A Word from the Man Behind the Curtain

Back in January, 2011 was looking to be a very good year indeed. I had just fin­ished com­piling the votes for the inaug­ural CAST Awards and was pleased with the level of participation.

In March, I was flattered to be included on a panel on online film cri­ti­cism among such exalted com­pany as long­time film critics Adam Nayman and Jason Anderson and film­maker Margaux Williamson. You can listen to us bat the sub­ject around for almost two hours, if you like.

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In May, I was con­tacted to talk about Toronto Screen Shots for a blog­ging con­fer­ence and the result is the video you can see above.

My con­fid­ence was rising, which helped because, also in May, I quit a very luc­rative job. It was the first time I’d ever left a job with nothing else lined up already. Maybe I thought the film busi­ness was waiting to wel­come me with open arms.

It wasn’t.

In the midst of a very tough job search, I was at least for­tu­nate enough to be able to attend a number of press screen­ings, and enjoyed the deep­ening camaraderie with a number of col­leagues, people writing about film on both a paid and unpaid basis. It was at this point when I prob­ably should have hustled a bit more.

Personal aside: I’ve never been par­tic­u­larly good at “tooting my own horn.” I sup­pose this could be par­tially respons­ible for my zig-zagging career tra­jectory. I’ve been happy to be a jack-of-all-trades gen­er­alist in the belief that it makes me a more “inter­esting” person. So while I believe I’m pretty good at most everything I try, I’m not con­fident enough to scream, “hey, look at me! I’m awesome!”

I began to notice a few of my blog­ging friends picking up paid writing gigs, and privately I was a bit envious. But instead of asking them how they did it, I con­tinued to sit back and wait for others to come to me. When they didn’t, I reasoned that maybe I just wasn’t good enough, or that I really didn’t want it enough.

I do think both those things are true, by the way. Not that that can’t change.

The web is a won­derful thing, and I’ve been for­tu­nate to have been riding the wave of internet pub­lishing (“blog­ging”) since pretty close to the begin­ning. But I’ve increas­ingly felt out of sorts with the way the Internet has enabled the most obsessive among us to suc­ceed. Remember, I’m a gen­er­alist. Even among some of my dearest film blogger friends, many of whom are a gen­er­a­tion younger than me, I feel at once less ser­ious about film and yet more con­nected to the rest of the world. I feel inferior and superior at the same time.

So I began trying to figure out what I wanted Toronto Screen Shots to be. I knew from the very begin­ning that I didn’t want it to be a “movie news” site, trying to break stories about the casting or budget of the latest block­busters. I prefer to focus on reviews. But even keeping up with the new releases each year, whether the­at­ric­ally or on DVD, has become next to impossible for me.

It could be simply my age catching up to me, or maybe the pace of life really has accel­er­ated, but I find myself unable to keep drinking from the fire­hose of media, espe­cially when so many other out­lets are doing a fine job of it already.

My aims for begin­ning this site were pretty straight­for­ward: I wanted to become a more know­ledge­able cinephile, and a better writer about film. I also wanted to share films that needed more exposure with an audi­ence, how­ever big or small. I’ve tried to write more about doc­u­ment­aries, or for­eign films, or films that are not new.

I think I’ve gotten away from that over the past year or two, as the pro­file of film blogs has allowed more of us access to press screen­ings and DVD review copies. As the industry’s need to keep feeding us new product to sell over­whelmed my own need to deepen my appre­ci­ation for film, I think Toronto Screen Shots lost its way a little bit.

Another problem is that smaller film fest­ivals which used to realize a huge benefit from online cov­erage (Toronto After Dark, Reel Asian, Cinefranco, European Union Film Festival) no longer really depend on me the way I used to think they did. Out of loy­alty, I have kept trying to cover them, and this year in par­tic­ular, I feel that I failed.

Back in the summer when I was riding high, I applied for TIFF accred­it­a­tion for the very first time. When that didn’t come through (along with my rejec­tion for mem­ber­ship in the OFCS, received around the same time), my con­fid­ence took a hit, but in hind­sight, I’m glad I wasn’t thrown into that mael­strom. It’s clear to me that I need to slow down, to cut back, to reflect more.

The online envir­on­ment has room for all kinds of writing. I’m dis­ap­pointed that per­cep­tions of film blog­ging seem so tilted toward block­busters, toward dis­cus­sions of box office num­bers, toward only the newest films. That kind of cov­erage will be as dis­pos­able online as it is in print.

So I hope you’ll bear with me as I try to realign Toronto Screen Shots with what my ori­ginal goals were back in 2007. I hope that freeing myself from the “fire­hose” will break the crip­pling writer’s block I’ve been feeling for the past few months.

Maybe when I get my (modest) mojo back, I’ll actu­ally start asking if any­body out there wants me to write for them. Stay tuned.

Note: I tried to find inform­a­tion about the images used in this post but was unable to. If you are the copy­right owner, please con­tact me should you want the images removed or proper credits attached.

Tagged as: apologia, manifesto