THE END...OR IS IT?

I’m amazed that anyone would make a film for young people and let it run two hours and forty-one minutes, but I don’t think that’s going to keep anyone in the target audience from going to see Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.  (When I saw it at a press screening several weeks ago, a colleague brought along his kids and they didn’t squirm once—which is more than I can say.)

But it’s unlikely that very many people, young or old, will see the movie’s final joke, a nice postscript to the story involving one of its main characters.  That’s because it’s placed at the end of the long, long closing credits. (They actually run about six minutes, approximately the length of an old Warner Bros. cartoon!) 

I saw it, because I refuse to leave a theater until I’ve been threatened with civil or criminal prosecution.  Normally, you can hear car engines turning over outside while I’m still watching those credits...even at so-called industry screenings, where you’d think insiders would give their peers the courtesy of watching their names roll by. 

Those long credit rolls are a relatively recent appendage to Hollywood movies; right through the 1960s and even into the early 1970s, most screen credits appeared at the beginning of a movie.  They were concise, because no one had yet been persuaded that it was vital to credit the caterers, interns, and drivers.

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One veteran filmmaker who decried this change was Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who prided himself on ending his movies with a punch, delivered by a musical finale, a great last line, or both.  Think of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, All About Eve, or A Letter to Three Wives for perfect examples.  He wanted to send audiences into the lobby with that final moment resonating in their heads, and bemoaned the fact that this was no longer possible.

Films like Harry Potter offer a reward for those of us who endure the endless roster.  There have been many others over the years.  Airplane! not only featured a payoff to a running gag within the movie, but injected jokes into the closing credits as well.  (At the end of the legal warning about copyright infringement are the words “So there.”  The legal eagles at Paramount were unaware of the gag until it was too late, and didn’t find it amusing at all.) From that point on, the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams made a practice of putting goofy gags in the final moments of their movies.

Young Sherlock Holmes presented a post-credit story revelation (as does Jonathan Demme’s current release The Truth About Charlie), while The Muppet Movie was the first to show a cast member shouting into the lens, “Go home!”  Wayne’s World and Wayne’s World 2 have very funny punchlines, as do a number of animated features from Disney and Pixar.  (I remember standing, almost alone, in the balcony of the El Capitan theater at the end of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, then feeling smug that my long wait was not in vain.) 

Many directors like the idea of giving faithful viewers a bonus for staying until the very end.  You never know what’s coming—if, indeed, anything is coming—until the movie studio logo appears.

People who race to the exit instead don’t know what they’re missing.  Ask anyone who saw the last moments of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.