Thursday, 26 August 1999

MORE THANKS: Sorry to continue the self-reflection. Just another 409 words or so. So, you know, I'm sitting at dinner with TNT's Marketing Chief Scot Safon a couple of nights ago and I realize that I hadn't mentioned him or Brad Siegel (President of TNT) or Morgan Fouch (our managing editor) or Graham Verdon (my first editor) or Jenn Nowitzky (my second editor) or Meghan McCarthy (my new editor) or Cindy and Paul - The Campbell Twins or Susan Campbell (tiny design queen) or Chris Brandon or Cindy Campbell or Rebecca "The Babymaker" Reynolds or Wonya Lucas or Joan or so many others at TNT, some of whom I probably don't even know are helping, or last but certainly not least, the great Jay Wilson. These are the people who get the column to you every day and who have supported the building of the column into a better known place to surf. These folks get a lot done with a little budget and what may be the smallest staff for a major Website anywhere. And they really, really deserve my thanks and yours.

But I want to single out Scot and Brad. If they weren't behind the column and the entire site, roughcut.com and The Hot Button would be a mere memory. As you may have noticed from the lack of ads, we aren't a moneymaker. That is, in some part, by choice. But my point is that these two men who are responsible for the health and welfare of a major division of a massive conglomerate have not only allowed, but supported the freedom of expression on this site and in this column without getting anything much from it but the pleasure of our existence. Some folks like to complain that we don't have enough money to spend at roughcut.com. I say, try finding another site with this much support that isn't being watched by big corporate brother and/or selling everything that they can find to sell. I was recently offered the opportunity to move to a more popular Website and I basically passed. I stayed here at roughcut.com because we have and will continue to build a future together and because of the support of these two men (especially Scot, who I know reads the column almost every single day). They have the power to say "no" and they rarely do when it comes to the work. They let me succeed. They let me fail. They let me grow. And a writer could never ask for more than that.

AIN'T IT KIND NEWS: The Hollywood Reporter Tuesday story on Harry Knowles and Ain't It Cool News came to my attention via readers who wrote in to mock it. My comment yesterday that there were inaccuracies was based exclusively on the 500 words or so that The Reporter printed on their Website. When I got a hard copy of the magazine, it proved to be such an absurd piece of non-journalism, I just found myself laughing over and over again. And of course, I found out that Paula Parisi wrote the piece shortly after I had thanked her in the anniversary column. I really like Paula a lot. As a person. But she writes puff pieces. She's been hugely successful writing puff pieces. And this was about as puffy as it gets. Let's start with the lie that Harry has 1.5 million readers daily. Harry does have influence, but if he has 100,000 readers a day, that would be a lot. He probably has 1.5 million page hits a week, which is a lot on the Web. But not this absurd 1.5 million reader crap. Harry's been perpetuating the myth of how many people read him for years. Here's how it works. He tells talent he has 1.5 million readers. Talent says to the studio, "You have to deal with AICN because there are 1.5 million readers there." The studio says, "We want to buy ads, but we want to verify your pageview count." AICN says, "No."

It is safe to say that a Website that really had 1.5 million readers would generate over $1 million in ad revenue annually with ease. The biggest newspapers in the world don't have 1.5 million subscribers. Yahoo! doesn't have a page of content that gets 1.5 million readers a day (that is, outside of the Yahoo.com page and, perhaps, the My Yahoo start page). Harry says at one point that he had 50,000 readers when Batman & Robin came out. I interviewed him after that and he claimed three million hits a month at that time. That's 100,000 hits a day, not 50,000 readers. And no one else I talked to believed that three million figure at that time in any case. The figure is probably around 50,000 readers, which is actually more people than subscribe to The Hollywood Reporter or Daily Variety and is a lot more than read any other Internet movie site. But for The Reporter to perpetuate what is a complete, self-serving myth is offensive to me, whether about Harry or Sony or Warner Bros. or anyone else.

Parisi also continues the myth of Harry killing Batman & Robin, which even Harry has said is untrue. How did anyone "kill" a movie that opened to $43 million? Just dumb. Likewise, Parisi dismisses the bounce Disney got out of Harry on Armageddon because he wrote about the Port-O-Sans. Uh, they didn't pay for him to come to the premiere, where he so infamously cried, because they didn't think he was going to help. And the only two executives who would go on-record for the piece, from Artisan and DreamWorks, also expect him to help. Both companies now use Ain't It Cool News with aplomb. Artisan fed AICN Blair Witch stuff before Sundance and lit the match they wanted to light. DreamWorks, for whatever reason, decided that AICN should be their friend a little more than a year ago and has fed them stuff before any other 'Net outlet since. Admittedly, part of that is because of Moriarty's relationship with some people at DreamWorks. But, of course, Paula P underestimates the significance of Moriarty in the AICN big picture, derisively calling him "the kid," like he's just another source. Moriarty is a major AICN conduit, even if not paid for his efforts. In any case, there is a reason why executives from both companies are so Harry friendly. He has helped them both. Has he been dishonest in helping them? Only in as far as full disclosure goes. When DreamWorks sends you playing cards from Galaxy Quest a few days before they send them to everyone else on God's green earth, it might be a little more honest to write, "I got this early stuff from DreamWorks" instead of perpetuating the spy myth.

Why does AICN have power in Hollywood? Because of pieces like this that ask no hard questions and put in print whatever Harry claims without any basis for fact-checking other than Harry's word. And as I keep on saying, I don't blame Harry for building his myth. That's his job, in a way. But it is a journalist's job to answer all the questions. The mere fact that Parisi ends the piece with the "possibility" that Harry will add non-Web elements to his career is an indication that either she got suckered into playing it that way because Harry told her off the record that he was doing a TV pilot or she just didn't know. Either way, it's less reliable than anything I've read on AICN lately. (Except maybe for the Joan of Arc review that had to come from a Sony or Besson insider.) Fortunately, I don't have to worry about Paula reading this column because if she did, she would have known about Harry's upcoming TV pilot months ago. It's not very smart self-promotion on my part to be ripping the journalists who could build me up the way they've built Harry. But then again, I've always been an idiot when it comes to self-promotion.

Anyway, I've wasted too much space on this already. I'm happy that AICN exists. I hate what journalists have made of it. I'm not in competition with Harry. We do very different things. And I think it is fascinating that Harry has become so much a part of things that The Hollywood Reporter is doing puff pieces usually reserved for executives being kicked upstairs into "production deals". He should live and be well. And so should Moriarty. And Glen. But frankly, I'm surprised that Anita Busch would run something so utterly faulty journalistically. It reads like a three-page ad from Merv Griffin Enterprises for their new investment. Blecch!

From DC: "Dear David Poland, just as with movies themselves it would be wrong to imagine that movie criticism has descended from some pinnacle of greatness in the past. Between James Agee and Pauline Kael--over a decade--there are few critics worth mentioning. True, Andrew Sarris was writing in the 1950s but only in the pages of Film Culture, which was hardly a widely read publication. In the early 1960s, when I was an undergraduate, the New York Times tried out a West Coast edition and I couldn't believe how dreadful Bowsley Crowther's reviews were--and he was probably the most influential reviewer in the country. Apart from a lot of other things, Pauline Kael really revolutionized movie reviewing by writing bona fide critiques of movies--even the ones she hated. By contrast, Agee was often superficial and even flippant when he wasn't writing about a movie he loved like Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux. What about Manny Farber? I can only say he's not my cup of tea. And interestingly, both Agee and Farber missed the boat on Orson Welles. Dwight Macdonald and Stanley Kauffmann could write very well--unlike the lugubrious Crowther or the real jerks who penned Time's anonymous poison pen letters in those days--but nothing ever suggested to me they understood anything about film as a medium. (Macdonald was always much more insightful on American culture than movies.). At least 90% of the time I disagreed with Kael, but I always found it much more rewarding to read her savaging Kubrick or Resnais--directors I love--than to read other reviewers praising them. Some years ago in The New York Review of Books Renata Adler wrote a really nasty review of one of the collections of Kael's reviews, in which Adler charted some of her subject's stranger idiosyncrasies--like Kael's obsession with hirsute males on screen--but the only time I think Kael really went over the edge was in her vendetta against George Cukor, in which personal animosity certainly played a large role. What pisses me off is dumb criticism, regardless of whether I agree or disagree about the film in question. To put it mildly, I don't share your enthusiasm for The Matrix but your reasons for liking it were more persuasive than Kenneth Turan's--which is why I'm happy you spent some time pointing out the inanity of Kevin Thomas' review of Mrs. Tingle."

From CM: "Is Kevin Thomas the only critic who loves going to the movies? Or does he just have bad taste? His opinions are certainly controversial. It comes as a surprise that he'd give Brokedown Palace only *1\2 since this is a guy who gave a glowing review to Teaching Mrs. Tingle and recommends Firestorm, Universal Soldier: The Return (it's 'sleek', it 'moves with such swiftness and ease, its story blending seamlessly into its sci-fi technology and special effects. This is one 'return' that's surely welcome.'), and The Mod Squad (yep, he was the only critic at critics.com who did).

More controversy: he gave a ***1\2 to Virus, when at critics.com, he's the only reviewer over **. I also remember him recommending Kull The Conquerer. She's All That (which he was not alone in recommending) was 'A teen comedy that actually puts a priority on intelligence and values and spans generations in its appeal' in his ***1\2 review. Makes you wonder what he'll think of Drive Me Crazy. Is he going to call IT a rip-off if She's All That is not?

And from AM AMERICA: "Critical Mass Appeal. I think all this discussion about a critic's responsibility to be more informed than your average movie viewer has been very interesting. When I lived in Chicago a while back, I used to enjoy a little feature they had on WXRT radio, called 'Going to the Show with The Regular Guy.' He had that southside ''Da Bears Da Bulls' way of telling you what he thought about a movie, and was at his best when he also described his movie-going experience, often with his buddy, Mats (sp?). I remember one time, (at band camp) he was describing a trip to 'the show' in the dead of winter at a multi with perhaps 3-6 screens, the box office for which was outdoors. There was a heater, like the ones at the 'L' train stops at the window, but no respite for those waiting in what was, at the time, a rather lengthy queue. A young couple ahead of him, having arrived at the theatre unprepared, was hemming and hawing about what they wanted to see. 'Mississippi Burning? Who's in that?' The Regular Guy shouted, 'Gene Hackman! Join the world, will ya!?' in his impatience to get to the window, and subsequently to the heat and to the show. To this day, I can't say Gene Hackman's name without adding, 'Join the world, will ya!?' Anyway, his show is an example of the public's desire for a 'regular guy's' opinion on what movies are good. Archives are available at http://www.wxrt.com/sounds/guy/. I listened to a few of the (relatively but not really current) reviews, and didn't find one that I thought was a stellar example of his work, but I guess the one for Out of Sight is as good as any (in the 'O' section of the archives, naturally). I think you're starting to get the hang of the affect / effect thing. :-)

E ME: You're all sick of reading about Harry in this column aren't you?