Vocab's Top Ten Moments at MovieCynics: #5 Press Screenings

For anyone out there that wants to consider yourself a movie reviewer (Remember, only pretentious dizzlebags call themselves film critics.), you really can't call yourself one until you've made your way past the pearly gates... in this case, you get your name on the list to get invited to press screenings.

            Now for those of you out there who are trying to rightfully earn the vaunted title of movie reviewer, let me dispel some of the myths out there about press screenings. First off, no matter how hard you work, Hollywood isn't going to come kissing your ass and saying, "Hey... you want access to these press screenings?" This is just never going to happen. If Hollywood were this innovative and forward thinking, then they wouldn't be making a fourth sequel in the Big Momma's House franchise or rebooting crap like Three Men and a Baby. (These things haven't happened, but just you wait. The Vocabulariast is one-part a-hole and three-parts prophet.)

            They are never going to notice you. In fact, I'm pretty sure Hollywood would be just fine not having any reviewers at all. This is why they guard their information so dearly. You see, getting on the list is near impossible... why? The information is guarded. Most of the movie critics I've met that actually attend these screenings are huge self-absorbed nerds with poor hygiene and inferiority complexes. Or they are the opposite... self-aggrandized metrosexuals who can't help but look at the world down their noses. Neither of these types of people are going to give you the information you need to get your little foot in the door.

            How did I score my proverbial golden ticket? Well, two things worked in my favor. #1... reviewing movies doesn't pay you jack. #2... I was making enough money to hire writers. This led to me posting ads on craigslist for writers, and I stumbled across this old burnout dude who had actually been writing reviews for years. Now, the fact that he had been doing this for years, and still needed the extra income my little website would provide ought to tell you something about this racket.

            I met him for a beer, we decided the gig wouldn't be right for either of us, and then we started to shoot the shit. As we talked, the subject of screenings came up, and lo and behold, this guy had the information I needed... namely, the contact information for a super-secret P.R. company that ran all of the screenings. All I had to do was contact this P.R. company and get my name on the list, and I would have access to Sony's screening reps, along with a couple of the other major film companies.

            Of course, in order to get the information, I had to swear myself to secrecy and keep his name out of it. Or was it her? I'm not saying. Smokescreen, bitches. Eventually, this kind dude shoots me the contact information, and I was on easy street from there.

            Actually, though it seemed that simple, I had to provide proof of my site's viability, its lofty traffic numbers, and give them my real name. Who the hell uses their real name? That's like asking to for a picture of my gear. Rude.

            My first free screening was awesome. Not because the movie was great or anything, but because it was confirmation that I had finally broken through. I was a movie reviewer... like legit. When I talked about my gig with others, I could say things like, "Yeah, I make some money, get free DVD's, and get into press screenings."

            The first free screening was for The Thing prequel, and I checked it out at Lloyd Center in Portland. The sucky thing about being allowed to get into press screenings is that you half to show up 45 minutes early if you want to guarantee yourself a seat. Then you check in with the P.R. rep, cross your fingers and hope they don't send you packing because they've never heard of you, and then you sit in your seat and avoid talking to all of the other critics. I'm not joking. They avoid each other like the plague. I get it. They were all pretty lame.

            I still remember how awesome I felt sitting in the back row as The Thing prequel began to play. Not even the abysmal CGI could bring me down. When the credits rolled, I popped up out of my seat, and went home, yawning because it was fucking late. The damn screening didn't start until 7 o'clock. After a full day's work, two hours of literally just waiting around outside the theater, and another hour of waiting inside the theater, I was pretty exhausted.

            That's the thing with these screenings. They set up so many arbitrary rules, that at any one time, you may only see a handful of critics at a movie. Let me give you an example. For genre films that people are generally excited to see, screenings were invariably at 7 o'clock, and you had to get there early because they were going to flood the theater with a group of theatergoers that I like to call "the free people." These people are loud, obnoxious, fairly trashy, and only really concerned with getting something for free. They talk loudly, buy one big tub of popcorn and share it around while drinking from free water cups. They all know each other because this is the only way they ever see movies. It doesn't matter what movie it is either. If it's free, they're ass in seat. The shit these people say is the type of stuff that you would collate into some lame post on Buzzfeed titled: 25 Dumb as Fuck Things Heard in a Movie Theater.

            So you get there. Sometimes you have to bag up your cell phone, sometimes you don't. You sit around for an hour, and then a horde of braying jackasses starts rushing into the theater and filling your mind with dumb. By the time the movie is over, you're so annoyed by their constant rustling and incessant gabbing that you can't help but think of newer, better ways to kill people.

            Then there is the glorious 12 o'clock showing. These were actually a better experience, but they were also totally awkward. These showings were generally reserved for "serious" movies, the type of movies that the movie studios thought were actually good. Rather than sit a bunch of dumbasses around you, they limited these screenings to movie reviewers only. Not so bad, right?

            Wrong. These movies were screened at 12 o'clock on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, when most movie critics are actually working at their real jobs. If you wanted to attend one of these screenings, you had to pretty much skip out on work.

            Free screenings are not all they're cracked up to be. If you crack down and get thirsty or hungry, which is highly likely considering the amount of time you'll be waiting around, then you've defeated the whole purpose of the experience. One medium popcorn will make it just like you paid for the damn movie. You can't even get a jump on "non-movie reviewer" reviewers because you can't post your review until the movie is actually in theaters. Meanwhile Joe BlogJob can pirate a damn movie off the internet and have his review up two weeks before yours, thus securing valuable priority in Google's ridiculous search engines. I know... I used to do this.

            Still, I relish that first screening. To work so hard and finally attain one of the goals you set out for yourself is always a rewarding experience, even if you have to sit among a bunch of smelly trolls and people who steal soap and lotion from hotel rooms, which they probably won on a radio contest anyway.

How I Lost My Movie Critic Status

            Over the years, as I stopped making money off of MovieCynics, and began to care less and less about seeing movies. I just sort of stopped going to these screenings. They kept inviting me, but the idea of seeing something like The Grand Budapest Hotel... even for free, simply doesn't appeal to me anymore.

            My last screening came on the week before The Boxtrolls was released. We were getting ready to have our Portland screening of All Hell Breaks Loose in a couple of weeks, so I thought I'd just stroll over to the theater at noon, hand out some fliers to the "professionals," get some free publicity, and watch The Boxtrolls. It was actually a pretty good movie, but that's not the point.

            Once I got there, I was racked with nerves. Here were people I had seen off and on at various screenings for the last five years... and yet, I had never said a word to them, and they had never said a word to me. At a noon screening, when all the seats were open, critics would stroll in and sit generally about as far apart from anyone else as they could. These were not socialites.

            Anyway, as the critics would come strolling in (These were indeed critics, in every sense of the word.), I would hand them a flier, explain who I was, and see if I could score some much needed publicity for All Hell Breaks Loose.

            I've never seen such an awkward collection of people in my life. And suddenly, it dawned on me how Michael Cera had become so popular despite making movies that have no redeeming quality whatsoever. These movie reviewers were all bloated, hipster versions of Michael Cera. Of course they would love his movies. It was if I had walked into a mental asylum full of drooling idiots. Half of these mongos could barely put together a comprehensive sentence, despite my disarming charisma and easygoing charm.

            Of course, being the only not-white movie critic in the entire city might have had a hand in that as well. Half the people looked like they locked into a fight or flight situation as soon as they figured out I was addressing them. These are not the group of people anyone should be taking movie advice from. Every time I see that Rob Lowe commercial with the shy-pissers in it, I think of movie critics.

            Anyway, I hand out all of my fliers, the film rolls, and I get my ass out of there. After that, the invites stop coming. I can only guess, but I'm fairly sure one of these anti-social, bush-league, basement dwellers must have reported me for spreading my wares... and to top it all off, not a single one of these people bothered to spread the word about All Hell Breaks Loose. But you know what? I'm glad I no longer get invited to press screenings of I, Frankenstein or anything featuring Jesse Eisenberg. All is good.

You made it to the popcorn!

Vocab's Top Ten Moments at MovieCynics: #3 and #4

#3. Free Crap in Your Mailbox

There are lots of reasons to want to become a film critic, or movie reviewer for the less toolish out there. I want to raise the art of cinema (Yeah, right.). I need attention (likely). I need money (Cue sniggering movie critics everywhere.).  But to be honest... the number one reason to become a movie critic is to get free swag. I'm talking DVD's, screenings, posters, random postcards from random people, and the glory of an always blowing up inbox.

Some reviewers may give you one of those other reasons, but it's really all about the swag. If you love movies, you love free ones even more. When I received my first dose of random swag, I was jumping for joy. Ok, I didn't actually do this. Everyone that knows me knows that I generally have one of two reactions to things... indifference and "smiling."

Over the years, MovieCynics had become a haven for indie auteurs and random reviews of short films, in addition to the routine, ritualized destruction of big-budget Hollywood movies. With this focus, I began to attract the attention of what I like to call the dregs of the film distribution game. I was being constantly bombarded with requests from fledgling distributors who only seemed capable of scoring the rights to films that no one ever wanted to see, and I endeavored to fill them all, with the help of my man Bobby Bless and some other random reviewers. My initial dose of free stuff came in the form of a collection of posters and DVD's for an up-and-coming film distribution company called Wild Eye Releasing.

One day, I walked my butt out to the mailbox, pulled it open, and yanked out a giant manila envelope. Contained within were screeners for the following films: Goth Kill, Blitzkrieg: Escape from Stalag 69, and The Bloody Ape. In addition, I received quite a bevy of promotional items as well, posters, stickers, random weird promo pics. All in all, it was a great day.

Of course, then I put the movies in my DVD player... for you kids out there, we all had DVD players back then, and I proceeded to gouge my eyes out. These were the worst of the worst indie films. Honestly, I'm still amazed that Wild Eye turned into what it has turned into based upon the quality of the initial films in their line-up. Truly atrocious cannot begin to describe how terrible these films were... and yet, I found ways to say nice things about them while still pointing out their myriad flaws, thus overcoming the most common conundrum of the successful movie reviewer: I like free shit... but if I'm honest about this detritus that was freely bestowed upon me... will I continue to get free shit? This is a representation of the quintessential struggle of man in the modern world. Think on it... attain nirvana.

For a while, my mailbox became like a distant aunt at Christmas, spewing up gifts that people assumed I wanted, but which I just smiled at and piled on my floor. Screener after screener came through that mailbox, and I can only wonder what my mailman thought about all the mystery mail addressed to "The Vocabulariast." Then again, my mailman was like a low-rent version of Milton Wadams from Office Space, so I'm sure he just thought someone from a foreign country with the first name "The" was living in our house. Even to this day, I still get random packets of screeners from some companies, and I can't help but wonder... don't they know that I took down my website and that I refuse to watch indie movies in screener form?

On an interesting side-note, my first film All Hell Breaks Loose will actually be released by Wild Eye Releasing, so if you're a budding movie reviewer (Please don't be that guy that calls himself a "film critic."), then you might be able to look forward to getting a promo copy of my film. Good luck trying to figure out ways to say nice shit about it. By the way, I never received anything from Wild Eye again after that first run. I guess I wasn't nice enough.

The Sad Numbers

As I was writing this article... it dawned on me that I spent an amazing amount of time writing reviews, and as I poured over the numbers, a frightening realization was made.

Over the course of my MovieCynics career, somewhere close to a decade, I wrote somewhere in the area of 2,000 reviews. Now... if we do the math, that works out to 90 minutes on average for watching a film plus 45 minutes on average to write a review. So in order to review a movie, I had to work and focus for 135 minutes. That's actually pretty close to the minimum, as we all know contemporary movies have runtimes bloated with dance numbers and needless exposition. In addition, there were some films where I had a lot to say about the movie, so the time spent writing those reviews could run upwards of an hour-and-a-half.

Now, let's say I took the averages and multiplied them. The math would look like the following: 135 minutes X 2,000 reviews = 270,000 minutes. That doesn't look too bad. But then, when I divide 270,000 minutes by the number 60, I come up with the number 4,500. That's how many hours I spent writing reviews. 4,500 divided by 24, the number of hours in a day, equals 187.5 days. What? Whaaaaaaaat?

I spent over half-a-year of my life writing reviews... and that doesn't even factor in the amount of time I spent messing with the website, writing news articles, finding release date information for upcoming releases, and writing drinking games for everything... with all of that garbage taken into account... I'm pretty sure I may have spent a year writing movie reviews. A year... of my prime. Who knows what I could have been doing in all of that time.

This is all so... depressing. I wonder if I could have learned to play guitar in that time. Maybe I could have written a killer book that people would actually read. Hell, I could have gotten an agent. Maybe I could have learned to brew craft beer.

I suppose deep down inside, where the beer goes, I always knew that I was spending an awful lot of time on doing something that doesn't really matter. Think about it. I can spend an hour-and-a-half writing up a badass review of The Love Guru, and yet, no matter how precise and accurate I think my arguments are, some inbred fool can just come along and say, "Derp... I think The Love Guru is hilarious." People can, and do, like bad things. There's no accounting for taste. Trucking down the critic trail is tantamount to plodding along a conveyor belt to Delaware. Cool... you're moving, but what happens when you get there? You're still just in Delaware... the land of... uhh... whatever they have in Delaware.

That's part of the reason why I stopped writing reviews. I had arrived in Delaware, and I was thoroughly unimpressed.

Oh yeah, where was I? The 4th best thing about slaving at MovieCynics.

#4. I was gettin' paid, y'all.

Listen... I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. MovieCynics, at one point, was doing very well for me. All that stuff about how much time I spent on the website? It was all worth it, because I was actually making money off of it. Now, a lot of people don't make a dime off of their website. Some spend tons of money just to maintain the heartless thing, but with MovieCynics, I actually had a pretty good thing going.

It took forever to get the damn site off the ground. You don't just start writing up reviews of The Hills Have Eyes and Constantine and expect to make money. There are things that you have to do. I had to build the audience, which I always struggled with. My reviews and cynicism are frequently too much for most, but I did alright for the most part. In addition, we had to craft a website that looked good.

Now, in this day and age of plug-in based platforms such a as Wordpress and Blogger, it would seem ridiculous to even try to handcraft a website, but that's exactly what we did. There was this one guy. I won't name names, but he drove me nuts. Still, the work that he did made the most attractive version of MovieCynics that we ever had.

I can still see it now. At the top, we had a monochrome picture of Alex from A Clockwork Orange sitting on a couch. To the right, on the header, we had a picture of Alec Baldwin's character holding the brass balls from Glengary Glen Ross. In order to search on the website, you had to click on the balls. I've never seen anything so glorious on any website since... O doubt I ever will.

When you clicked on a review, a page would come up that had three different links. The first link was on the left. It said "Vocab's Review." On the right was a link for "The Dirty Alternative's Review." Between the two reviews was a beer mug... which would link to a drinking game if we had one.

My descriptions are not doing it justice, but trust me, it was beautiful. It was also broken as hell with regards to SEO, or search engine optimization as the nerds like to call it. Search engine optimization is this fancy word that geeks throw around that basically says it's how regular folk find your site. If your website isn't optimized for search engines, the odds that anyone will randomly find your website are slim to nil... and our cool-looking, beautiful website was being ignored by every major search engine's crawler. Which means no traffic and no money... like Montana. Not Joe Montana, he has plenty of money. You see him snarf down those pizzas in that Papa John's commercials? Dude is loaded and gets free pizza? How is that fair? Yeah... you're right. Eating free Papa John's isn't necessarily a perk... it's more like a punishment.

Oh yeah, where was I? SEO... that crap always makes my mind wander. Anyway, after a huge blow-up (mostly on my end), we were down to two people trying to make MovieCynics work. Our web designer left after I got pissed at him for not putting in the hours that I was putting in. I was basically killing myself with work. He worked on it for a couple of hours a week, lazy s.o.b.

After that, we went to a Wordpress installation. Things started to get better. The look of the site was complete crap, and I couldn't get my partner to do anything with it, which was driving me nuts.

Through my hard work and some work from my friend, we gradually started to see a profit. It was small at first, miniscule even, but it was enough to get us excited... and then rip us apart.

You see, money will do that to people. There was more going on of course, none of it my fault, but when the money started trickling in, we started arguing about what to do with it. I wanted to change a crapload of things on MovieCynics, the aesthetic, the archive system, I wanted to add forums, and I wanted an actual logo to go with the website.

My partner wanted to save the money until after tax season. I made an offhand comment that he always wanted things done his way, which was true, but it sent him over the edge. We got into a huge rumble... I mean huge. Thank God I lost the old forums, because that's where the argument resided for months, like a hidden tumor. I have the feeling that he had wanted out for a while and took this as an opportunity to get out. I also think that part of it was that I was getting way more out of the website than he was, friends, comments, connections... people liked my writing. His writing? Eh, it couldn't hold a candle to mine.

In the end, he held the website ransom, giving me either the option to pay him $5,000 to own the website outright or he'd put the site up for auction and we'd split the proceeds 50-50. After some tough conversations with my wife, I gambled $5,000 on my own abilities and bought the website from him.

Once I got the website in my dirty little paws, I did all sorts of crap to it. I got a logo, which I still plaster everywhere I can. I paid three-hundy for the damn thing, it would be foolish not to. I built a handmade alphabetical archive for both movie reviews and drinking games. People no longer had to search through pages worth of reviews to find what they wanted. I obtained advertising partners for some steady income, and I kicked my own butt into overdrive.

The end result? Pretty damn good. Money started pouring in, I made a bunch of connections, and things were looking up.

For the first time in my life, I was making money off of my writing. I didn't go the thrill-seeker route of writing my own stories, but I was still making money. I can't explain how awesome the feeling was. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. I could see my day job ceasing to be a requirement. I was able to afford to pay writers to see the movies that I didn't want to see, and while none of these writers were ever that great, it was nice to sit out the latest Tyler Perry movie. The sky was the limit.

Then it all came crashing down. It seems like for every one of my favorite moments, there is an equal and opposite least favorite moment. My burgeoning cash cow dried up for two reasons. The first reason was the re-structuring of Google's algorithms. For years, I had worked to corner the market on some key words. Back in the day, if you wanted to know when a movie was being released on DVD or Blu-Ray, 9 times out of 10, Google was going to point you to my site. This meant lots of traffic and lots of people clicking ads. Once Google changed those algorithms, my ranking sank and sank until all the AdSense money I was collecting just went poof.

The second reason is actually partly my fault... maybe mostly. I had hired writers on to take some of the load off of me. On social media, I was always telling people to click ads. No problem there, but one of my writers began doing the same thing... in the actual reviews on the actual website. This is a huge no-no for any sort of ad-based affiliate program. One day, I receive an email accusing me of using automated software to tell people to click on ads... and then I was unceremoniously dropped from the program and issued a final check. The program was Amazon, only the most trusted and successful affiliate program around. There was no contact info, no way to apologize. I was simply shit out of luck. Overnight, with the sending of one email, my entire revenue stream was cut out from underneath me.

I tried several different affiliate programs after that, but not a damn one of them worked nearly as well as Google AdSense and Amazon's affiliate program. In fact, they didn't work at all, and I never made another damn dime from the website. Once the money went, my writers went, and I was essentially facing down a lifetime of writing movie reviews for little or no reward. My website had become so large that it was almost impossible to transfer without some fancy  workaround, so an expensive dedicated server was required just to keep the damn reviews up.

To be honest, I was quite bitter about the whole experience. But then, something great happened. I pulled myself out of the world of being a critic, and I focused my energy on becoming a creator rather than a critiquer. I'm way happier, and the money doesn't even bother me anymore... though it would still be nice to have an extra couple thousand bucks in the bank account every month.

Oh well. Writers are forged, and MovieCynics was my crucible. I came out on the other side, wiser, more hard-working, and cured of my movie/DVD habit. Now, I use all that time I would be spending watching movies to write novels and screenplays. In the last year, I have written three books and three screenplays all while holding down a full-time job... and I do it for the fun of it, not the money. Though, I look forward to the money happening eventually.

I'll have parts 5 and 6 later, so keep an eye out and thanks for reading. Goth Kill... seriously... who would buy the rights to that?