Substack and the Price of Independence

Substack's pitch has always been subtraction. No editor's red pen, no ad sales department, no executive deciding your beat doesn't fit the budget this quarter. You write, you publish, and the platform handles payments, hosting, and delivery straight to a reader's inbox. That's a real thing to offer, and it's why several hundred thousand writers took the offer.

But publishing, payments, discovery, and community don't disappear when you remove the editor. They move somewhere. On Substack, they move into a single privately controlled system that performs all four functions itself and takes a cut of the proceeds regardless of what it's cutting off from. The question worth asking isn't whether Substack removed intermediaries. It's what "independent" means once one company has quietly become all of them at once.

Why Writers Join

The product genuinely works, and it's worth saying so before getting to anything else. AJ Feuerman, a publicist, calls herself "an unrepentant early adopter" — she joined at the end of 2017, right after the platform launched (back when Substack was still just a newsletter tool and not yet a referendum on the rest of the internet), purely to read new perspectives and hot takes from people she already followed. She didn't start her own newsletter, Spin Cycle, until a little over a year ago, and forty issues in she still isn't chasing subscribers or income. She told me it exists because, as a publicist, "I love what I do for a living and I find oftentimes it affects how I view things," and writing about her own field in public doubles as a way of examining verticals she doesn't usually get to look at directly — an excuse, in her words, that might lead somewhere professionally or might lead nowhere at all, and either way she enjoys doing it. Her audience is small and mostly known to her: around 300 subscribers on Substack, a third of them people she was already acquainted with, plus a few hundred more who follow the same content repurposed on LinkedIn. Her advice to other writers considering the platform is practical rather than evangelical — manage your expectations, be your own publicist, and actually use the social feed most people forget is there. "It's giving early Twitter vibes over there," she told me, "and it's great."

Steven Huff, a classic-film critic who writes The Moveable Marquee, gives the same verdict from three years further down the road. He joined because critics he knew were using the platform and seemed happy, and because it was easier to set up than the blog he'd struggled with before. It hasn't made him real money — free subscribers far outnumber paid ones — but it's built him an audience and produced comments that have sharpened his own writing in ways he can point to specifically. He publishes twice a month and told me that commitment alone has kept him energized; he's also been watching, with some curiosity, since fellow critic Jonathan Rosenbaum turned on monetization for his own Substack, wondering how that's working out for him. Asked about the moderation controversy that runs through the rest of this piece, Huff gave the answer that complicates it most: he hadn't heard about it. "I've only lately heard that something is up," he told me, "but I'm not sure what it's about." His own threshold for leaving has nothing to do with Nazis — it's content restrictions or length limits beyond what already exists. "I'm an old man, not a digital native," he told me. Ease of use wins.

R.J. Marx joined for a different reason entirely: he needed somewhere to keep writing after retiring from a long newspaper career. Print journalism, in his own assessment, is "functionally extinct — on life support at best," and Substack offered a way to keep his name "out there" without answering to a publisher or editor again. He's used it to workshop a local-history project — a book on the 1962-64 Labor Day riots in Seaside, Oregon, that started as posts — and to support a jazz class he teaches at his local community college, alongside straightforward political advocacy on issues he cares about. He never expected money from it, having been in the business long enough to know writing rarely pays, but he considers Substack's model more generous to writers than Medium's or any paywalled platform he's tried. Two years in, it's delivered exactly what he was after: a passionate, loyal readership, contact with other writers navigating the same uncertain media landscape, and no real stress, since he doesn't depend on it for income — "the only stress is when a post drops like a pin. Then I feel like nobody likes me." Asked about the moderation controversy, he went a step further than Huff: he wasn't just unaware of it, he wanted to know if he should be. "I don't know what the moderation controversy is," he told me. "I haven't been reading about Substack's internal politics. Should I be worried?" His own conditions for leaving are concrete rather than ideological — Substack claiming rights to his pieces, a mandatory paywall, or "if Elon Musk bought it." Asked whether he owns his audience or rents it, he pointed out that the question undersells how long he's actually had one: readers who've followed his byline since the 1970s aren't Substack's to take from him.

Feuerman, Huff, and Marx establish that the tool is real and that plenty of people use it exactly as advertised, for reasons that have nothing to do with each other, with no awareness of anything darker underneath. What they can't tell you is what the tool is attached to.

The Dependency Stack

Substack has always described its 10 percent cut of subscription revenue as aligned incentive: the company only profits when the writer does — a sentence that reads better in a pitch deck than in a subscriber ledger. It's a good sentence, and it holds up less well once you notice who's actually taking the cut first, and that "the writer" in that sentence doesn't distinguish a film critic from a newsletter promoting Holocaust denial. The fee can't discriminate. That's the design, and it's also the design flaw.

It shapes behavior in smaller ways too. Luke Y. Thompson, a film critic who writes Mortal Cinema, opened his account years ago when Substack first rolled out its Twitter-style feed, looking, like a lot of people at the time, for somewhere to land if Twitter finally broke. It sat dormant until he lost two paying gigs at once and decided that if he was going to maintain a critic's outlet either way, he might as well build his own audience instead of someone else's. What it's delivered since is modest and specific: some money, a circle of friends inside what he calls the FilmStack community, and an audience small enough to actually know he's the one writing his own reviews — a dig, he told me, at his years reviewing for Nerdist, where readers sometimes assumed the bylines belonged to Chris Hardwick. His biggest complaint about the platform has nothing to do with ideology — it's Stripe's chargeback mechanism. If a subscriber forgets they renewed and disputes the charge, the writer eats the full disputed amount, plus a flat $15 cost just to dispute it — one Thompson says he usually loses anyway — even though Substack already took its 10 percent before the dispute happened. It's a small mechanical detail that doesn't show up in anyone's moral accounting of the platform, and it's real money leaving a freelancer's pocket for a transaction that already cost him once. Real money, gone twice.

At scale the math gets worse. Sean Highkin, who runs the NBA newsletter The Rose Garden Report, switched from Substack to Ghost last year and now pays $2,052 annually in platform costs, against the $4,968 he was paying Substack for the same subscriber base. Matt Brown, who writes the college-sports newsletter Extra Points, estimates he'd be paying around $1,800 a month in fees had he stayed on Substack, versus roughly $3,000 a year on Beehiiv now — a savings, he says, of "bare minimum $15,000" annually, and probably more.

The professional network cuts the other direction too, for writers who never joined. In early 2025, Katharine Coldiron needed to consolidate several scattered obligations onto one platform: irregular posts stranded on Blogger, film essays she'd been publishing on Medium, and a yearlong short-story project that needed somewhere to collect money from readers. She narrowed the field to Substack or Patreon and picked the latter, for reasons that were mostly about texture rather than ideology — the writers she followed had mostly gone to Substack, the visual artists and other media-makers she followed had mostly gone to Patreon, and Substack's own promotional emails had started reading like Mailchimp's, "more corporate and self-promoting," right around the time Patreon's path to actually getting paid looked clearer. She isn't sentimental about the platform she chose either: gatekeeping cuts both ways, she told me, and self-publishing has always let both overlooked voices and "utter crap (and harmful crap)" through the same open door, no different in kind from self-published ebooks or zines. What she watched happen to Substack afterward was less charitable — it went, in her words, from ubiquitous to mocked, "mentioned with rolling eyes and memeification," while its digest features came to resemble something "used to be known as 'newspapers' or 'magazines,'" minus an editor to keep the noise down. Knowing what she does about the white-supremacist and anti-trans content Substack allows on its platform unquestioningly, she said plainly that she's glad she didn't choose it. And yet she is, by her own count, the only writer she knows without a Substack — a correct call on her own terms that still costs her standing in a professional community that mostly decided the argument was already over.

Alistair Pitts never really joined in the first place, though not for lack of opportunity. He signed up in May 2024 to follow one specific newsletter, then was gifted a free annual subscription to another by a fellow film obsessive he'd "met" on Letterboxd — a platform he was, by his own account, growing jaded with, since nothing he wrote there got traction unless he stooped to one-line "zinger" reviews of whatever big release had just come out. Substack, in theory, should have been the better fit for a "longform content chap" — though the thing he actually makes is A Russian & Soviet Movie Podcast, which he's been producing since 2017, and what he'd lost wasn't a writing outlet but a discovery tool: he'd used Twitter mainly to get listeners to the show, back when a pithy line or two of text and a compelling still image were enough to gain some traction with the algorithm. Substack never quite filled that gap, and it's a platform less oriented toward the kind of curated visual content that dominates Instagram besides. In practice it's delivered "not much of anything beyond a vague, occasional sense of, 'oh yeah, I should probably carve out some time to do that.'" What's kept him at arm's length is a specific memory, not inertia — he described the moderation record as making him "uneasy," citing a direct fear of "Twitter all over again," and added, of Musk specifically, that he wished the man "would do us all a favour and move to Mars and take his white supremacist buddies with him." His plan going forward is to invest elsewhere entirely — Patreon, YouTube, direct relationships with labels and publications.

Maitland McDonagh shows what it looks like to be on the inside of the same bargain Coldiron and Pitts declined. A veteran film critic who's watched most of her mainstream outlets dry up, she runs two Substacks — MaitlandOnMovies, active, and Maitland's Vintage Gay Books Newsletter, a dormant side project reviewing vintage gay pulp fiction from a substantial personal collection she'd been sitting on for years, set aside in favor of the movie newsletter simply because its readership was always the smaller of the two. What Substack actually delivers, mechanically, she finds hard to complain about: link a bank account once, and the money shows up on its own schedule, minus a cut she doesn't begrudge "given all the responsibility they take off your plate"; the traffic graphs tell her exactly where her readers come from and what fraction convert from free to paid; and she handles her own copyediting and photo-sourcing — with help from someone she calls Frank — without finding any of it especially hard. MaitlandOnMovies had brought in just under $2,000 year-to-date at the point she and I spoke, which she calls "not life-changing but also not nothing." That income matters now in a way it might not have a decade ago — "pretty much no-one is offering me work anymore," she told me — and being a recognized newsletter voice has an unexpected professional side effect: it keeps her on studio mailing lists for screenings and screener links, sometimes ones she'd otherwise lose access to entirely.

She'd never had a moderation problem herself, even publishing reviews of vintage gay pulp erotica — her own theory is that she stuck to discussing the plots rather than the sex, and that Substack has gotten "a little more conservative these days" regardless. That's precisely what made the Nazi material land harder once she actually saw it. She hadn't heard about the moderation controversy either, and once she looked, she found it harder to forgive than anyone else in this piece did: she pulled up Substack's own hate-speech policy, which bars content that would "incite violence based on protected classes," and called the gap between that language and the platform's actual conduct "way hypocritical." A platform careful enough to keep her decades-old erotica newsletter untouched is the same platform that let Nazi newsletters run for years. Asked directly whether she owns her audience or rents it, she didn't hedge: "I feel I'm renting my audience and don't know whether I could carry over the bulk of them to a different platform." Her verdict on the platform overall is a shrug rather than an endorsement — worth it, she says, "if you're willing to put in the work and are willing to give your newsletter some time to develop a following," which is a description of a job, not a dream.

Coldiron and Pitts are opting out of the same recommendation network, professional visibility, and discovery infrastructure that Maitland depends on and knows she can't take with her. Staying costs money, and increasingly, for writers like Maitland, staying is what keeps the money coming at all. Not joining costs relevance. Substack built the only system currently offering both dependencies at once, and charging admission to get out of either one.

The editor who used to decide what got published is now a recommendation algorithm that doesn't distinguish a Nazi newsletter from a film newsletter. The publisher's overhead is now a 10 percent fee collected from every writer regardless of content. The circulation department is now subscriber infrastructure Substack owns and controls. The advertiser pressure that used to shape what a magazine could print is now Stripe's chargeback rules. The professional network a critic used to build over a career is now a platform-specific community that doesn't travel intact to Ghost or Beehiiv. Editorial standards are now a company moderation policy, set by people who've said, on the record, that they'd rather not enforce one. Nothing here disappeared. It changed shape, and the fee sits at the center of every substitution, collecting regardless of which side of the moderation argument it happens to be funding that month.

The Governance Test

In April 2023, the Anti-Defamation League published the first documented case against the platform, cataloguing antisemitic, conspiratorial, and white-supremacist accounts thriving on Substack and flagging the company's cut of their paid subscriptions as a financial stake in content it wasn't removing. Jonathan Katz gave the problem a name in The Atlantic that November, reporting Substack was hosting, and in some cases profiting from, Nazi and white-nationalist newsletters with subscriber counts in the tens of thousands. Roughly two hundred Substack writers organized as Substackers Against Nazis that December, demanding answers; co-founder Hamish McKenzie responded on the 21st that censorship doesn't make extremism disappear and, in his view, makes it worse. Casey Newton wasn't satisfied. He and two Platformer colleagues independently verified seven newsletters explicitly supporting Nazi ideology; Substack removed one before Newton's list arrived and five more after. On January 12, 2024, Newton left for Ghost with more than 170,000 subscribers. Writer Max Read later reported Substack had leaked word to a friendly outlet ahead of Newton's story, framing the finding as six marginal accounts to shrink it before it landed.

Andras Jones supplies something close to Substack's own defense, from a writer's chair rather than a corporate one. "The power to censor always favors authoritarians and harms intellectual minorities," he told me, arguing the company's refusal to police pro-Nazi content is fidelity to free expression rather than a lapse in judgment. He's arrived at that position partly through experience: he told me he's been called a "Putinist" for expressing concern about the US arming Ukrainian Nazis, a "toxic white Bernie Bro" for backing Medicare for All, an "anti-vaxxer" for asking questions about the Covid response, and a "right wing Trump supporter" for criticizing Democrats from the left — a run of contested labels he offered as evidence that "Nazi," in his experience, gets applied about as loosely as any of the others. He pushed further: "Do the Nazis on Substack include those in favor of arming Nazis in Ukraine to fight Russia? Who gets to decide which Nazis get censored and which ones get Uzis?" — a framing of the war plenty of readers would contest on its own terms, and one that treats "Nazi" as a live debate rather than the specific, sourced description the ADL and The Atlantic attached to specific newsletters. He allowed one exception, though: "if Substack is actively promoting or prioritizing hateful content that's another matter."

Here's where the distinction between what's documented and what's argued actually matters. That Substack's recommendation algorithm surfaces extremist newsletters to new subscribers is not something I'm inferring — it's a Guardian investigation's own finding, published February 7, 2026, under controlled test conditions: within two hours of a reporter subscribing to a newsletter called NatSocToday (2,800 subscribers, $80 a year, a swastika for its profile image, a recent post calling Hitler "one of the greatest men of all time"), Substack's own system surfaced 21 other profiles with similar material, several of which the paper found regularly share and like each other's posts. A second account, Third Reich Literature Archive, had 2,100 subscribers at the same $80 rate. A third, run by a writer named Ava Wolfe, charged £38 a year and engaged specifically in Holocaust denial. The algorithm also surfaced "great replacement" conspiracy content to the same test account. Substack had already made a version of this same mistake once, sending some users a push notification actively promoting NatSocToday in July 2025 — a "serious system error," the company said, though it's a strange kind of accident that lands on one specific newsletter.

Here's my own reading of that finding, not the Guardian's and not Substack's: a platform whose product actively recommends extremist material to strangers within two hours isn't merely tolerating speech the way a common carrier does. It's functioning as a publisher, making editorial decisions about what deserves amplification, whether or not it wants to be held to a publisher's standard. Jones's free-speech defense answers a real question — should this material be allowed to exist somewhere. It doesn't answer the one the Guardian's evidence actually raises, which is whether a company should build a system that hands it to people who didn't ask for it.

Why People Stay

Community, not conviction, is what actually holds most of the writers I spoke with in place.

John Skipp doesn't argue principle. He does a headcount — of his own feed, not the platform's statistics, and that distinction matters. He joined in 2022 after discovering Sari Botton's Oldster Magazine, and spent the years since building Yer Pal Skipp into a real operation: frequent, near-daily posting, an interview podcast, and a novel, The Change — a Twilight Zone-inflected countercultural thriller — serialized in fifty-two paid installments, the only thing on his Substack he's ever put behind a paywall. Skipp is no apologist for Nazis; he's unambiguous about where he stands. What he denies is that they're anywhere near him, comparing them to the anonymous extremists undoubtedly living somewhere on his own long Portland street — neighbors you don't choose, but don't move over for either. Then he names the people actually in his network: E. Jean Carroll, Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Reich, George Saunders, a dozen more. "Name me one fucking Nazi in the batch," he told me. "I double-dare ya." His own feed feeling clean isn't evidence the platform is; it's evidence his threshold for leaving is specific — "when all those excellent people are driven from Substack" — and that the bet only pays off if the people eventually driven out would be the good ones.

Renée Stramel and Will Battersby show what that community actually buys, from opposite sides of the transaction. Stramel isn't building an audience — she's an artist and reader who fled to Substack in the wake of the last presidential election, disgusted, she told me, by the way other news organizations were falling in line and specifically by Jeff Bezos's management of the Washington Post, a paper she'd read for years. What she found instead was a community of artists and gallery curators having longer, slower conversations about work and industry trends than she'd found anywhere else — enough to make her seriously consider starting a blog of her own there, a plan she's since abandoned specifically because it would leave her "dependent on another outside platform and vulnerable to those whims." "I am not happy about it," she told me plainly, asked about the moderation record — and Substack has become what she calls a "refuge" from the rest of social media regardless, more intuitive to her than Bluesky and easier to find her own community within. She recommends it to friends looking for an alternative to Meta but tells them upfront what it is: "a platform built by billionaires."

Battersby runs a small production outfit, Etch, that joined Substack in late 2024 betting that its readers and what he calls "consumers of smart moving images" overlap enough to be worth reaching directly. It's delivered a small but steady income in the company's early years, real information about its own audience — what length of material they want, how often Etch can actually deliver something of quality that isn't just a filmed podcast — and something harder to quantify: the confirmation that someone is actually watching, rather than shouting into what he called a "direct to consumer void." What he'd lose by leaving isn't the money. It's the specific, private relationship with the supporters who get behind-the-scenes material the company doesn't put anywhere else — a relationship he doubts would survive a move to YouTube or elsewhere in anything like its current form, even if some of the audience followed. "Is there a morally perfect platform?" he asked me. "This is capitalism, so every means of communication is going to be compromised in some fashion." He's lived that compromise from both directions — he mentioned, almost in passing, that a small left-leaning streaming service once released a documentary his own father made in the 1970s without properly securing the rights, and he was glad they put it out anyway. Etch did draw one line: it left X after Musk, in Battersby's words, "publicly and openly declared his fascistic politics." Substack hasn't crossed that same threshold for him. Not yet. His advice to other writers considering the platform is characteristically unsentimental: "Join. Find out if you have an audience willing to subscribe to your work. Use it for creative discipline."

Luke Y. Thompson gets to the same place as Skipp and Battersby by a different road entirely: exhaustion, not community. Walmart is where his grocery money stretches furthest, and it's problematic. Facebook is how he keeps up with extended family, and it's problematic. He still needs Twitter/X for sources who won't post anywhere else. "There's only so much ethical consumption I have the time and energy to manage," he told me — an argument that any platform large enough to matter will host people worth blocking, and that the writers actually worth reading are easy enough to find without pretending the whole platform is clean. Skipp bets on the community. Battersby bets on the relationship. Thompson has simply run out of room to keep litigating every platform he touches. Three different roads, one destination: nobody here is leaving.

What Leaving Costs

The alternatives don't eliminate dependence so much as let a writer choose which dependency to keep. Ghost offers greater control without Substack's built-in social network. Beehiiv supplies a different set of growth and recommendation tools under a different financial arrangement. Patreon is built around membership more than publishing. An independent site provides the most autonomy and the least assistance — which means the writer gets to become publisher, circulation department, technical support, and unpaid intern all at once.

That leaves writers with a choice more complicated than stay or leave. They can pay Substack a percentage for convenience, discovery, and community, or rebuild those functions elsewhere at the cost of money, labor, reach, or some combination of the three. A mailing list can be exported. The habits surrounding it cannot. Comments, recommendations, in-app followers, recurring payments, and the ordinary expectation that readers know where to find you belong to the system in ways a spreadsheet of email addresses doesn't capture.

The Loan Comes Due

Sean Highkin's numbers look, on paper, like an unambiguous win: $2,052 a year on Ghost instead of $4,968 on Substack, and a subscriber base that's grown 22 percent since he switched. But something didn't survive the move regardless. "When I first joined up, they gave me a big push and featured me and funneled a lot of traffic to me," Highkin has said. "But once I wasn't one of the 'new recruited talent' they could tout, they stopped featuring me and I saw my growth stagnate." That featured placement — the thing that got him an audience in the first place — never came with him. It couldn't. It wasn't his to take. It belonged to Substack the whole time, on loan, and the loan came due the moment he stopped being useful for recruiting the next round of writers behind him.

Substack promised to remove the middleman. Then it quietly became nearly every middleman function at once. That it works well enough for most people to stay is exactly what makes the dependency worth noticing.

My thanks to everyone who agreed to talk with me about their own experience of the platform, whatever conclusion they came to. Their willingness to speak plainly, on the record, about a bargain most of them are still actively weighing is the reporting this piece is built on.

• AJ Feuerman — Spin Cycle, https://ajfeuerman.substack.com/
• Andras Jones — https://andrasijones.substack.com/
• Katharine Coldiron — https://www.patreon.com/KatharineColdiron
• Maitland McDonagh — MaitlandOnMovies
• John Skipp — Yer Pal Skipp, https://johnskipp.substack.com/
• Alistair Pitts — https://substack.com/@allypittsmoviesetc
• Renée Stramel — https://open.substack.com/pub/reneestramel
• Luke Y. Thompson — Mortal Cinema, https://lytrules.substack.com/
• Will Battersby — Etch, http://etchstudio.substack.com/
• Steven Huff — The Moveable Marquee, https://stevenhuff.substack.com/
• R.J. Marx — https://rjmarx.substack.com/

All Quiet on the Spiderbaby Front...

It's been two weeks now since the shitstorm of "Spidergate" swept through the Internets. Twitter, blogs, forums and facebook were abuzz for a few days and even a few mainstream periodicals picked up on the story: Gawker, The L.A. Times, The Toronto Star, The Guardian.

Intrepid investigators have scoured Lianne MacDougall's past works, going all the way back to her college papers, discovering a history of plagiarism that reaches far into her past.

Meanwhile, there's been no word from the MacDougall/Tarantino camp, from St. Martin's Press (where her book Grindhouse Girls is said to be coming out "late 2013"), or from any other media outlet.

I could be deluded (and usually am) but I feel that the Spiderbaby "scandal" extends past the boundaries of "genre journalism" and speaks to a larger problem of the value (or lack thereof) placed on the pixels that so many people have been pushing around the internet. By writing something for online consumption, is it's value inherently less than that of something on paper? And why should one writer get paid for using the exact same words that another writer has used rather than paying the original author? Is there more value in the "image" of the author than the actual output?

This ordeal has opened up a lot of great conversations that I would encourage people to check out including (but not limited to):

• Lianne Spiderbaby plagiarized my review of Turn Me On, Dammit!
• Lianne Spiderbaby Didn’t Plagiarise Me, But I'm Angry Anyway
• Lianne Spiderbaby & Journalistic Integrity (or lack thereof)
• On Plagiarism, “Lianne Spiderbaby,” Tarantino, and when “borrowing” is theft
• Spiderbaby and why plagiarism is as pointless as it is depressing
• What Defines the Value of a Word
• Plagiarism is Not a Style of Writing

Did I miss anything? Let me know.

And, in the meantime, don't hold your breath for anyone else to pick up this story and run with it. It seems that things have run out of steam.

Who Does Your Girlfriend Think She's Fooling?

It's come to my attention that Lianne Spiderbaby (AKA Lianne MacDougall), a writer for online and offline publications like Fangoria, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Video Watchdog, FEARnet -- well, she used to be on FEARnet... Oddly enough, she's also the current squeeze of our old pal Quentin Tarantino has something more in common than just a love of film with her beau. She's also a big fan of Tarantino's "collage style" of art.

Lianna, host of the Rondo-award winning "horror multimedia" site Fright Bytes, has been taking whole swaths of other peoples' writing and passing it off as her own without any kind of acknowledgement. She's posted numerous articles on FEARnet as a column called "Spiderbaby's Terror Tapes," that have been largely based on other peoples' work.

First Example
The July 9, 2013 piece, "'Suspiria' with Barbara Magnolfi," pieced together sections of original writing along with chunks from Critical-Film.com, HighDefDigest.com, and EmpireOnline.com. Here's a visual example of the introduction to Lianne's interview (which is not plagiarized):

Without a doubt, Suspiria is Dario Argento’s best film (some of you may not feel the same, but I stand behind my choice), and one of the most atmospheric and artistic films ever made in the horror genre. It is the first in Argento’s “The Three Mothers” trilogy, which also includes Inferno and The Mother Of Tears. Argento was at the top of his proverbial game when directing both Suspiria and Inferno as they defy everything you've come to expect from horror films. Not only are they brimming with suspense and incredibly stylized violence, they are absolutely beautifully filmed.

Suspiria defines the horror film as a work of visual art. Scenes are lit with bright reds, greens, and blues making them look more like moving paintings than film. It's a masterpiece of visual filmmaking. Suspiria also includes one of the most memorable soundtracks of all time. Goblin, who would score numerous other films for Argento, provide a haunting score and one that uses strange human vocals, the sounds of whispers and gasps to compliment the music. It's an artistic choice that lends itself well to the film. In fact, it’s hard to imagine Suspiria without Goblin’s soundtrack. The 1977 giallo classic is an experiment with lighting, mise-en-scène and sound.

Rightly considered the pièce de résistance of Dario Argento's filmmaking career, the movie is sparse and plain as it follows a young American dancer named Suzy (Jessica Harper) through the stressful demands of a prestigious ballet academy. Over the course of the film, Suzy slowly discovers that the ballet studio is run by a nasty coven of witches.

But it’s the beginning sequence that sets Suspiria apart from all the rest – it starts out late in the night during a raging storm. A young woman runs screaming from the exclusive Frieberg ballet school. We see her hurtling, screaming through the woods, illuminated by lightning. After she arrives at a friend's apartment she peers through a window into the tumult, only for an arm to smash through one window pane and, in a loving, extended shot, suffocate her against the other. While her friend drums hysterically against the locked door the gloved hand repeatedly stabs the girl. In the next shot the stabbing continues, this time in full close up as the fiend winds a rope around the shrieking victims legs. Then, we cut to the friend running into the lobby of the apartment building for help. As she looks up towards a stained glass ceiling, the victim's head crashes through it in a hail of glass shards followed by her body. We cut to the blood-drenched corpse, suspended by the rope dripping blood onto the floor. Finally Argento pans the camera to reveal his next horror: the falling glass has impaled the friend to the ground, crucifix-like, the largest sliver having split her face in half. This is horror beauty at it’s finest!

Yeah, that's pretty blatant.

Rather than 'fess up to what she'd been doing, it's my guess that Lianne is going to throw her intern, Raven Cousens, under the bus. Why do I say that? Lianne announced the arrival of her "new evil henchman" in a post on her website on June 17, 2013. Now, all mentions of Raven have been removed from Lianne's site. So, don't be surprised if Raven is set up as the fall girl.

There's a small problem with the idea of Raven being the culprit in this plagiarism. It's not that Raven would have been ghost-writing (or ghost copy/pasting) pieces that were credited to Lianne. Instead, it's that the chronology doesn't add up. I say that because Lianne was lifting passages from other peoples' works before the announcement of Raven's internship.

Second Example
On May 6, 2013, Lianne (or someone being credited as Lianne Spiderbaby) posted on FEARnet's "Spiderbaby's Terror Tapes" in the article "'Popcorn' with Jill Schoelen." This time, Moria.co.nz supplied the lion's share of the content for the piece, either directly or via some loose paraphrasing. I'll just highlight the direct stuff and readers can compare the rest.

Maggie (Jill Schoelen), a student at USC film school, is plagued by recurring dreams that feature a terrifying man evoking Satan and other cultish horrors. At school, the film department’s funding has just been cut, but the department head comes up with an idea: holding a festival of old gimmick horror films in a soon-to-be-demolished theatre to raise funds. A film memorabilia expert shows them a film called The Possessor, which features occult sacrifices being conducted by Lanyard Gates, the guru of a film cult in the 1960s. Maggie is startled when the film shows things that appear in her dreams. As the festival begins, a masked madman starts killing off Maggie’s classmates and those closest to her. It also appears as though the killer wants one thing – Maggie. The story is a tad contrived – it is set up to suggest that Lanyard Gates is the killer but it turns out that the killer is someone else who fits into the contorted Lanyard Gates schema.  The script does offer a few amusing lines. One student protests that there is more social relevance in one Police Academy film than in all of Ingmar Bergman’s!

The masterminds behind Popcorn were none other than Bob Clark and Alan Ormsby, who worked together on the frighteningly fabulous Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (1972), Black Christmas (1974) and Dead of Night (1974).  However, they both took their names off of Popcorn because of all the controversy surrounding the making of the film.  Ormsby wrote the script and used the name Tod Hackett. Although Bob Clark was on set everyday, he decided to be uncredited.  It isn’t known why their names were removed, or why Ormsby was fired.

Mark Herrier was the replacement director, and Popcorn was his first feature. Popcorn comes with a great affection for the lost pleasure of attending a movie at the theater, and it even screens old refreshment and snack ads. Popcorn may have been more successful if it were released today – with such heightened nostalgic aspects, the film would have proven to be popular amongst the sequel-loving horror fans today.   In particular, Popcorn has affection for the old gimmick films of the 1950s. Many of the gimmicks used in the film – the mosquito harnessed to fly across the theatre; insurance policies and warnings about dying of fright; electric buzzers on the seats; and odors pumped into the theatre are all gimmicks that William Castle used in the 1950s. Popcorn also challenged its audience with self-reflective postmodern sensibilities in away that wasn’t really experimented with until Wes Craven’s Scream.

I would advise St. Martin's Press, the publisher of Lianne's upcoming book, Grindhouse Girls (with an intro penned by Tarantino), to do their due diligence to make sure everything is properly vetted and footnoted.

Lianne Discusses Editing
Want a good dose of irony? Watch this video.



Full disclosure, a lot of the research for this piece was done by several other folks (and verified by me -- you can verify it yourself via cached versions of the pages). I'd hate to be accused of 1) plagiarizing someone else's work or 2) putting my name on an article that someone else wrote. Wouldn't that just be a terrible thing to do?

Stay tuned for updates in this story.

Update 7/13/2013 @16:26:
It's been an interesting morning to say the least. I've gotten a lot of feedback on this post and I appreciate everyone who's had something to say, good or bad. The comments to the post are very interesting and some of them are incredibly enlightening.

The video I posted above has been made private and the post about Raven Summers has been re-instated. Lianne's website went down for a little bit but it seems to be back. Likewise, some of her tweets have been up and then down later on. I thought I saw tweets about her individually apologizing to authors for the things she's cribbed but that seems to be down (and Twitter goes through a lot of hoops to try and disable caching of their stuff.

But, here are a couple of interesting tweets that I screen grabbed (despite being now blocked from following her):

Lianne reached out to me to ask me to take down this post but I told her I wouldn't. I figured that we've all had enough of disappearing posts and that doing so would merely fuel the (f)ire.

Update 7/14/2013 @09:29:


Update 7/16/2013 @15:58:
As noted in the comments below, Video Watchdog editor Tim Lucas has retracted his initial assessment of the situation and published a statement about the situation on his blog. This initial statement included assurances that the article Lianne penned for the next issue of VW was plagiarism-free. He has now updated that statement to say that it is not free of pilfered prose.

Unfortunately, new findings have forced me to retract a portion of yesterday's statement. John Charles has notified me that evidence of plagiarism has been found in Lianne Spiderbaby's coverage of EMANUELLE IN AMERICA. John is preparing a statement we will be posting later in the day.

I know of several writers who would do a much better job at writing and being honest in their craft that Tim may want to employ (or re-employ), including a few that Lianne ripped-off. Read more here.

Update 7/17/2013 @19:57:
Traces of Lianne's plagiarism keep disappearing from the web. Today all of the videos of her Rondo award-winning FrightBytes show went private, essentially removing all of the content from the YouTube channel.

Meanwhile, more writers are coming forward about being plagiarized. One of the latest is from Scared Stiff Reviews, another is from author Joe Wawrzyniak whose review of I Dismember Mama on IMDB found its way in part to FEARNet courtesy of Lianne. At some point I imagine that someone more ambitious than me will catalog all of these.

In the meantime, keep tabs on the latest events here or via the forums at Latarnia, Monster Kid Classic Horror Forum and The Mortuary.

Podcasting on a Budget - The Book

In Podcasting on a Budget Mike White details the nuts and bolts of creating and distributing a podcast all for less than $60. He also reveals the intricacies of audio editing, getting your podcast on iTunes and utilizing social media for free publicity.

Retail Price: $9.97 US
Paperback/eBook: 52 pages
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-105-25405-5
Publication Date: November 15, 2011

ePub:


Paperback


PDF:

My Year with Gunnar Björnstrand

My first film class at school had me studying under Professor Herbert Cohen. We covered the basics (Kane, Potemkin, etc), yes, but we also watched a whole heck of a lot of Ingmar Bergman films -- especially those with Gunnar Björnstrand.

I'm not sure when I realized it, but Cohen was writing a book about Bergman (Ingmar Bergman: The Art of Confession) and using our class as a bit of an excuse to re-watch/study a number of Bergman's films, focusing quite a bit on movies with Gunnar Björnstrand, one of Bergman's stock players.

I'm going to take a page from Cohen's book. Not the one about Bergmen but I'm going to do the same thing in the coming months/weeks. I've been asked to come aboard as a writer at DailyGrindhouse.com and I'm going to be reviewing some movies that I've been wanting to write about in a larger context:

• The films of Alfred Sole
• The films of Oldrich Lipsky
• The films of Jean-Pierre Melville
• Elliot Gould/Donald Sutherland '70s films
• The films of Greydon Clark
• Films related to the above
• Stuff I've been wanting to write about

I'm also going to be delving into some horror spoofs from the early '80s. Wish me luck.

More than anything, I'm hoping this kicks my butt into gear with some writing I've been wanting to do outside of Cashiers du Cinemart #16. I'm off to the races.

Truther Than Strange

I don't know when I stopped writing fiction. As a kid I used to spend hours on a typewriter banging out stories of intergalactic mayhem starring a cast of anthropomorphic animals. I know that these were rip offs of other, better writers but it got my feet wet and dispelled any notions that writing was an easy task. My uncle wrote short stories in the evenings and on weekends when he wasn't teaching high school English. I think I read one or two of these but just wasn't too impressed. I confessed my dream of being a writer and he hooked me up with volumes of writers' market books. The heyday of fiction magazines had passed, yes, but a tiny market still existed and I worked to mine this vein. But, first, I needed some stories so I could start saving my rejection notes. I mean, that's what writers do, isn't it?

In middle school I penned a few tales of aliens attacking my classrooms or monsters stalking the halls but these were jokes and I knew it. I wanted to pen something more serious. And, boy, did I. I can only recall two tales that I plugged away on during that time and am rather disturbed to drum up their plots. In one of them, a man wakes up from suspended hibernation in an Antarctic research facility. I don't remember why he'd been placed in suspended hibernation but I do know he awoke alone and without any way to contact the outside world or any food. He ended up slicing off parts of himself, cooking up his tastier morsels to sustain himself as long as he could. And, wouldn't you know, as the one-armed, legless man was about to castrate himself (what fate could be worse to a boy writer?) the rescue party arrived... just a moment to late.

Compare this to the other story I remember in which a man who had wronged a woman a year before came to in her apartment, bound and sitting before a glorious banquet. You can be sure that the main course was the baby he sired. I wrote about the cooking process, the baby's white skin reddening in boiling water like a lobster's shell. Pretty sick stuff. Cannibalism, bondage, and a lot of glossing over any kind of set up by putting the main character in situations where they regained consciousness in a new, strange place. Now that's lazy writing!

Not knowing any better, I sent out these atrocious tales to several magazines and got my expected rejection notes. But, then, that's all I did. I'm of the mind that the rejection soured me on further explorations of fiction. Was I so deluded that I expected my baby/self-eating stories to run in the next Twilight Zone Magazine? Perhaps. I couldn't tell you the next time I sat down to spin a yarn that wasn't based on fact (I enrolled in a journalism class that I enjoyed with gusto... if only my teacher had enjoyed having me around!).

Despite my failure in journalism, I enjoyed writing papers and essays in high school and on into college. Once I graduated I missed writing so much that I began a zine. I never called what I wrote "stories" but "articles" as I kept them grounded in reality as much as I could. On occasion I'd sacrifice a fact for entertainment but, too often, I stuck to the inverted pyramid, delivering prose so dusty it could choke an Okie. Sure, I'd bury a lot of leads under paragraphs of personal stories or observations but, again, I wasn't spinning yarns. Fiction and I kept our distances as if we'd filed restraining orders.

Now, all those years later, I think about the few flourishes I've dappled onto my prose with fondness. I remember writing a review of a record by The Friends of Dean Martinez where I explained that it would be the perfect soundtrack to driving through the desert at night, describing the way the white lines could hypnotize as they fell into the headlights. Sure, it took inspiration from David Lynch's Lost Highway but these few sentences were as close to reconciliation as fiction and I had gotten over the years. I'd look back on these with fondness, pulling them out and polishing them up from time to time.

Just recently I ran across the book No Plot? No Problem! in which writer Chris Batty discussed National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) during which time a writer has to fire his or her inner editor and embrace the dangerous world of writing without a net (hell, without an outline or years of research!). Something about this carefree attitude, kicking off one's shoes and letting loose on a keyboard, reminded me of my early days plugging away at that noisy manual typewriter and how fun it had been to create worlds with my words.

,p> I missed fiction. I thought I'd gotten it beaten out of me but it seems it was still there, waiting in the wings to do the appreciative slow clap, joined with enthusiasm by the characters I'd created and those I have yet to dream up.

We'll Always Have Paracinema...

I'm thrilled and honored to be included in the latest issue of Paracinema magazine. My article, "Boy to Men (And Back Again)" will be featured in their seventh issue along with pieces by Adam Protextor, Todd Garbarini, James Gracey, and many more.

Pick up the issue online or visit one of these fine brick & mortar retail shops.

Metro Times Reviews

Two new reviews up in the latest Metro Times:

Dead Girl
Sex with an attractive girl with no emotional strings attached? Sounds like what dreams are made of for many dudes — just look at Craigslist. If that hot girl was actually more room temperature and discovered bound in the basement of a mental hospital, this might present a problem for some dudes ... but not all. READ MORE

Adam Resurrected
Scenes are crosscut with 1961 Adam in Tel Aviv, where he's confined to a mental institution with other Holocaust survivors. This section shifts from Patch Adams bathos to Awakenings pathos (though Robin Williams is nowhere in sight). READ MORE

If you want to keep up on reviews that I write, sign up for our RSS Feed.

Projects To-Do List

I'm making myself a to-do list to keep me sane/honest:

Video:
- A-Team fan vid here
- Doktor Kosmos music video here
- Seijun Suzuki "fan vid"
- The World Hates Paris

Writing:
- Movie review: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
- Article: Oldrich Lipsky Films
- Article - "Far East Superman" - Indian/Turkish versions of Superman
- Article - "My Pants Are Talking!" - Talking genital films
- Article - "Killer Cocks and Vicious Vaginas" - Killer genital films
- Screenplay 1 - TB VS JK
- Screenplay 2 - TLR Hucksters
- Robot porn book
- CdC Sequel book
- Article - "Boys to Men" - Body swap movies of the late '80s

Music:
- Get all of my various compilations together and re-torrent/post here

Introduction and Foreword of the CdC Book

I'm happy to announce the folks who took the time to write an Introduction and Foreword to the Cashiers du Cinemart book: Herschell Gordon Lewis and Chis Gore.

I know very few people with their own Wikipedia entries but Herchell Gordon Lewis is one of them. One of the most influential pioneers of exploitation cinema, Lewis anticipated both the "nudie cutie" (The Adventures of Lucky Pierre) and "splatter" films (Blood Feast). Some would even credit him for starting the biker film with his She-Devils on Wheels. The "Godfather of Gore" has made films about politics, fairy tales, swinging, and so much more.

And speaking of Gore (rimshot), Chris Gore should be a familiar name to readers of Cashiers du Cinemart and to film fans in general. Gore made a name for himself in the 1980s via Film Threat magazine. A fellow Michigander, Gore's written books, directed films, and hosted TV shows including a segment on G4's Attack of the Show and IFC's Ultimate Film Fanatic -- of which I was a contestant until I got booted.

That's a long story... one I wrote about in great detail in CdC #14. Now, readers will get to read the other side of the story with Gore's touching foreword to the Cashiers du Cinemart book.

I'm proud to include words by Lewis and Gore in the pages of my book. They're among some great company what with pieces by Rich Osmond, Chris Cummins, Andrew Grant, Skizz Cyzyk, Leon Chase, Michael Thompson, and Andrea White. The book also has original artwork by Nathan Kane, Jonathan Higgins, Pat Lehnerer, and Dean Stahl. With cover art by... well, let me have something to share next month. Stay tuned!

Cashiers du Cinemart Book: Table of Contents

Here's a rough swipe at the table of contents. Still pending. I made some notes about some of the changes included, though every piece has been proofed and edited for clarity and re-fact-checked. My proofreader, Lori Hubbard Higgins, did an amazing job combing through my abhorrent prose.

Introduction - By Herschell Gordon Lewis
Foreword - By Chris Gore
Features:

• A Dynamite Double Feature - CdC favorite Rich Osmond looks at some explosive '70s cinema
• Psycho Vixens - Rich Osmond examines two flicks about girls gone wild.
• Tragically Obscure: John Paizs’s (The Big) Crime Wave - Combination of two articles about Paizs by Skizz Cyzyk from CdC 9 & 10
• The Four and a Half Worlds of Parker - Updated piece (formerly "Three and a Half Worlds") which has been edited and expanded. Includes some insight from the creator of Parker, Donald Westlake
• Madness in the 20th Century - This article about Charles Willeford has been updated and tightened up
• The Serious Moonlight: The Cinematic World of David Goodis - Updated to include discussion of "Goodiscon" as well as expansion of the "Goodis on TV" section
• The Dark Places of James Ellroy - Updated to include discussion of Street Kings and L.A. Sheriff's Homicide
• The Cashiers du Cinemart Manifesto - So perfectly written, nothing could make it better
• All The Good Guys and the Bad Guys that I've Been - One of my favorite pieces from Cashiers du Cinemart, this is an appreciation of Paul Williams by Leon Chase
• The Prize is Your Life - I expanded this article to include several other "people hunting people" movies
• Oedipal Ketchip - A terrific discussion of Shuji Terayama's films by Andrew Grant
• The Highlander Returns! - Two rants from Mike Thompson about the wonder of the Highlander films. This was updated to include cuts of the films that have been made available since the early days of Cashiers du Cinemart
• Double Impact: The Duplicity of Jean-Claude Van Damme - Brand new piece that has never been published
• Lone Wolf & Cub - Edited and updated for clarity

Tarantino:

• Tale of the Tape - The whole epic story of Who Do You Think You're Fooling? and the controversy surrounding it. Updated and severely rewritten
• Ironic Press Release - My facetious discussion of You're Still Not Fooling Anybody
• Attention Enemy - Following up with the You're Still Not Fooling Anybody fun
• Tarantino in a Can - A look at Tarantino's obsession with the bathroom in his early works

Star Wars:

• The Lost Cut - Discussing the early version of Star Wars that will never see the light of day again
• Jar Jar Done Gone - How The Phantom Menace put heat behind the Fan Editing movement
• Triumph of the Whills - This piece now combines three different rants about the madness of King George Lucas
• Star Wars Documentaries - "They Came, They Saw, They Sat"

Scripts:

• 8mm - Mike Thompson compares what we saw to what Andrew Kevin Walker wrote
• The Uncredible Hulk - Another great Thompson rant, updated to include the latest incarnation of Hulk and the Ang Lee version, too
• Cat Woman - Thompson declaws this kitty
• Digging up the Bones of Indy Jones - Severely rewritten and updated version of "Jonesing for the New Indy Film" from CdC 9 that traces the trajectory of Jones through several proposed sequels
• Travis McGee & The Lonely Silver Screen - Combination of the CdC 14 and 15 articles
• Return to the Planet of the Apes - Combining observations about the POTA remake from CdC 10 and 13
• Superman: Grounded - Updated to include Superman: Doomsday and the reaction to Singer's reboot of Superman
• The Metamorphoses of Alien III - Includes additional content
• Gremlins - A thorough look at an early draft of this classic flick by Chris Cummins

Black Shampoo:

• Interview: John Daniels - Edited and updated
• Interview: Greydon Clark - Edited and updated
• Interview: Tanya Boyd - Edited and updated
• Interview: Skip E Lowe - Edited and updated
• A Few Notes on Black Shampoo - Edited and updated
• Can You Feel the Love? - Edited and updated
• DVD release - Edited and updated
• Interview: Gerald and Gary Lee - Brand new interview with the men who made the music for my favorite film

Interviews:

• Crispin Glover - Brand new, never published
• James Ellroy - Edited and updated
• Guy Maddin - Updated / Additional Content
• Monte Hellman - Edited and updated
• Richard Crawford - Edited and updated
• Taylor Negron - Edited and updated
• Svengoolie - Edited and updated
• Bruce Campbell - Edited and updated
• Keith Gordon - Edited and updated
• Dr. Demento - Edited and updated

Life:

• Theater Work Story - Highly edited and rewritten
• Fish out of Water - Andrea's reaction to the UPC in Bowling Green
• Mike & Andrea go to Breakfast - Never before published tale of woe from Andrea White
• Brendan Fraser + Monkey = Fun! - A new party game from Skizz Cyzyk

Afterword

Stay tuned to the blog or the facebook for further updates as they come!

Slamdance Screenplay Competition

The Slamdance Feature Screenplay competition Call for Entries begins today.

Slamdance is looking for unique, independent and creative voices in any and all genres.

Visit the website for details.

Grand Prize $5,000.
Write it up!

New Pieces Online

It's a good day to be me... Got a couple pieces posted today:

• Best DVD releases of 2008 by Mike White - From the Mobtown Shank
• Burn Notice - The Closest Thing to Travis McGee - From ForcesOfGeek.com

Enjoy! And be sure to Digg it if you're a power user. LOL.

Sprechen Sie Peitsche?

My research into BDSM/Fetish-related documentaries has taken me into the Land of Chocolate, Germany. I'm looking for the following flicks. If anyone has any copies/leads/advice, I'd love to get my hands on these:

• DOMINA - DIE LAST MIT DER LUST (Klaus Tuschen, 1985)
• ANNA DOMINA (Horst Schier, 1993)
• LOVE FOR SALE (TV) (Dominique Klughammer, 1999)
• PAIN IS... (Stephen Dwoskin, 1997)
• Beruf - Domina: Das Geschäft mit Lust und Peitsche (Matzner Markus, 2006)
• HERZFEUER (Thomas Bergmann & Mischka Popp, 1994)
• Gib's mir - Besuch bei einer Domina (Ines Jacob, 2006) (Short)
• Qual oder Lust? Die bizarre Welt der Dominas (TV) (2007)
• Machtspiele - Fetisch, Fesseln und Gefühle (Claudia Riemer, 2007)

And there's this one from Russia:

• Den rozhdeniya Infanty (Valeriya Gai Germanika, 2007)

Shiny Boots of Leather

I got some possible good news today. I might be a part of an upcoming journal. I know that's a pretty sketchy sentence but I don't want to give away too much and jinx it. What I can reveal is that it will involve the article I wrote on BDSM in cinema for the Metro Times a few months ago. That said, I've been spending this weekend watching various documentaries on the same subject. Some good. Some godawful.

The next few weekends between now and Thanksgiving will include many more BDSM-related films. It should be an interesting month. I'm working off a list of about a dozen titles. If you can think of anything I should check out, feel free to post a comment.

Walking Out Invalidates Opinions?

Getting a lot of flack for my review of HELL'S GROUND over on Amazon.com. The comment from director Omar Khan has been removed (something about my "charming weirdness" line) but there's an interesting response which questions the validity of a movie review from a reviewer who walked out of the screening. Apparently my opinion is only valid if I make it all the way through a film. I'm not sure if I agree with that. What kind of an obligation does a reviewer have to commit to a film with which s/he can't engage?

Indy Jones Story

As promised, I returned to my story from Cashiers du Cinemart #9 with the release of INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL. The new piece, "Digging at the Bones of Indy Jones," is featured in this week's Metro Times.

It's funny but I feel like I'm in the minority of critics with my opinion of Indy Jones 4. It's not the best film ever made, that's for sure, but my expectations were so low and it didn't slap me in the face with suckiness that I gave it a passing grade. With George Lucas behind the scenes we should all know that it could have been a lot worse.

Not Done with D/s

I've been thinking about going back and expanding my piece on D/s in film that I wrote for the Metro Times last week. I'm not done exploring the way that this has been portrayed in film and I continue to find more movies that employ it as a central theme including:

• The Piano Teacher
• The Image
• Demonlover
• Dominatrix
• The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
• Conspirators of Pleasure
• Tipping the Velvet

And more. I may just go ahead and review these flicks and post 'em here if I can't find another venue. Something to look forward to!

The State of Film Criticism

What: Panel discussion on the State of Film Criticism
Where: Tent City at the Maryland Film Festival (across from the Charles theater)
When: Sunday May 4th, 2008 in the Panel Tent
Who: Michael Sragow (Baltimore Sun), Chris Kaltenbach (Baltimore Sun), Lee Gardner (City Paper). Moderator: Mike White

Which brings us to "Why" -- Apparently there's something in the air at the moment as this discussion seems to key in well with a recent event at New York's Moving Image Institute which began an interesting dialog about this subject which I hope to follow up on during this panel discussion.

Check out some of the coverage of the event over at Shooting Down Pictures and SpoutBlog:

• MII Day One
• MII Day Two and Three
• MII Interlude
• MII Day Four and Five

Compare the above to some of the speaking points I have jotted down (some may be cryptic but they make sense to me):

• DIY criticism (blogs, imdb, amazon, forums, epinions, etc.)
• Salon versus AICN
• Magazines as collectibles (Lost, Dr Who, Star Trek, etc.)
• Distribution systems suck. Are Magazines/journals on their last legs?
• Books (tie ins, biographies, film guides, scripts, a few actual attempts at re-viewing. Intentional hyphen.)
• Cheapening the "Brand" (continuity mistakes and Easter eggs, Top ten lists)
• Criticism versus reviews versus theory versus semantic masturbation
• Confusion of film reviews versus film criticism. Thumbs aren't theories.

Now that I know who the folks on the panel are, I'm going to have to do a little research. I've had the pleasure of listening to Kaltenbach in the past when he's introduced Sunday Movies at the Charles and I don't think he views himself as "Critical Royalty," but I'll be curious to ask him and the others about their attitudes when it comes to plebeian film reviewers.

I'm pretty sure that I fit into that category though I feel that I'm more in a grey area between the bloggers and the floggers, that I was in my little zine ghetto for so long that I missed the populist revolution while still in the mindset of "Kill Yr Idols" where I rejected many of the pillars of the film criticism pantheon while trying to hoe my own row. That's not to say that my bookshelves aren't littered with works by Gerald Peary, Molly Haskell, Andrew Sarris, etc. (three of the speakers at the MII event). There are writers whose works I enjoy, those who I respect, and even those who fit into both categories. I just never felt beholden to the Paulene Kaels of the world (though I'll hand it to the gal for also disliking SHOAH).

It's ironic that only now, after all these years, I finally have started to set my sights on trying to fit in with the misfits. I made a list of the few magazines who are still kicking and whose work I respect. I dropped them all a copy of Cashiers du Cinemart #15 and a cover letter asking about lending my pen to their pages. So far, the return tally has been exactly one. I'm hoping to hear from more of these fine rags soon though I have the fear that, like with CineAction and Shiznit.co.uk that I'll be too lowbrow for one publication but too highbrow for another. I need to find me a few good "midbrow" magazines who'll love my assbackwards awkward style.

Getting My Act Together

Maybe it's that Spring is finally in the air in Michigan. I'm finally getting my act together. I've been writing down some of the ideas I've had knocking around in my noggin for months (years?) and attempting to bring them to fruition.

Along with this, I've been asked to host a panel at the Maryland Film Festival on "The State of Film Criticism". Rather than just shooting from the hip (my usual modus operandi), I'm actually coming up with some (get this) "speaking points". How fucking professional is that, huh? "Speaking points." Yeah, I said it!

I went over to Borders today to look at the state of their film criticism books. It's a sad state. The film section -- three shelves wide -- consists of three subsections; criticism, star biographies, film guides. Yet, even these aren't as "pure" as their titles suggest. All three are sullied by quickie tie-in products, biographies of marginally-related "stars", and other effluvia. Worse, the criticism section is nearly just that. What's sorely lacking is film theory. The two aren't mutually exclusive and often go hand in hand. Apart from one book of collected essays, there was little that even smacked of film theory.

Despite my attempt to stop buying books, I picked up a few tomes (online, they weren't available at Borders) that may be the modern equivalent of film theory. Reviews sure to come.