Credit: Dangerous Minds / John Henry Timmis IV

When prestige movies first began to be premiered on VOD services, a strange subject of discourse began rearing its ugly head.

The likes of The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon were both well over three hours long and, since both of them had a vanishingly small window for release in theatres, the vast majority of people watched them at home. People struggle to get through 20-minute episodes of Brooklyn 99 without a tea break or an absent-minded scrolling session, so how the hell were people meant to watch motion pictures that are 209 and 206 minutes long respectively?

Several options were floated. In the case of the The Irishman, a pretty helpful infographic circulated around movie Twitter (I know, I know, it was only marginally better back then) dividing the movie into a five episode series of television. All to save people from the drudgery of actually watching a movie at home and not having it on in the background while you watch reels on Instagram. God only knows what we’d do if we were actually confronted with The Cure For Insomnia.

You think three hours is bad? This experimental film from 1987, directed by John Henry Timmis IV, makes both Scorsese pictures mentioned earlier look like Vines. The Cure For Insomnia lives up to its title by being an arse-numbing 87 hours long in length. Three days and 15 hours in total. For contrast, if you wanted to divide that into 45-minute episodes like the guide to The Irishman, it would be 115 episodes long. Best get binging then!

Why is this movie 87 hours long?

Now, obviously, this is not a film that is meant to be watched in one sitting. If you really want to be cutting about it, it’s not even really a film meant to be watched in the way that we usually would. It’s an art movie in the truest sense of the word. The fact that it was made and it exists is enough, actually, sitting through all 5,220 minutes of it (not a joke) is more of an insane endurance test than anything else. The kind of thing that a person would only ever do for bragging rights. Especially when you take into account the movie’s content.

You see, The Cure for Insomnia was originally a poem. Chicago native LD Groban devoted his entire life to writing it and by the time the film was made, said poem was over 4000 pages long. By the time of Groban’s death in 2011, he’d added over a thousand extra pages to the poem. Perhaps that’s the one thing the movie is missing. A subtitle calling the film ‘a work in progress.

The film consists of Groban at several different locations, reading the poem in its (at the time of filming) entirety, interspersed with a few cutaways to clips from heavy metal music videos or porn films. I say “a few cutaway clips” as if the screentime of those cutaway clips doesn’t amount to the extended Lord of the Rings movies several times over. The film looks, sounds and feels like found footage, with Groban himself barely audible for the vast majority of this film.

The film has been screened in its entirely precisely once, and for a long, long time (nearly as long as the film), the film was considered lost media. Especially after its director and star both passed away in 2002 and 2011, respectively. However, excitingly enough for fans of lost media, there is a way of getting one’s hands on it. Groban’s sister Deborah still has an original print of the film and is willing to send people copies for the price of duplication and postage.

That said, a mere three-and-a-half-hour chunk of the film (four per cent of the damn thing) is on YouTube, so if you’re tempted. Give that a bash first. You might find that three and a half hours of Groban burbling about nothing is more than enough.