Michael Phillips: Should movie theaters provide intermissions, even if filmmakers don’t?

“Killers of the Flower Moon” is not short, nor should it be. At 3 hours, 26 minutes, it casts a spell, dark and mournful but alive.

It may look like a certain kind of movie epic, especially as the trailers market it. But director/co-screenwriter Martin Scorsese’s cinematic lament for the Osage Nation during the oil boom in Oklahoma a century ago — when dozens of wealthy Osage were being murdered before the newly created FBI took an interest — relies on quiet, tense exchanges behind closed doors. This isn’t a triumphal story. It’s a story of greed, racism and harsh 20th-century history.

Would the movie work better, and attract bigger audiences, especially in the 50-year-old bladder demographic, with an intermission?

A handful of U.S. movie theater exhibitors recently went rogue and put in their own intermission — and then retracted it on orders from the “Killer of the Flower Moon” backers Apple Original Films in collaboration with Paramount. (Apple is testing a distribution partnership with Paramount, among others, akin to Amazon’s deal with Warner Bros.)

Scorsese didn’t make the movie with an intermission in mind. He didn’t love having someone else decide where one should go, even if it’s by customer demand or a theater operator’s presumption that three-and-a-half hours will be an easier sell with a break.

“Flower Moon” editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s longtime colleague, had two words for British newspaper The Standard regarding the intermissioning of their picture: “not right.”

Others argue for the option to offer moviegoers a break if they want it, or the uninterrupted film if they prefer that.

Says Tim Richards, founder and CEO of Vue International, a privately owned cinema chain in Europe, the U.K. and Taiwan: “‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is an extraordinary experience. And I would hate for anyone to not see it simply because they were concerned about sitting in one spot without a comfort break for three and a half hours.”

In his U.K. cinemas for the first week of release, Richards offered his customers both options, one with an intermission inserted at the 1-hour, 42-minute mark, well before the FBI shows up, the other without, as Scorsese intended it. Richards is cagey about details, and who sanctioned the intermission option for a week. But now, he says, that’s that. “The filmmakers, together with the studio” called it off.

Meantime several other Vue territories, including those in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, continue to offer approved intermissions in “Flower Moon.” Those countries have long-established moviegoing traditions, and the wine or beer or soda and popcorn break at halftime remains a must for the customer base. Length often has nothing to do with it; two-hour movies often come with an intermission, however smoothly or awkwardly inserted.

Richards recalls trying to “reintroduce the intermission starting a few years ago with one of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, which range from 135 to 165 minutes. The third, “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” really did feel the end of the world. Running times can be deceptive. Many moviegoers, including me, and including Richards, feel “Flower Moon” develops at a masterly pace, not nervous but not static, that belies its length.

Once upon a time in America, most movies of a certain duration, especially in their “road show” extra-long big city engagements at higher prices, embraced the intermission concept from the get-go. Filmmakers wanted all the bells and whistles: the overture; the intermission with intermission music; the entr’acte music; the exit music. It was an event.

Films of the requisite length and sweep didn’t necessarily build up to the intermission break with a huge action sequence. “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) might’ve culminated pre-intermission with Peter O’Toole on horseback with thousands of extras in the desert. Instead (and very shrewdly), it comes to its intermission with a simple walk-and-talk, with Jack Hawkins referring to O’Toole’s Lawrence: “That poor devil. He’s riding the whirlwind.” To which Claude Rains, intimating danger and colonialist doom ahead, says: “Let’s hope we’re not.” Intermission! Cue the Maurice Jarre theme!

Other epics of the early ‘60s, such as “Spartacus,” build to a rousing note of what’s next? In “Spartacus” Kirk Douglas, leading the slave revolt against the Roman Empire, promises to “smash every army they send against us!” Cue the Alex North music! Yes! The moment works. It’s hardly the best moment in the movie, but it’s the right time to pay the water bill, if you know what I mean.

I grew up in the waning era of un-ironic intermission movies, which were getting scarce by then. (Funniest ever: The eight-second intermission during the Bridge of Death crossing in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”) Curious about how “Flower Moon” would feel cut in half, so to speak, I saw it again the other night. Around the 102-minute mark, I kept an eye out for the probable intermission point Vue cinemas overseas were offering their customers as an option.

And you know? I couldn’t find any natural break around that point in Scorsese’s film. Storywise, you could do better with the arrival of Jesse Plemons’ FBI agent, but that’s a fair bit later. The entire film defies an obvious intermission at midpoint, because it’s about a fever dream that never breaks.

Vue’s Richards agrees: “There’s nowhere where you think ‘I can make a run for the bathoom.’ That’s a film that holds you. No big crescendos, no peaks and valleys. But that’s exactly why someone who needs a comfort break might struggle with the decision to see the film without an intermission.”

The problem is, Scorsese didn’t think about his movie any other way, at any point. Richards, on the other hand, says he got “more than 80% support” for the intermission option. And he believes, he says, in giving customers a choice, especially with the average length of movies increasing by 30 minutes over the last decade — and “with cinema operators in some instances really struggling. Recovery has been a lot slower than expected. But the studios, our partners, have made a commitment to cinemas ... that’s unprecedented.”

I’d love to live in a movie world, if we continue to support one, where large, ambitious films of all kinds rediscover the pleasure and tradition of the intentional, filmmaker-driven interval, strategically placed in the service of the story. “Flower Moon” wasn’t one of those films, because the director didn’t make it that way. So be it, says Richards, who says it’s simply “all about choice.” Whose choice, exactly, well … that’s a matter to be settled, or at least continued, after intermission.

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