Can't say this is much of a surprise:
Nathan Lee, one of The Village Voice's two full-time critics, was laid off last week by Village Voice Media, a large chain of alternative weeklies that has been cutting down the number of critics it employs across the country.
The week before, two longtime critics at Newsday -- Jan Stuart and Gene Seymour -- took buyouts, along with their editor. And at Newsweek, David Ansen is among 111 staff members taking buyouts, according to a report in Radar.
They join critics at more than a dozen daily newspapers (including those in Denver, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale) and several alternative weeklies who have been laid off, reassigned or bought out in the past few years, deemed expendable at a time when revenues at print publications are declining, under pressure from Web alternatives and a growing recession in media spending.
Given that movie blogs are strewn about the Web like popcorn on a theater floor, there are those who say that movie criticism is not going away, it's just appearing on a different platform.
A different, cheaper platform.
I've been the mainstream movie critic at Film Threat for...four years now, and while I enjoy the fact no one butchers my reviews and I can pretty much call my shots in terms of upcoming releases, I'm under no illusions about the financial viability of my hobby.
And a hobby it will remain, apparently. Lee (who I enjoyed reading) and Ansen are were pretty big names in the world of film criticism. At this point, I don't know what's more disturbing: that some of the heaviest hitters in the field are being forced out, or that Pete Hammond's expulsion from Maxim wasn't a response to years of public outrage but simply a cost-cutting move. And one that was ahead of the curve at that.
Despite Samuel Butler's long ago suggestion that critics arrive at their occupation because of their general unfitness for anything else, they can be a cultural good, championing films that lack crowd-pleasing content or the financial wherewithal to muscle their way into public consciousness. Mr. Lee, for example, named "Southland Tales" the best film of last year. Never heard of the postnuclear, semi-futuristic portrait of Los Angeles directed by Richard Kelly ("Donnie Darko")? That's very much the point. "Criticism is treated as a kind of product, and that is inevitably going to favor bigger national releases," said Owen Gleiberman, a critic at Entertainment Weekly. "That The Village Voice doesn't want to pay for two staff movie critics is a joke," he added. "There is so much to cover."
Michael Lacey, executive editor of Village Voice Media, said in an e-mail message that the company, which owns 17 newspapers, continues to have a serious commitment to covering film.
Print media critics remain the only ones whose opinions really have that kind of impact. A groundswell can start online, but it isn't until folks like Ebert or Hoberman or Scott pick up on it that it has any significant impact. On the other hand, no amount of negative criticism can derail some movies, whether it's on a web site or the nation's biggest print daily.
Which is why Eddie Murphy, Owen Wilson, and Brett Ratner still have careers.
But are print critics really so all-important and sacrosanct with the Web full of debates about all manner of film in places like indiewire.com, cinematical.com and blog.spout.com?
"Honestly, I think that a lot of the viewers of serious films have already migrated to the Web," said S. T. VanAirsdale, a senior editor at defamer.com and the founder of thereeler.com, a site devoted to coverage of the New York film world. "Serious movies can always be helped by a boost from anywhere, but almost anyone who is interested can find plenty of information about a film before it even opens because of all the coverage in the blogs about festivals and screenings."
Both areas have their strengths. With print criticism, you're more likely (though certainly not always) to be exposed to someone with more than a few years' experience who can actually construct a fucking paragraph. The article's likening of movie web sites to popcorn on a theater floor is apt not just because of their sheer number, but because almost all of them are unpalatable. And I admit it galls me a bit that, well, Robert Wilonsky says it better than I could:
They and people like them--say, Ain't It Cool News' Harry Knowles, who accepts studio-funded trips to movie sets and is still taken seriously by movie execs as a film critic, despite being quasi-literate--are why the studios can trim the "interview" time from 60 minutes to half an hour. They know they'll get good pub regardless of the setup--an hour in a restaurant, a handshake in a hotel room, a howdy on a movie set. Those bearing cameras and recorders are just happy to breathe the rarefied air of celebrities, collect their goodie bags full of logo-covered crap and share the same prepackaged quotes that spread like Colorado wildfire the days before and after a movie's release
But for continuing and more or less immediate coverage of festivals and movies the studios want to hide from the press, the web is the way to go. What's that, DreamWorks, you're not screening The Ruins until 10 PM the Thursday before it opens? Yeah, that'll suck for newspapers, who have to put their issue to bed at 8:00, but we doughty online types can bang out a review and have it up by 1 AM West Coast time.
Or we could, if our Leatherheads review wasn't running on Friday.
The apparent demise of the print critic isn't just because of the dire financial state of our nation's newspapers and the influx of cheap online labor from Mexico, but because the studios have been making a concerted effort for several years now to eliminate the industry itself. They've already proven that withholding almost every horror movie and a sizeable chunk of comedies from reviewers doesn't affect opening weekend grosses in the slightest, so that trend is only going to widen.
Meanwhile, some critics have realized a modicum of fame can be garnered by peppering their reviews with gushing quotes that may (ohpleaseohplease) get picked up in a film's print of TV ad campaign.This, unfortunately, doesn't get them fast-tracked onto the "must hire" list for the Los Angeles Times. But who knows? Maybe it gets them invited to that mystical junket that only "special" critics are allowed to attend; where stars and directors grant 3-hour exclusive interviews and they even get a special "thank you" during the closing credits.
Yeah. Guess I need to keep working on that novel.
Absolutely keep working on that novel if you know somebody somewhere in the publishing industry who can move your submission out of the slush pile and onto a real desk somewhere (by ‘real desk’, I mean, some place where someone who has the ability to say ‘hell yes’ in addition to ‘Jesus no’ will actually read the thing).
If you don’t, well… um… Powerball tickets have about the same shot.
This is coming from someone who has written seven novels, one military memoir, and a buncha short stories (see MISERABLE FICTION OF THE EARTH, in my blog’s sidebar), nearly every one of which has spent years sitting in various slush piles before being sent back to me with a piece of (generally) badly constructed rejection boilerplate taped haphazardly to its side. (Short stories don’t spend that long in slush piles; they generally get returned entirely unread… or so I surmise, when I mail a 12 page short story from Florida to F&SF in New Jersey on Saturday, and it’s back in my mailbox with a ‘sorry, we’ll pass’ note the following Saturday. Not counting Sunday, that’s three days to get there and three days to get back — when did the happy asshole manning the rejection desk have a chance to read the fucker? There’s barely twenty spare minutes in that schedule to take the thing out of my original envelope, stuff it into my SASE, toss in a Xeroxed fuck off note, and throw the whole thing back in the mail chute.)
Obviously, my experiences could all be due to a complete lack of talent on my part, but, well, as to that, while I cannot really judge my own work objectively, I know goddam well I write at least slightly better than Dean R. Koontz.
However, if you have contacts inside the publishing industry, then, by all means, get something finished and submitted.
Otherwise, keep buying those Powerball tickets.