When the acclaimed cin­e­ma video-essay chan­nel Every Frame a Paint­ing made its come­back this past sum­mer, its cre­ators Tony Zhou and Tay­lor Ramos took a close look at the “sus­tained two-shot,” which cap­tures a stretch of dia­logue between two char­ac­ters with­out the inter­fer­ence of a cut. Though it’s become some­thing of a rar­i­ty under today’s shoot-every­thing-and-fig­ure-it-out-in-edit­ing ethos, it was used often in clas­sic Hol­ly­wood pic­tures. Take, for exam­ple, the work of Pol­ish-born writer-direc­tor Bil­ly Wilder, who began his film career in pre­war Ger­many, then went to Hol­ly­wood and “embarked on a series of osten­si­bly dar­ing, dis­en­chant­ed movies, against the grain of Amer­i­can cheer­ful­ness.”

So writes David Thom­son in The New Bio­graph­i­cal Dic­tio­nary of Film. “Dou­ble Indem­ni­ty was a thriller based on the prin­ci­ple that crime springs from human greed and deprav­i­ty; The Lost Week­end was the cinema’s most graph­ic account of alco­holism; A For­eign Affair has shots of a ruined Berlin accom­pa­nied by the tune ‘Isn’t It Roman­tic?’; Sun­set Boule­vard mocks the mad­den­ing glam­our with­in Hol­ly­wood; Ace in the Hole expos­es the unscrupu­lous­ness of the sen­sa­tion­al press; Sta­lag 17 is a pris­on­er-of-war film that under­cuts cama­raderie.” And the fine­ly honed com­e­dy of The Apart­ment or Some Like It Hot has only grown more enter­tain­ing — because rar­er — over the decades.

But was straight­for­ward com­e­dy real­ly Wilder’s forte? His pic­tures are fun­ny, but often in a high­ly par­tic­u­lar way. His “char­ac­ters do not mean what they say, and they do not say what they mean,” Zhou explains: this is ver­bal irony. But it comes along with two addi­tion­al fla­vors of irony: dra­mat­ic, which aris­es “when the audi­ence knows more infor­ma­tion than the char­ac­ters,” cre­at­ing sus­pense over whether those char­ac­ters find out the truth “and what hap­pens as a result”; and sit­u­a­tion­al, which aris­es “when a char­ac­ter makes choic­es that lead to an unex­pect­ed and yet inevitable con­clu­sion.” In his scripts, Wilder could “weave all these types of ironies togeth­er while main­tain­ing a strong emo­tion­al core.”

Even so, no great film­mak­er is mere­ly a sto­ry­teller. Despite being famous pri­mar­i­ly as a dia­logue writer, Wilder “insist­ed that his films should work as images first.” Among oth­er tech­niques, “he put the cam­era where the sub­text was, which allowed the audi­ence to fol­low the emo­tions of the scene and not just the lit­er­al mean­ing.” He also “used as few cam­era setups as pos­si­ble,” shoot­ing pages of his script with­out a cut. (Instruc­tive­ly, the video com­pares a scene from Wilder’s orig­i­nal Sab­ri­na with its hope­less­ly awk­ward equiv­a­lent in Syd­ney Pol­lack­’s 1995 remake.) Nor is it inci­den­tal to his fil­mog­ra­phy’s endurance that he embod­ied that old-fash­ioned com­bi­na­tion of respect and con­tempt for the view­er. “Let the audi­ence add up two plus two,” he once advised younger film­mak­ers, and “they’ll love you for­ev­er.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

10 Tips From Bil­ly Wilder on How to Write a Good Screen­play

The Essen­tial Ele­ments of Film Noir Explained in One Grand Info­graph­ic

Every Frame a Paint­ing Returns to YouTube & Explores Why the Sus­tained Two-Shot Van­ished from Movies

Decod­ing the Screen­plays of The Shin­ing, Moon­rise King­dom & The Dark Knight: Watch Lessons from the Screen­play

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

This past sum­mer, out came a trail­er for Mega­lopo­lis, the movie Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la has spent half of his life try­ing to make. It took the bold approach of open­ing with quotes from reviews of his pre­vi­ous pic­tures, and not pos­i­tive ones: when it was first released, Rex Reed called Apoc­a­lypse Now “an epic piece of trash,” and even The God­fa­ther was “dimin­ished by its artsi­ness,” at least accord­ing to Pauline Kael. But film-crit­i­cism enthu­si­asts smelled some­thing fishy right away, and it took only the barest degree of research to dis­cov­er that not only had Reed and Kael (who liked The God­fa­ther, as did most every­one else) nev­er used those phras­es, none of the quotes in the trail­er were real.

All this evi­dence of crit­ics per­pet­u­al­ly fail­ing to grasp Cop­po­la’s visions seems to have been fab­ri­cat­ed with an arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence sys­tem. This was a piece of bad press Mega­lopo­lis could’ve done with­out, sto­ries of its trou­bled pro­duc­tion hav­ing been cir­cu­lat­ing for months. But then, Cop­po­la has endured much worse in his long film­mak­ing career, like the hell­ish, enor­mous­ly pro­longed shoot­ing of Apoc­a­lypse Now, or the fire-sale of Zoetrope, the stu­dio he found­ed, after the box-office dis­as­ter of One From the Heart. That he was able to get Mega­lopo­lis into pro­duc­tion, let alone com­plete it, counts as some­thing of a tri­umph in itself.

The Be Kind Rewind video above recounts the sto­ry behind Mega­lopo­lis, in essence “a sto­ry about Cop­po­la him­self, informed by his own ambi­tions, set­backs, times of for­tune, and times of loss.” When he com­plet­ed the first full draft of the script in 1984, he could have had no idea of what lay in store for the project in the decades ahead, not least its numer­ous derail­ments by his own per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al crises as well as large-scale dis­as­ters like 9/11 and COVID-19. The result, at a cost of $120 mil­lion Cop­po­la raised by sell­ing off part of his win­ery, is a spec­ta­cle that med­i­tates on civ­i­liza­tion, moder­ni­ty, and utopia that, even this ear­ly in its release, has drawn reac­tions of aston­ish­ment, deri­sion, and — most com­mon­ly — flat-out mys­ti­fi­ca­tion.

The film “alter­nates grandiose rhetoric about gov­ern­ment and the mod­ern city with bor­der­line screw­ball com­e­dy, quotes Mar­cus Aure­lius and oth­er ancient thinkers, papers over sto­ry gaps with sonorous nar­ra­tion by cast mem­ber Lau­rence Fish­burne, and fills the screen with super­im­po­si­tions, split-screen mosaics, and images that aren’t meant to be tak­en lit­er­al­ly,” writes Rogerebert.com’s Matt Zoller-Seitz. “Movies like this only seem ‘indul­gent’ because we’re so deep into the era where every­thing has to be unmit­i­gat­ed fan ser­vice, the cin­e­mat­ic equiv­a­lent of cook­ing the Whop­per exact­ly how the cus­tomer dreamed about order­ing it.” Mega­lopo­lis is, in Be Kind Rewind’s final analy­sis, “the apoth­e­o­sis of auteurism, unre­strained spec­ta­cle that ampli­fies Cop­po­la’s best and worst instincts on a mas­sive scale.” Per­son­al­ly, I can’t wait to see it.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la Breaks Down His Most Icon­ic Films: The God­fa­ther, Apoc­a­lypse Now & More

Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Hand­writ­ten Cast­ing Notes for The God­fa­ther

George Lucas Shoots a Cin­e­ma Ver­ité-Style Doc­u­men­tary on Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la (1969)

Demen­tia 13: The Film That Took Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la From Schlock­ster to Auteur

Is Amer­i­ca Declin­ing Like Ancient Rome?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.