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Measuring a Movie’s Greatness

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By Jim Fisher.

Ultimately it is the creators, the filmmakers themselves, who will determine which movies are important, not the expert critics.

Luís Amaral

Luís Amaral

Luís Amaral

One of the great pastimes ever is the argument, preferably over a cold beer at a gathering of friends, over which movies are the greatest of all time. Good times, indeed.

This argument can erupt anywhere, at almost any time. “Casablanca,” someone will aver. “Lawrence of Arabia,” another chimes in. “The Godfather,” asserts a quiet voice in the corner. “Blazing Saddles,” snarls a large, humorless man, neck veins bulging.

“You’re all wrong,” says a svelte young woman, holding the humorless man in a headlock while his face turns black. “It’s…”

We’ve all been there.

From the average movie-goer to the most seasoned screenwriter, producer, director and film academic, we each have our own personal list of greatest movies ever backed by our brilliant reasoning and sophisticated judo holds. Even active members of that least qualified community of all, the professional movie critic, produce lists of the greatest movies to the amusement and derision of all.

At the risk of being folded into a Full Nelson and educated by your cogent arguments some night in a dark alley, my personal nominees for best movies of times are these: The Battle of the Century (a silent) and The Demon Machine (an Academy Award winner), both out of the fertile mind of Stan Laurel. For those who aren’t aware, almost every comedy convention used in today’s movies and television was introduced, and frankly, perfected, by Mr. Laurel. (Suddenly, I sense anger in the Force.)

Oliver Hardy as the Manager and Stan Laurel as the Prize Fighter in The Battle of the Century

Oliver Hardy as the Manager and Stan Laurel as the Prize Fighter in The Battle of the Century

There must be a better way to determine which of the thousands upon thousands of movies produced since The Great Train Robbery are best. And Luís Amaral, co-director the Northwestern University Institute on Complex Systems, has developed an automated method that beats critics in picking great movies. (Amaral also is professor of chemical and biological engineering in Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, though what that has to do with anything is unclear.)

Amaral’s process is an objective method of measuring movie citations to predict a flick’s greatness. Now, before you set out to stalk this researcher with the intent of straightening out his benighted thinking, his idea is that the best predictor of a movie’s significance is how often a movie is referenced by other movies. In other words, a movie’s significance is decided by today’s and tomorrow’s film directors — not the critics or any other group of yokels and yahoos you might name.

Movie critics can be overconfident in spotting important works, and they have bias. Our method is as objective as it gets.

Luís Amaral

Good, because this subject definitely needs a traffic cop.

He and his colleagues are the first to systematically compare different approaches for estimating a film’s significance. They considered metrics for measures both subjective (critical reviews, awards, public opinion) and objective (citations, box office sales).

Janet Leigh as Marion Crane in Psycho

Janet Leigh as Marion Crane in Psycho

The researchers found their automated method of movie citations is better at predicting greatness, especially in movies 25 years old or older, than these runners-up:

  1. the expertise of movie critics (a group of critics or a single critic),
  2. the wisdom of the crowd,
  3. the numbers of awards won and the
  4. box office receipts, among others.

The research team conducted a big data study of 15,425 U.S.-produced films listed in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Specifically, they looked to see how well an approach predicted a movie’s inclusion in the National Film Registry of the U.S. Library of Congress, which is akin to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

In their analysis, the researchers found the number of times a movie 25 years or older is referenced by other movies best predicts inclusion in this registry of American films deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”

Films with the most long-gap citations that also are in the National Film Registry are The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Psycho, Casablanca and Gone With the Wind.

Jack Haley as The Tin Man, Ray Bolger as The Scarecrow, Judy Garland as Dorothy, and Bert Lahr as The Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Jack Haley as The Tin Man, Ray Bolger as The Scarecrow, Judy Garland as Dorothy, and Bert Lahr as The Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Now, calm down before you do something you won’t regret later. There’s a logic here.

“Directors keep coming back to movies that are significant,” Amaral said. “If you show a little bit from Pscyho, such as referencing the shower scene, you are putting that whole movie in front of the viewer of the new movie.”

“There is something about a movie that is hidden to us, but there are measurable things, such as critic ratings, awards and referencing by other filmmakers, that hint at this hidden element — a movie’s significance,” he said. “We find that ultimately it is the creators, the filmmakers themselves, who will determine which movies are important, not the expert critics.”

Take that, critics.

P.S. Neither of my favorites made the cut. I shall address this oversight with Professor Amaral and his cohorts the next time I’m in Evanston.

Reference: Max Wasserman, Xiao Han T. Zeng, Luís A. Nunes Amaral. “Cross-evaluation of metrics to estimate the significance of creative works.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015; 201412198 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1412198112

 This article first appeared on Science for Writers (www.scienceforwriters.blogspot.com)

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Jim Fisher has been a professional writer since 1983. Now semi-retired, he focusses on writing fiction and screenplays and editing the science-based blog, Science News for Writers (SNfW): <a href="http://www.scienceforwriters.blogspot.com">www.scienceforwriters.blogspot.com</a>.

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