56
the dream logic you've set up for it, I think it's a success.
27:00
I think you can break almost every other rule but the rule of musicality or
27:04
the rule of dream logic in cinema.
27:07
And breaking is even wrong. I just think you have to find the musicality or
27:10
find the dream logic. And I.
27:13
If you look at Kurosawa films and Kubrick films, they're often symphonic and
27:18
structured, by which I mean they often have four distinct parts.
27:22
And, you know, if you're a big fan of Beethoven symphonies, those are symphonies
27:27
that always have four movements.
27:29
And the movements tend to go movement one is the introduction of the melody,
27:33
maybe the harmony, the melody, some of the maybe minor melodies.
27:39
Act two is the complication of everything you've introduced in act one.
27:43
Or movement one, movement two.
27:45
Movement three often is either the contrast with movement one and two.
27:50
Not always. Sometimes movement two is the contrast, but either movement two
27:53
or movement three will be either your slow movement, or if you're writing a
27:59
slow symphony, your fast movement.
28:01
And that contrast is necessary for movement four, which is often the culmination
28:07
and the sublimation of everything.
28:09
And often, not always, but often your most powerful expression of your melody
28:14
or your best melody is expressed fully in movement for this,
28:20
you know, the Beethoven's ninth.
28:30
That one, Ode to Joy. You get intimations of it throughout, but when the chorus
28:35
breaks into it in movement four, you're just like, you want to float out of your seat. And.
28:42
That structure you can see in Kurosawa movies like Seven Samurai, I think, is symphonic.
28:49
I think that Red Beard is very symphonic. I think when we're talking about Kubrick,
28:55
the easiest movie to talk about is 2001, A Space Odyssey, because it also,
29:00
I believe, is in four movements and it very much.
29:04
Uses actually orchestral music and classical music as its score.
29:08
And you can feel that Kubrick is trying to create something more musical and
29:12
experience rather than something that is overexplained.
29:17
And I think 2001 is a perfect example of a symphonic structure that works incredibly.
29:24
So movies that were discovered in the editing.
29:26
American Beauty had all these courtroom scenes of the murder case of who killed a certain character.
29:33
And they were all cut out because they slowed down the movie or they messed up its flow.
29:38
But I don't actually think that you can say that that fundamentally changed the story.
29:44
Because the story, even if they were telling it in a Rashomon-like way,
29:47
with the court case happening, Even getting rid of the court case didn't get
29:51
really get rid of the basic story that American Beauty was telling.
29:56
Annie Hall is a little different. Woody Allen's Annie Hall, which won Best Picture in 1977.
30:01
They shot that movie to be kind of like an epic zany comedy about Woody Allen's
30:08
character, Alvy Singer, going through a midlife crisis. And it had many more
30:14
Marx Brothers-esque stories.
30:16
And digressions, there was a scene where Alvy played for the New York Knicks
30:21
and, you know, one thing would pop up, another would pop up,
30:23
another was a much more kind of rat-a-tat-tat, surreal stream of consciousness style.
30:30
But they found that a lot of those sequences were inert. And the sequences that
30:34
really worked was the love story between Alvey and Annie Hall, played by Diane Keaton.
30:40
So they just made the decision, brutally cut out everything that didn't work,
30:44
and ended up with an 89-minute, 90-minute movie about a relationship.
30:49
And it had a three-act structure. they meet.
30:53
Now, again, it was told not in chronological order, a la Pulp Fiction,
30:57
but basically Annie and Albie meet, they date, they break up,
31:02
they get back together again, and then they finally have the final breakup.
31:05
And even though you could probably argue that maybe that movie is four or five
31:09
acts, even in its edited structure, even in that movie, there's a very clear,
31:14
beginning, middle and end.
31:16
And then Mad Max is a fascinating movie because Because in many ways,
31:19
when you look at the rest of the Mad Max, what's now, I guess,
31:22
Quintology, Mad Max, The Road Warrior, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Fury Road, and Furiosa.
31:30
Basically, Mad Max, the very first movie, is almost a prologue because for 90
31:38
percent of that movie, you're following a society that hasn't yet fallen apart.
31:43
And Max is a cop. He's got a wife. He's got a child.
31:47
But that movie only really becomes what we know is the Mad Max world in the
31:52
final 10 minutes when Max takes on the toe cutter and they have a kind of a near road rage,
32:02
almost seemingly post-apocalyptic road duel.
32:05
And that sequence is the Mad Max that we're going to come to know in all the subsequent movies.
32:11
But Miller talked about how he didn't have any money when he was cutting the
32:15
movie he realized he didn't tell the story well enough he was missing scenes
32:20
that would have made it feel like a fuller movie and when you watch Mad Max
32:24
it does feel like something's missing
32:26
but and there are these jumps where you're like huh what's going on,
32:30
why is there's this musical number wait why is what happened did something just
32:35
supposed something's supposed to happen in there, it seems like the world's
32:37
a lot worse off than it was a few scenes ago.
32:40
But nevertheless, you go with it and the ending is so great that it allowed a second movie.
32:46
And, you know, there's a movie where Miller found the best possible structure
32:51
he could in the editing with what he had and he found something.
32:56
And so I guess I would just say,
32:58
wrapping this all up, that I've said this before, I do think there's more.
33:05
To existence than what meets the eye.
33:10
And I am someone, I do believe there's something before and after death.
33:13
And I do believe there are levels to existence we can't really perceive with our eyes.
33:20
And I don't know what those are. I won't go any further than what I've said
33:23
there, but I do very intuitively, fundamentally believe those things.
33:28
And I am also a spiritual person. I do believe in God and I do have faith.
33:32
So I would say that weirdly, however you want to say this, and a lot of this
33:37
boils down to language. So I always hope I'm not losing my agnostic and atheist
33:42
listeners who I respect tremendously.
33:45
And you have your very real and intelligent and much more intelligent reasons
33:51
for seeing the world the way you do.
33:53
And I think that you have you have truth. You have truth. I don't want to ever be misunderstood.
33:58
I just think you see a different part of it.
34:01
I, I intuit a different part. Maybe I'm wrong. I have to be humble about that, but I intuit it.
34:06
I don't actually think our differing viewpoints are actually in conflict.
34:12
I, I just think we see different parts of the same truth. That's sort of the way I see all that thing.
34:18
And that being said, I feel all these different structures when they work,
34:23
they somehow tap into that cosmic Indian melody,
34:27
that cosmic melody of the universe that we sometimes tap into and transcribe.
34:34
And when we do do that, however we transcribe it, it gets transcribed in a way
34:39
that is intuitively satisfying, even if it is unorthodox, even if it doesn't
34:46
cleanly fit into a three-act structure.
34:49
And when those moments, movies happen, they're illuminations,
34:53
they're catharsis, they're cathartic, they're incredible.
34:57
And I just wanted to talk about that today. So thank you.
35:02
Okay, Secret Movie Clubbers. That was a stream of consciousness podcast.
35:07
I don't know if that one had a structure. Maybe it did.
35:09
It definitely is going to have a beginning, middle, and end,
35:12
as in you turned it on, you listened to it as long as you could,
35:15
and then you turned it off. I appreciate you listening.
35:18
Secret Movie Club podcast 224, which will come out next week,
35:23
will be about the great movie twists.
35:26
We are for sure going to talk about Sixth Sense, Psycho, Planet of the Apes,
35:30
the original Planet of the Apes, among others.
35:34
So if you have not seen those movies and you don't want those twists spoiled,
35:39
do not listen to next week's podcast until you've seen them.
35:43
For everybody else, I'm digging into them. So I can only do a podcast about
35:46
movie twists if I talk about movie twists. So I will, though,
35:51
try to do my best at the beginning of next week's podcast to tell you all the
35:55
movies I'm going to talk about.
35:56
So if there are any you haven't seen yet and you don't want to listen to the
36:00
rest, you can hit it off at the beginning.
36:02
In the meantime, please go to secretmovieclub.com. We have three movies coming
36:06
up August 1st, 2026. That's a Saturday at the Historic Palace Theater in downtown Los Angeles.
36:13
Sixth Sense, an unbreakable movie twist matinee on 35 millimeter film followed
36:20
by The Big Lebowski, which we're trying to get on 35, but be ready.
36:23
It may be digital, but we're going to show Lebowski at 730. And then we have
36:27
the after party in Maude's apartment upstairs.
36:29
We only have about 20 tickets and I'm recording this on Wednesday.
36:34
So I don't know if they're going
36:35
to be any movie plus after party tickets available when you hear this.
36:39
But if there are, go either to secretmovieclub.com slash events or just Google
36:46
secret movie club and Eventbrite and go to our Eventbrite page,
36:49
and there may be passes there.
36:51
But if those passes sell out, we still have about 200, I think, movie-only tickets.
36:58
It's a thousand-seat theater, so we're already at 800. It's going to be a huge audience, but.
37:04
There are 200 movie only. And if you get a movie only, we are going to give
37:08
10 passes to the movie only holders.
37:11
If you come in costume and we pick you for best costume or you win the trivia
37:15
contest. And we're going to try to get groups in.
37:18
So if you come in with three people and you win the trivia contest,
37:22
we'll give you four passes.
37:24
Like we're going to try to make that work somehow. So go to secretmovieclub.com,
37:28
get on our newsletter, find out about everything we're doing.
37:31
We got podcasts. We got movie writing. We got a lot of free content for you.
37:36
We just want to be part of celebrating movies, screening movies, making movies.
37:42
In the meantime, I wish you the best in this hurly-burly world,
37:47
getting through this hurly-burly week.
37:49
Every week seems to bring new what the F is going on moments.
37:55
But as Dostoevsky said, if you want to conquer the world, conquer yourself.
38:00
And as Goethe said, and basically the same, I think, conclusion,
38:05
if every person clean their own house, the whole world would be clean.
38:10
So I'm going to try to focus on conquering myself and keeping my own house clean.
38:16
And then maybe somehow I can contribute positively to this world because I love
38:22
this world. I love living and I want to, I want to, I want to be helping.
38:27
I don't want to be hurting. So there you go.
38:30
I will talk to you next week at secret movie club podcast, 224.
38:34
In the meantime, keep the faith, fight the good fight, run the race.