Insecure Wednesday: Filler and I Don't Mean Eric

 For Monday's entry I posted my Goodreads review of Mango Bob, a book I wanted to like but really didn't, mostly because the description promised a Carl Hiaasen-type crime comedy thriller in Florida but in reality there was a lot of padding with the crime story being really thin and incompetently done.

If Alex Cavanaugh reads this, he can back me up on this:  a lot of bad movies use filler to pad their run times.  Something bad movies love to do is show people driving from one place to another and parking and getting out and walking to a door.  James Nguyen of Birdemic infamy became the go-to punchline in Rifftrax movies for this.  In A Talking Cat!?! there is literally a five-minute sequence in the middle of the movie just showing a woman's car driving down a road back to her house.  Why?  No real reason except it added to the runtime.

In R.O.T.O.R. there's literally a whole scene of the main character and his new female partner checking into a hotel after he picks her up at the airport--which we also have to see in detail.  The female partner goes into her room, takes off an oversized dress for a Rambo-type outfit, and then they leave never to return.  Other than killing a couple of minutes (and probably getting the production some free rooms) what does this really add to the movie?

Even less bad movies can be guilty of this, like the Star Wars movies where there are gratuitous shots of ships flying to a planet or station and landing.  I think the "Special Editions" in the late 90s added some of these scenes, which while they show us the planets and stations and whatever aren't really necessary to the plot and just add to the runtime.  Or like Star Trek the Motion Picture where it takes like half-an-hour just to see the revamped Enterprise as Kirk is heading to it for the first time.

Most of the first third of Mango Bob felt like this kind of vamping.  There's all this boring, pointless detail about him going to a Saul Goodman-type lawyer (who is never seen again) to get a quickie divorce.  And then him moving into a state park with a tent to stay.  And then buying a motor home from his workplace.  The latter is important to the story--such as it is--but we didn't need so much detail about him selling his truck and essentially trading it for the motor home.  And then back in the state park there's so much detail about how to park the motor home and hook it up to the electrical and water outlets and blah, blah, blah.  I mean, are you writing a comedy crime thriller or a how-to guide on RVs?  The latter would have made more sense.

There can be that fine line to walk where if you don't give enough detail things aren't clear, but if you provide too much detail you're going to bore the audience.  Obviously you want some details, but you want those details to be important.  They should contribute something to the story whether it's part of the plot or contributing to the atmosphere.

Part of how you can tell the difference is something mentioned by the actress playing Lisa's mom in The Disaster Artist.  She laments that her character in The Room is mentioned to have breast cancer but the detail never comes back.  Filler details are the sort of thing that don't come back or really have any significance to the plot.  Saying she has breast cancer is a pretty small amount of filler, but imagine if they had shown her going to a doctor and getting tests and stuff?  That's the kind of filler a lot of bad movies do.

Especially when editing, what you have to ask yourself is if the scene you're writing is actually important to the audience's understanding of the plot or if you're just putting it in there to make the story longer.  If it's the latter, you really need to get rid of it.