The Top Ten Moments I Had at MovieCynics.com
Being a movie reviewer is a whole lot less glamorous than
one might imagine, and yet, there are still hundreds of movie review start-ups
every year. Some will be successful, some will be forgotten, but the majority
will simply flame out due to the extreme amounts of time and dedication that
are required to turn what starts out as a passion into something resembling a
successful business.
I know... I spent 10 years running the website at
MovieCynics.com. At its height, the website was bringing in thousands of
dollars a month and getting a hundred thousand visitors a day... not too bad
for a lone dude lying on the floor with a laptop. Of course, those days are
gone, and just as my love for movies peaked and faded away, so too has
MovieCynics.com, but I still hold many of the lessons I learned at the website
close to my heart, and I will forever be indebted to the time that I spent
watching every piece of crap that I could get my hands on.
So without further adieu, here are two of my top ten moments at
MovieCynics.com. They are in no particular order. If you plan on getting into
the movie review biz, you can look forward to a couple of these.
1. That first
comment on a review that wasn't from a friend: I've had a lot more
significant moments in my life, moments that were truly emotional/impactful,
getting married, selling my first book, and making my first movie just to name
a few, but certainly that first internet breakthrough was something special.
Writing movie reviews is a solitary, lonely business in the beginning. It's
like being the lone worker in a porn shop. You watch and see
everything, but no one really wants to have anything to do with you. You work
at a porn shop for Christ's sake! Get a life! Start up a movie review website
and see for yourself how people treat you.
Here you are, pumping your heart and soul into a review
of Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, and odds are you're just going to post it
up and let it sit there... for days. Occasionally, you'll go back to it and
check it out to see if anything has happened with it. You'll secretly be
pleased with your own turns of phrase. Then you'll secretly be embarrassed at
the errors and typos that you finally notice by the tenth reading of your review.
And that's all you get, personal satisfaction and embarrassment. The doubts
creep in: Do I suck at writing? Am I completely wrong? Even worse... am I just
plain fucking boring? If a review is posted on the Internet, but no one
comments, was it ever really posted at all? Oh, the ways that I ripped into
Bucky Larson! But without comments, a movie reviewer is like pre-spinach
Popeye... just another schlub in a navy outfit with a spindly girlfriend.
I wish I could say what the first comment was... but it was
over a decade ago. I will tell you the quality of movies I was reviewing back
then fell somewhere between utter trash and stuff Hollywood video would PAY YOU to rent. But it wasn't the
comment that was important; it was that feeling of validation, that feeling
that what I was doing actually counted. I wrote something. Someone cared enough
to leave a comment. Fuck yeah.
That's a strong sensation for someone who was literally
just starting out as a writer. Without my MovieCynics.com experience and the contribution
of random Internet people, I highly doubt I would have ever taken the step to
becoming a serious writer, someone who writes his own shit rather than bag on
other people's shit.
So to whoever posted that first comment, I thank you. May
your days be full of green lights, cheap beer, and hilarious interviews of
horror movies that no one has ever seen.
2. That First Time a Filmmaker Contacted Me to Do a
Review: Living in Portland, Oregon means that casual contact with actual
filmmakers is a non-occurrence, so as I worked and worked, honing my craft and
building up a small cult following by slaving away on movie reviews, news
articles, release dates, and the occasional top ten list, I began to stumble
across random filmmakers. Some were fans, some simply wanted their movies
reviewed... others were mad that I had actually reviewed their movie... to
which I still say, "If you don't want people to call your movie a piece of
shit, then don't make a piece of shit."
My first contact with a filmmaker came in the form of
Henry Weintraub. Hank, as I know him now, and myself were essentially of like
mind with regards to movies, and one day, he emailed me, asking if I would like
to check out his short film Mindslime. I responded that I would love to check
it out... it was that simple. But man, did it feel so much greater than that.
Here was a filmmaker, local, indie, but still a filmmaker, who actually wanted
me to review his movie. Here I am, some chump, barely out of college (who was
actually only just beginning to learn about movies), and this guy wants me to
review his film. If I knew what I know now, I probably would have turned him
down. Luckily, I was naive and prone to bouts of self-importance, so I agreed.
Now, for those of you out there who simply want to get to
know people in the film industry, one of the best ways is to simply start
writing movie reviews. People are always looking for press. Of course, you're
never going to get contacted by Steven Spielberg (maybe), but there is a legion
of indie filmmakers out there just dying to get a review of their latest flick
up on your webspace.
So I wrote up a review for Hank. He liked it. I liked
that he liked it, and my love of truly independent films was born. Of course,
the excitement of this feeling would fade over time, until the point where I
began to dread every time an email showed up in my gmail account. You see, not
all indie filmmakers are good. In fact, most of them are embarrassingly
terrible. I now know what it must be like to be a parent listening to your
child practicing an instrument for the first time. You just smile, try to be
positive, and give them some constructive feedback to encourage them to
improve. Meanwhile, you have to fight back the urge to punish the little
resource sponges for assaulting your senses... such is the way with reviewing
indie films. For every one that you kind of enjoyed, there are ten that have no
business being seen by anyone other than family or friends... but I could just
never bring myself to rip into the damn things as hard as I could. Maybe I
should have. I suppose I could have saved them all some time and some money.
I like to think that I helped some of these poor,
misguided filmmakers along the way, but who knows? In the end, we probably just
fueled each other's delusions of grandeur, like two alcoholics making never-ending toasts to
one another and saying, "I'll drink to that!" We encouraged each
other to keep working... but did anyone benefit from this? I don't know of a
single, indie filmmaker that ever became anything but a struggling indie
filmmaker. Now that I'm beginning to become part of the machinery behind the
curtain, I am learning why... but that is a story for another day.
Thanks to Hank Weintraub for making this guy feel like an
important dude, even though I was literally just some a-hole in an apartment
wasting his evenings. Hope you got something out of it as well.
Keep an eye out for numbers 3 and 4 soon. Thanks for reading, and in the immortal words of Urkel... Did I do that?
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