What is the longest movie script ever written?
If you were on the internet in 2016, you would have seen a white T-shirt with an interesting, abstract, block-like text box ironed to the front, which at first glance looked like a out-of-the-box (literally) take on the boring rectangle, but if you looked closely, you’d see it was the entirety of the script of the 2007 hit animated film, Bee Movie.
Sure, the product itself was a funny gag, but the minimalist-looking T-shirt brought up valid questions surrounding the average and the accepted length of a script. The fact that the entirety of the “do you like jazz?” anthropomorphised script could fit into such a small space begets further questioning, if we forget about the meme-ification of the ideal and, like true postmodernists, put on our thinking hats.
Sure, you can condense any matter into a smaller space, as is the teaching of physics, but, on average, the Bee Movie is quite a short script: the film only runs an hour and 35 minutes long, so what, dare I ask, lies on the other end of the spectrum?
To find the answer, we must leave the American soil of the Bee Movie and head on over to Munich, of all places, where we can uncover the incredible fact of Edgar Reitz’s Die Zweite Heimat, lasting 25 hours and 32 minutes. It premiered in Munich from September 5th to 8th, 1992, spread across several days to allow film goers to have a functioning life around the epic.
My favourite play of all time is Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, which is usually spread across two nights, running at around eight hours total, but in Die Zweite Heimat‘s shadow, the dystopian play feels like a short television advertisement.
If you can’t comprehend the sheer size of the movie, let me throw some mind-numbing quantifiers your way: there were 2,143 pages of script, 557 shooting days, and 117 days of editing, and in the background, some 2,300 extras propped up, with 71 leading roles, and 310 smaller roles, or, speaking to the east London cappuccino sippers out there, this translates roughly to 4.2 hectolitres of coffee. With this many moving parts, it’s nearly impossible to get things right on the first shoot, too, and because of this, there were 31,097 takes and 8,539 cuts, such that a total of 67 months was required for the editing.
To oversimplify (as one must on an occasion like this), the 13-episode film follows Hermann Simon as he leaves his rural home in 1960 to follow his dreams of studying music in Munich. Beyond Simon, the film branches out to explore the ups and downs, the highs and lows, of a young generation in Munich; as such, the title, which translates to The Second Home, refers to the community built outside of the four walls you grow up within, where each episode focuses on a different character’s perspective in an effort to present a smorgasbord of cultural ideas.
Is the only way to chronicle an entire generation to produce the longest movie script ever written? It’s certainly the biggest swing I can think of, but there are other efforts that, just as successfully, distil the attitudes of a time period down to their most authentic core: think Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, capturing the rock-and-roll culture of the 1970s, or, better yet, Dazed and Confused, which bumbles around a 1976 day-in-the-life, platforming that era-specific feeling of teenage liberation, or even Forrest Gump, which very obviously chronicles multiple decades of American history.
Still, Edgar Reitz pulled off something remarkable, and, hey, if you ever see a T-shirt with the entire script of Die Zweite Heimat condensed onto it, you know where to find me.
