I just sent this as an email to a friend of mine who writes screenplays and delves into film like I do. I thought I would also post it here.
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So yeah, whatever happened to the hold shot? You know we’ve lost so much these last few decades in terms of how you make films. Hold shots, slow entrance shots, establishing shots. All gone in place of quick cuts that don’t inform they only confuse.

You know, a slow establishing shot of an empty room, 5 or 10 long seconds before someone walks through a door and inhabits the space. You got an entrance, that told you about the character. You got to drink in the room itself and feel the setting, let it inform you. Now we start with the guy already in the room and what does it tell us? That the fucker can work a doorknob. Yippee.

How does that ever inform an audience? It can’t. Instead we have jarring hard stops and quick cuts, that do have their place – they really do! but it isn’t in every movie and every scene. Let the environment breathe. Let it speak to you. Sure you burn some time, your dialog will have to be tighter, probably, but it will be worth it in the end. Because you’ll have built something. Something with depth to it.

Christ and the long shots. Do you remember good old Westerns? Or Laurence of Arabia maybe? All of those old big epic feeling movies. How many movies call themselves epic now when they mean “lots of fantasy people with swords that die”. That isn’t epic. It’s a body count. Epic is depth and breadth of scope. It’s a feeling, a movement, an urge. You need long shots, pain in the ass to set up and pull off long shots that aren’t done on a set, they’re done outside. In the world. And they take their fucking time happening. A long shot that them hard zooms in to a close-up isn’t a long shot. It’s a fucking close-up with an ounce of foreplay.

I’m talking watching these riders on horses ride over dust flowing lands at a distance. You can’t see how they are. You can’t see details. They are nameless, faceless people. They don’t stop, the just move forward, dust plumes rising around the feet of their horses. And you hold it! You stay there. You live there damn it, and you make that image sing to you. Don’t close in. Don’t even go medium. Naw, we’ve lost the balls for that shot. We really have. And it’s a major fucking shame. It hurts me deeply.

Long slow shots used to be able to invoke power. Majesty. Strength and sureness. Now? It’s a medium shot and nothing longer, to hard close-ups to quick cuts and camera shakes. It’s all more realistic they want to say. Fuck that noise. Real? Real is so long you can hardly see it. And sometimes it’s a fast jarring break. And sometimes it just sits there, maddening with its unblinking eye. Reality is all of it. Not any one subsection.

We’ve just lost a lot of the craft here in favor of videos. And it sucks. And it makes me mad.