Screenwriter

DONALD CLARKEon killing two movies with one stone

Readers of this column may have, from time to time, fumed at Screenwriter’s sincere (well, sincereish) view that Harry Potter is the greatest menace to western culture since the Barbarians crossed the Rhine.

An overstatement? Not a bit of it. Why, just last week it was announced that Twilight: Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final part of the ongoing vampire saga, will, for the convenience of Summit Pictures' bankers, be released in two separate parts.

Now, you could argue that this craze began when Quentin Tarantino allowed Kill Billto be cloven in twain. But that decision was taken some way into an increasingly fecund production. The folk behind the Harry Potterseries were that bit more cynical in coolly deciding to take an axe to their golden goose before a line of dialogue had been delivered.

Both Breaking Dawnand Harry Potter and the Deathly Tediumare, it is true, very long books. But, in earlier generations, even fatter texts were adapted into single, bulky episodes. Think Gone with the Wind(1,024 pages) and War and Peace(1,296 pages).

Let's not mince words. The decisions to split Breaking Dawnand Deathly Comawere made for purely financial reasons. But why stop there? Megaflick Pictures and their rivals can surely invent many more ingeniously amoral strategies for extracting the greatest yield from their hottest properties. Here are a few suggestions.

- Randomise screenings. When, in the future, you buy a ticket for a movie you will no longer be able to specify any particular release. You take your blank card to a screen and – imagine the excitement, readers – await the credits with a mixture of hope and fear. Will it be Harry Potter and the Deathly Monotony? Will it be Michael Haneke's Scenes from the Death of Children? Heck, it might take you 10 attempts to see that Twilight film.

- Introduce coin-operated meters in cinemas. It’s only fair. The longer the film is, the more you have to pay. You sit in your individual booth and ram euro into a slot situated just behind the cup holder. If you don’t want to know how the latest Sandra Bullock film ends, you stand up and leave when the screen fades to black. As I understand it, a similar system has operated effectively in certain specialist cinemas (see London’s Soho and Hamburg’s Reeperbahn) for many decades.

- Charge punters a fee to leave the auditorium. You charge them to get in, so why not charge them to get out? Such a technique, if employed on the next Rob Schneider comedy, could generate hundreds of dollars before the film has passed the half-hour mark.

- Employ goons to follow cinemagoers from the cinema, smash them repeatedly in the face with pickaxe handles and, as they whimper and bleed in the gutter, rifle through their belongings for cash and valuables. It’s a little less subtle than splitting a movie in two, but it’s also considerably less hypocritical. Just a thought.