Film Courage: What does a good opening of a movie have to have?
Chris Gore, Founder/Owner of FilmThreat/Author/Filmmaker: It’s just really simple, I want to know what’s going to happen next. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the first 5 or 10 minutes of a movie and I don’t want to watch the rest of it. For a couple years I was a programmer at the Sonoma Valley Film Festival and was a program director and I watched films and you can tell within the first few minutes, you want to know what’s going to happen next. You have to be engaged, you have to be drawn in, it’s got to be something emotional. You have to connect and you just really have to know what’s going to happen next. You can have a great opening and that can actually, if you don’t have that great opening, it’s not gonna propel the rest of the film because the middle of the movie can get muddled. I think middles of films are tough but if you blow the opening, I mean there’s no point in watching the rest. I can’t tell you how many first 10 minutes of movies I’ve watched. You have to grab the viewer in the first 10 minutes and it really comes down to Do I want to continue on the story with this character?
Film Courage: Can you think of one that’s the perfect opening, that stands out as a model, that you would never feel you could live up against?
Chris: See my taste is so weird…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BIO:
Chris Gore is a writer, comedian, author and television personality who has built a solid reputation as a hilariously outspoken voice in the entertainment world. As a teenager, Chris founded the brutally honest magazine Film Threat, which began as a fanzine while he was a college student in Detroit. As Film Threat evolved into a respected national magazine, he relocated to Los Angeles. The print magazine was retired in 1997 when it was re-launched as a web site. FilmThreat.com found a huge audience online and was named one of the top five movie web sites by the Wall Street Journal. Chris has appeared as a film expert on MSNBC, E!, CNN, Travel Channel, and Reelz Channel. Chis has also hosted shows on FX, Starz, IFC and G4TV’s Attack of the Show as the show’s film expert. His weekly movie review segment DVDuesday was among the most popular on G4. Chris is also an author, having written The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made and The Complete DVD Book. His book The Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide is considered the bible of the industry and is required reading at film school.
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