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As Papers Lose Their Voices, so go Their Lives
Film critics have been getting whacked lately like they're in the third act montage of a "Godfather" film...BAM-BAM-BAM. They're going down with an unforgiving ferocity that spells danger not just to the craft of film criticism but to print journalism as a whole. Why? Because the local film critic has always been symbolic of the individuality of the American newspaper and magazine.
The latest victim is the stylish and tough Glenn Whipp of the Los Angeles Daily News. He was preceded in the gangland slayings by some other superb writers: Glenn Kenney at Premiere (who, by the way, gave me my share of metaphorical prison rapings when he wrote about my films), Carina Chocano, and Kevin Thomas at the Los Angeles Times, Jonathan Rosenbaum at the Chicago Reader and, well the list does sort of go on and on.
When I was a kid, my heroes were not baseball players nor movie stars. My knights in shining armor were film critics. Sounds crazy, I know. But that's the way it was with me. I loved going to the movies, especially when I was a teenager in the seventies. How couldn't you in what was perhaps the greatest era of auteur cinema? Going to the movies was what the cool kids did back then. It therefore held that those who were getting paid to do so had to be the coolest people on Earth.
Every weekend from, like, 1974 to 1978, I'd trudge over to the Greenwich library, which gathered up almost every major newspaper in the country. I would sit there all day long and read and read and read the reviews. I remember being twelve or thirteen and writing to Judith Crist, Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert. They were all non-pretentious mensches who wrote me back, humoring me.
I came to the conviction that film criticism in and of itself was an art. Kael's sentences, almost every one of them, were little grammatical dances that shimmied and curtsied and sometimes impaled. Her writing was its own creature - something acrobatic, something that had never been done before. Her style was as influential to writers after her as Faulkner or Tom Wolfe were. Kael's bi-weekly column was something to anticipate, something you set time aside to go through. It was appointment reading.
Roger Ebert, even at a very young age, wrote with a kind of home-spun wisdom. He was (and is) straight and direct and delivered his opinions with humor and efficiency and he always had a prediction of exactly what you might experience watching a certain film. Sometimes, like with early Scorcese (his new book about the director is splendid), he'd get behind a film you wouldn't expect and it would get you thinking. More importantly, it would get you to the theater.
Ebert was the best to determine if you should go to a film. Kael was better to read after having seen the movie.
There were plenty of others I looked up to. Rex Reed made me laugh. He still does. John Simon was so cruel that he made the reader seem like a co-conspirator in his lacerations. Charles Champlain was professorial and elegant and you always felt more educated after reading him. Stanley Kauffman was somber and serious and took the whole craft so seriously that he made you realize that cinema - which our parents always regarded as frivolous - was high art indeed.
All these critics worked either for a magazine or a newspaper. They each had a voice. A voice that was as unique as the voices of the filmmakers they wrote about. And that voice translated into being the voice of the newspaper or magazine for whom they worked.
Here is Pauline Kael on "Street Smart":
"Morgan Freeman may be the greatest American actor in movies. He gives the role of a Times Square pimp, Fast Black, a scary, sordid magnetism that gives the picture some bite. Magically, he sustains Fast Black's authenticity; it's like sustaining King Lear inside GIDGET GOES HAWAIIAN."
Roger Ebert on "Taxi Driver":
"'Taxi Driver' shouldn't be taken as a New York film; it's not about a city but about the weathers of a man's soul, and out of all New York he selects just those elements that feed and reinforce his obsessions."
Vincent Canby on "Gandhi" and its Oscar chances:
"To honor a film like 'Gandhi,' a perfectly reverent if unexceptional film, they are paying their dues to the race (human), certifying their instincts (good) and also the belief that movies about worthy subjects can make money."
Here is Jonathan Rosenbaum on my first little film "Deterrence" (He's misunderstanding my intentions, but, bless him, the guy knew how to get a point across):
"Foreigners who argue that Americans are Neanderthal savages can point to this movie as persuasive evidence."
Newspapers have been in a downward spiral for close to a decade now (I blame Craigslist most of all. Classified ads have always been a major source of income for newspapers - but no more). In order to cut costs, management goes first to critics - a bit like how schools slash arts programs. There is something they do not take seriously about them. They find them easily replaceable or, maybe, not needed to be replaced.
When these newspapers and magazines fire the Whipps and the Kenneys and the Wilmingtons, they are hurrying their own demise by cutting out one of the very things that makes them unique: the voice that often prompts people buy the newspaper in the first place (the same thing applies to another budget-slashing victim: the political cartoonist).
You know, it used to be that somebody would say, "I heard that such and such a newspaper loved or hated a movie." That's silly, of course. The newspaper's critic - not the paper itself - loved or hated a film. But because that critic was so identified with the publication, it served the same purpose.
There is hope I suppose. There are several critics I still love to read (I admit, some of the internet guys are pretty good). But, it's not like it used to be - which breaks my heart.
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Rod's paean to critics is written by a bright insider who's too polite to raise another issue that many of us know about from our experience as critics (hi, Rod; we used to sit together at press junkets), and that's pressure from the advertising department. Consider this: Of all journalists who publish opinions in newspapers -- sports columnists, editorial writers, lifestyle columnists, gossip columnists, op-ed writers -- only critics write about advertisers. You don't find newspapers panning supermarkets, furniture stores, car dealerships, or department stores, do you? In fact, you'll seldom find investigative news reports about those industries. Sports franchises, politicians, and celebrities don't advertise, so they're fair game. So that leaves critics -- primarily film critics, because that's the industry that buys the most lineage -- uniquely vulnerable to advertiser pressure. When times are good, publishers can tell angry movie advertisers to go pound celluloid. In tough times, however, opinions are a liability, and therefore those who offer them are considered a business liability.
I would assume most large papers would have done a study as to why their papers sell and to whom before they fire any daily feature. We're all trimming the fat today. And there will surely be the endless complaints to those fat-trimming choices. This appears to be one of them.
See Thelma Adams's Profile
You may be assuming too much. That's the platonic ideal of newspapers -- that they cut the fat and leave the bone and muscle. But consider this alternative: highly compensated managers and editors can cut away revenue-producing elements to preserve their seats on the Titanic.
I have all ideas you're correct. If I had my drothers; upper managerial pay cuts. Then complete nonsense like horoscopes and "advice" columns would go. But I don't run the papers.
As you say, it is a "Titanic" like situation though.
See Thelma Adams's Profile
Whenever I go to a new place, the first thing I do is grab the local papers to get a sense of where I am -- whether it's Toronto or Tulsa. Sure, I look at the crime blotters first (in my area in upstate NY, it's all about the DUI), but I always check out the culture coverage and, particularly, the film reviews. I think communities respond, well, communally, to movies. It's a joint reaction even if the folks aren't all sitting in the same movie theater at the same time. So, if the local paper is running AP critics writing about movies, and offering a top ten list dominated by movies that only played in the area for a week, it's not serving its base -- and thus becomes increasingly irrelevant. Local advertising is tied to local content -- so there should be a multiplicity of local voices talking about film, and art, theater, and books. And, on a completely different note, as Rod pointed out in his quotes from legendary critics, film criticism can be a literary art form where voice, knowledge and insight interact, and a great review should be just as entertaining, if not more so,t han the movie reviewed.
This applies to nearly all media. Almost all you learn about film now is which ones made the most money over the weekend. Pretty much the same approach as to how they cover politics, now that I think about it.
I think the "death" of newspaper film criticism is the result of several forces. Originally, newspapers were the main source of information, and films were only shown in a few theaters, with the major releases slowly working from the big cities to the rest of the country. In the mid-Seventies, releasing movies in hundreds, and then thousands of screens, became the norm, lessening the need for a local critic. With the internet and television becoming most peoples sources of news, that has impacted the newspaper. Also with DVDs and streaming video, that has altered the way people see films. Many of the films that I see and write about have not even been given theatrical releases in the US or may have only been seen in film festivals.
Well done, Rod. Living in LA it has been sad to watch the Times decline, firing staff and cutting back on their local coverage. I used to go to the Calendar (Arts)section first...no more. I believe you worked for the LA Weekly early on--they're the only real investigative journalism going on in LA now. I know once I get past the massage parlor and cosmetic surgery ads.
By the way, one of the greatest experiences of my life was your film class series in Burbank and all the great writers/actors/directors you had as guests for Q and A after screenings: Charlton Heston, Michael Caine, Martin Sheen, Robert Towne, Jon Voight, etc....Favorite memory was during the Q and A someone seriously tried to shill his real estate representation onto Heston. I miss that and your weekly radio show but am glad for your subsequent success.
For those who don' t know..Rod used to bet his radio guests they'd win an Oscar and if they did they'd have to thank him at the awards ceremony. Mel Gibson did win and thanked Rod..most viewers were "who?"..and the other critics were groaning and pissing themselves.
Interesting!
Silly me.
I thought newspapers were dying because they stopped printing news
And because their reporters stopped investigating for truth.
I'd blame Bob Woodward, who gets a paycheck from the Washington Post.
Bob never investigates anything anymore until he gets a book deal. And a huge advance.
That's why I think newspapers are dying.
Some of their employees have succumbed to greed, and forgotten journalism.
Rod, thank you for this. I often feel like a voice in the wilderness. The tides are shifting quickly these days. It's worth being grateful for what we have had in US for such a long time. A rich, vibrant, endlessly creative and seemingly unlimited artistic vision to help us steer our society. The 70's which I grew up in also, were a feast for movies, books, music and ideas. What we've moved into since then is thinner, weaker, colder, and often feels made with an agenda to dumb down, and wear down, instead of what our hearts yearn for, which is inspiration and joy. I recently saw Changeling, which I was excited about, being a long time Eastwood fan. I was treated to children being chopped up with an axe? For the holidays? Help! August Rush, that was more like it. Here's to Roger Ebert and Charles Champlain, and the illuminating voices of our day.
I stopped reading papers when they stopped covering the news- same for TV.
If you read most American newspapers for a decade you would hardly know that a whole world exists beyond the borders of the US. You also would never hear anything of 95% of our nation unless their was a mass murder, fire or some other useless yellow journalism bait laying around.
Janine Melnitz: You're very handy, I can tell. I bet you like to read a lot, too.
Dr. Egon Spengler: Print is dead.
Janine Melnitz: Oh, that's very fascinating to me. I read a lot myself. Some people think I'm too intellectual but I think it's a fabulous way to spend your spare time. I also play raquetball. Do you have any hobbies?
Dr. Egon Spengler: I collect spores, molds, and fungus.
Lurie wrote a lovely obit. I also used to study their critiques and opinions and placed great value in them.
Yes and no. For the LA Times to drop even one of its film critics verges on criminal (and Chocano is superb.) for a small city paper, where the major industry is something else, maybe farming, it's not such a big deal. The papers subscribe to various wire services and can almost always get a much higher quality of film criticism from them than they can from their own staff. it's far more important for local readers to have the local economic, education and political news than to have locally-written criticism. One hopes the editors will have the good sense to choose reviews of movies which are currently or about to be in town.
Craigslist is not entirely to blame. There are many competitors for the advertising dollar, and many editors have great failings in judgment, like emphasizing trendiness and glitz over serious reporting. instead of vainly trying to compete with television, they should have decided years ago to do what they do best-- give readers background information.
When I was a teenager, I remember being thrilled to get the Friday paper, and thumbing to the Entertainment section to see what "grades" the movies got. Even if I disagreed with their score or felt they pilloried one of my favorite actors, it was still an engaging game that set my brain abuzz.
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