Watching Movies for Visual Inspiration

I'm sure other writers watch movies and TV shows for visual inspiration—I can't possibly be alone in that. Heck, I can even watch a movie for other reasons (like, er, entertainment) and be struck by a scene or setting and think, "Hey, that would make a cool location for a story!"

Sometimes, though, I'll put in a dvd just to watch the settings. In that case, I generally end up gritting my teeth and trying to endure the movie to the end, because 9 times out of 10 the movie in question is pretty awful. And I find myself wondering how other people do it. How do other people manage to sit through an excruciatingly dull or just plain crappy movie in the name of research or inspiration?

And then, just by accident yesterday as I was watching such a movie, I hit the mute button when I meant to hit pause.

A whole new world of movie watching opened up before me. Not only was I able to focus on the sets and costumes—the whole point of watching said movie—but I also found myself making up my own story to go along with the images on the screen. Brilliant! (Well, not the made up story so much as the fun I had doing it!)

In fact, it was so much fun that I'm already making lists of movies, bad and good, to watch this way. Yeah, that's right, I plan to watch movies I love this way, too. See, I tend to watch favorite movies over and over again (kind of like I re-re-read favorite books) and it gets easy to multitask and do other things while listening to familiar dialogue. Watching those movies as silent film will require me to actually focus on the screen. I figure there's plenty of things I've never noticed before, just waiting to be discovered. Should be an interesting exercise.

Have you ever watched a movie or TV show without sound? Deliberately? What did you learn?

Oh yeah, the movie that spawned this great discovery? The Shadow, 1994, staring Alec Baldwin—a movie that's really only watchable in one of two ways: 1) with plenty of alcohol, or 2) as a silent film.