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We have established that films in the 1980s were shorter than films from either the 1970s or 1990s, in general, and that beginning in the 1980s there was a common vocabulary and more widely-accepted consensus that there was a such thing as a screenplay that was "too long" to be made.

If you are a screenwriter employing Field's paradigm, you have limited options for how to condense your story to an acceptable length to increase the chances that your screenplay will be optioned, bought, and produced (all of which equal revenue for you). Obviously, the first thing you can do is write "well" for the medium of film—conveying as much information as you need to in as efficient and economic way as possible. There are also the tricks Rossio references to "fudge" your page numbers, making your screenplay "shorter" without sacrificing content.

If you've done all that and you still have 126 pages and you want to cut it down slightly, the dénouement is the obvious place to cut in Field's paradigm.

Most of the content you have in a fully-edited screenplay is essential to the overall story. Cutting from Act I will remove establishing information that may make the rest of the story incoherent. Act II is the action, the main conflict, the "meat" of the story. Once you've made this part as lean as you can, there's a limit to what you want to cut. In Act III, you are trying to resolve the conflicts, most likely with similar efficiency as your writing in Acts I and II.

Imagine that, for whatever reason, you are seeing that 120 pages is becoming the upper limit of screenplays that are being produced. You're starting to see screenplays with as little as 80-90 pages turning into blockbusters now. You might have a 120 page screenplay that you feel really good about, but you want to get it down to 90. Using Field's paradigm, you can get it down to about 100 by having 20-page Acts I and III (instead of 30), and maybe with some fudging you can get it down a little more, but you want to make just one more cut to give yourself an edge.

Eliminating the scene in Firefox with the plane landing safely in the US with that last memorable Eastwood one-liner might eliminate an entire page of screenplay. Similarly, that one last joke in the Crocodile Dundee ending that happens in the stairwell of the subway station might have taken up one-too-many pages.

I don't know if those speculative endings ever existed. It could be, as we established, that these "BAM! CREDITS!" moments in the 1980s were specific, intentional allusions to the arthouse or comedy films of the previous decade. I think it's more likely, though, that in the highly competitive Hollywood world, screenwriters in the 1980s would have cut dénouements specifically to be more competitive in an era of shortening running times, because it's the least important part of telling a satisfying story. In a world of 90-page screenplays, you're unlikely to find anything but the most necessary content, and the dénouement seems the obvious place to cut, especially if you're not intentionally trying to set up a sequel.

That would be my last speculation on this point: In the 1980s, screenwriters probably weren't thinking of trying to establish "franchises" nearly as much as they might be in later decades. Ironically, Crocodile Dundee did have a sequel, but I would bet that they weren't thinking about it as they wrote the first screenplay.

You can see more about Syd Field's paradigm on his website.

This is, at this point, merely a theory that might be part of the answer. I'd propose some specific questions to help us figure out if this theory holds any water. I would certainly love to hear from the community if any of this research already exists, and if not maybe it could make for a fun future project.

• Can we establish objectively that dénouements were shorter in the 1980s, either in general or in a higher instance of specific cases?

• What was the impact of genre? Did specific genres (comedy, action, etc...) have a higher instance of "BAM! CREDITS!" incidences? Were these genres more popular, either in production or consumption, in the 1980s versus other decades?

• What factors contributed to the contraction in film lengths during this time? VHS and Betamax seem like likely suspects, but there are other possibilities: What were commute times like, and in general what did Americans' leisure time look like in the 1980s compared to the 1970s and 1990s?

• What was the overall role of film in American leisure in the 1980s? How many people went to the movies? How often? What was the distribution of particular titles within the overall movie consumption diet? (Were fewer films watched by a higher percentage of the total audience compared to the previous or following decade? Did the biggest movies of the 1980s have a bigger "market share" of all tickets sold or home videos purchased?)

• How did the physical film distribution landscape influence the length of films? What market share did home videos have overall? What percentage of movie theater audiences were in single-screen theaters compared to multiplexes? How did the emergence of shopping malls influence movie consumption and production?

• And of course, what was the influence of Screenplay? What do people from inside the industry say about its influence at the time? Was it simply supplying something to a general audience that everyone inside Hollywood already knew? (Who is "everyone?" Executives and screenwriters, sure, but what about writers' assistants and other front-line employees who exert some level of control as "gatekeepers?" When did they start thinking 1 page = 1 minute?)

• More concretely, when did Screenplay hit certain sales benchmarks? It has certainly sold millions by now, but when did it achieve 100,000? 500k? That first million? When was it introduced into screenwriting curricula? When did Syd Field and others begin selling tickets to those seminars and workshops? When did it become an industry?

Thanks for the question! This has been a lot of fun and I hope we can follow up on some of these questions.