Is dialogue showing or telling?

[Christine Wheelwright]

Having read all the way through this this thread again I have just remembered something I REALLY REALLY REALLY want to do in the insanely unlikely event I ever get a chance to direct a feature film. I want to start with an opening title crawl that has a shedload of backstory. Lots of movies back in the 30s and 40s started like this which is why George Lucas so brilliantly used it in Star Wars and why a disproportionally large number of bad science fiction films still do to this day (not because old films used to do it but because George Lucas so brilliantly used it in Star Wars and it has become part of the SF furniture).

So the opening of the movie - after a stupidly huge number of swirling glitzty CGI logos (many of which will be made up specially for the film and not have any real organizations behind them followed a huge long list of white lettering on a black background telling you that the names of the logos you have just watched are presenting and producing in association with each other) I will start the movie with long title crawl full of expositional guff that the audience will have to read.

"The year is Xty Twenty-three. The Nauxious Corporation own the Quantillium 57 mining concessions of Altair 4 and are ruthlessly exploiting.... a rebel colony.... robot assassins... blah blah blah... "

At the same time as this is scrolling past the eyeballs of an increasingly frustrated audience, a narrator is reading out a completely different script: "The realm of Fundupore is ravaged by an invasion from the Northlands. Lead by the evil Lord PootyPootynimnim, savage hordes lay waste to all in their path. Princess Stephanie, heir to the Crown and Anchor... blah blah blah..."

By the end of two minutes of this the audience - assuming I still have one - will be so bewildered they will accept any recognisably structured story that appears in front of them with such an overwhelming sense of relief that I should be able to get halfway through the second act before anyone start to question why the film isn't actually very good...

I wish I could tell you I had been drinking.

I haven't.

I'd watch that. You could stretch the intro to 90 minutes and have it tell the whole story as the text scrolls up the screen. Then finally cut to a live action bloke who says simply "Thats it!" And then the final credits roll (which should be fairly quick; no stunt coordinator, no costumed key grip, no animal wrangler, and so on). I think I'd quite like that because I'm a sucker for extended, grandiose introductions, although one of my own didn't do too well when I put it up for critique on sff.

Speaking of great introductions, this is my all time favorite:

 

[Swank]

Having read all the way through this this thread again I have just remembered something I REALLY REALLY REALLY want to do in the insanely unlikely event I ever get a chance to direct a feature film. I want to start with an opening title crawl that has a shedload of backstory. Lots of movies back in the 30s and 40s started like this which is why George Lucas so brilliantly used it in Star Wars and why a disproportionally large number of bad science fiction films still do to this day (not because old films used to do it but because George Lucas so brilliantly used it in Star Wars and it has become part of the SF furniture).

So the opening of the movie - after a stupidly huge number of swirling glitzty CGI logos (many of which will be made up specially for the film and not have any real organizations behind them followed a huge long list of white lettering on a black background telling you that the names of the logos you have just watched are presenting and producing in association with each other) I will start the movie with long title crawl full of expositional guff that the audience will have to read.

"The year is Xty Twenty-three. The Nauxious Corporation own the Quantillium 57 mining concessions of Altair 4 and are ruthlessly exploiting.... a rebel colony.... robot assassins... blah blah blah... "

At the same time as this is scrolling past the eyeballs of an increasingly frustrated audience, a narrator is reading out a completely different script: "The realm of Fundupore is ravaged by an invasion from the Northlands. Lead by the evil Lord PootyPootynimnim, savage hordes lay waste to all in their path. Princess Stephanie, heir to the Crown and Anchor... blah blah blah..."

By the end of two minutes of this the audience - assuming I still have one - will be so bewildered they will accept any recognisably structured story that appears in front of them with such an overwhelming sense of relief that I should be able to get halfway through the second act before anyone start to question why the film isn't actually very good...

I wish I could tell you I had been drinking.

I haven't.

May I recommend old fashioned looking illustrations of yet another story in the background of the scrolling text:
Huge ships in forced perspective firing lasers at terrified stampeding dinosaurs. Hooded mystics performing a rite around an overloading fusion generator. A beautiful woman smoking a filtered cigarette covered with glowing circuitry. Suited astronauts on horseback, lances at the ready.

 

[msstice]

@JunkMonkey I am now stuck doing internet searches to see which movie has done this, because you can bet money, if you think of it, someone has already done it (probably badly). I'm going to guess some 1970s gag movie. I remember that the Naked Gun series had captions that had typos in it that were corrected.

 

[sknox]

I dealy love Ripping Yarns. I have the printed scripts, which where published as books, Way Back When. I also have the DVDs.

 

[JunkMonkey]

@JunkMonkey I am now stuck doing internet searches to see which movie has done this, because you can bet money, if you think of it, someone has already done it (probably badly). I'm going to guess some 1970s gag movie. I remember that the Naked Gun series had captions that had typos in it that were corrected.

I'm pretty sure I came up with this cunning plan after watching some chop-socky film (possibly called The Flying Guillotine ) which opened with a screen of text (in English) and a voice over (in English) which had obviously come from two different translations of the original Chinese. They were almost the same but different enough to make you feel like your brain was being taken in two different directions at the same time. It was a very very odd feeling.