Cornell Prof. Discovers Secret of Good Movies

It's all about the attention span...

Howard Hawks famously said that all a good movie needs is three great scenes and no bad ones. Well, according to James Cutting, a psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, they also need to conform to a special mathematical formula. In a forthcoming paper, Cutting reveals that most modern Hollywood blockbusters conform to a mathematical model for attention span called the 1/f fluctuation.

In his research, Cutting measured the shot length of the 150 highest-grossing movies between 1935 and 2005. He then graphed the varying shot lengths of each movie as a wave. For modern blockbusters, those waves correlated with the 1/f fluctuation attention span waves produced by the University of Texas, Austin, during the 1990s. And the more recent the movie, the closer the movie's editing schemes matched the 1/f fluctuation.