In 2014, I decided I’d start writing about other people’s movies. The fully detailed story of how this now-forty-something white man got to such an adolescent wish-fulfillment place would only be interesting to him and take hours and at least two psychiatric specialists to explain properly. The shortened version will have to suffice.
Movies have been my primary focus for most of my life. Preparing myself for making movies by watching endless streams of them while forever socially retarding myself is how I have spent most of my life. They are an escape, sure, but I always found them to be more of a filter through which I can view reality and a guide to get me through my toughest moments.
Movies flash through my mind whenever something significant happens in my life to help me make sense of it. If I get hounded by a group of bullies while walking to my car at night, I flash to John Wick 3, grab the nearest book I can find, and beat their asses to death with it. Not really, but you get what I’m trying to say. It’s more like when I’m stuck behind a bar pouring drinks for a living and getting cussed out by an entitled sixty-year-old, Tim Robbins’ voice might enter my head and start telling me about all the wonders of hope.
I’ve also spent a good portion of my life writing my own movies and trying to get them made. After realizing very early on that no one was going to give me funding without having done anything first, I racked up credit card debt and self-financed three (almost literally) nothing-budget features and countless nothing-budget shorts, music videos, promos, and sketches. After over ten years of work, I have nothing to show for it but the work itself and the experience of having made it. Maybe I wasn’t lucky enough or maybe I’m just not that good at what I do. It’s taken me years to get to this place, but I’m fine with whatever the reality may be.
When I decided I’d proven what I could do with no money, I vowed to never go no-budget again. I would only seek out financing for my future projects, which lead me, like Laura Palmer before me, to go nowhere fast. Something that I loved became synonymous with frustration and disappointment. Getting money to make any movie isn’t easy, but it’s especially difficult without any commercial track record, and even more so when the projects you’re trying to get funded aren’t exactly brimming with commercial potential (my dark comedy about a sex-addicted children’s show host who becomes a prostitute’s bodyguard has yet to be made, but I’m open to offers!)
I was making my second attempt at living in L.A. in 2014 when ruptured discs in my back rendered me immobile for the majority of three years. I had to return to my hometown in Ohio (where I still am), very far from where I felt I needed to be in order to chase my tail trying to find anyone to finance my next movie. I was then 35 with no prospects and no hope of ever accomplishing my goals. Instead of becoming an even more obnoxious version of the Oscar-hating, Hollywood-bashing, entitled wannabe, and bitter old man that I’d already become, I decided to keep loving movies. This was difficult, however, because, around this time, I pushed myself to make what would be my third and (hopefully) final nothing-budget feature. Given my handicap and my lack of financial security, this venture was all kinds of emotional stress and physical hell that I truly didn’t need.
Later in 2014, I privately wrote some essays and reviews about other people’s movies. Doing this helped me escape my pains and the seemingly impossible hurdles I was facing. I felt a new path in my life could develop from it or, maybe, it could make my movies better. Either way, all my frustrations with filmmaking and my personal life would slip away when I focused on others’ cinematic works. It was an outlet that I sorely I needed.
That’s the short version of my beginning. The long version is littered with drugs, mental illness, broken relationships, dangerous sex, and moments of uncomfortable violence—and no one is interested in hearing about all that.
After writing film essays and reviews on my own for a while, I eventually answered an ad for the website, Taste of Cinema. TOC’s response was positive and the site’s owner liked my ideas. I was astounded that someone actually wanted to pay me (very little money) to create “best of” lists that compiled movie titles bound by a specific person or theme. The hydrocodone/muscle relaxer combo I was on and off during the year-and-a-half I wrote for TOC didn’t always make me the best writer but I, at least, had something to focus on outside of my own head and my own problems. Whatever long-winded flair or glaring factual/grammatical errors I find in those lists today, I’m truly grateful for my time with TOC.
While writing for TOC, I got to see my lists shared in David Lynch Facebook groups, commented upon on Twitter by James Gunn and Matthew Modine (Vision Quest, guys!), and shared by Tony Kaye and Daniel Waters (he wrote Heathers!) on their Facebook walls. TOC also helped introduce me to writer/director Allison Burnett, about whom I would later write an in-depth retrospective. For TOC, I wrote sincerely about admiring many filmmakers’ work and, through the wonders of social media, I actually got to witness some of those filmmakers enjoy it. The fact that some of the people I so heavily admired actually read something I wrote made my fragile/hungry little ego soar. But, to paraphrase Juliette Lewis in Cape Fear, reality eventually came crashing in. I was still a failed filmmaker/screenwriter living with chronic pain at his mother’s house in Ohio. It helped to see some of my heroes comment on my hero worship but it wasn’t exactly paying my bills or getting my foot into any doors that existed outside of my head.
Also, I didn’t have a lot of control over what I was writing about on TOC, as I had to appease the site’s owner on the content of each list and how they were ordered and titled (God bless him, it was his site). I had also run out of steam towards the end of my run and I realized that I was just creating lists so I could force the movies I really wanted to be writing about onto them. So, I started my own site, Other People’s Movies, in 2018. I told myself that it was to have more control over my writing but, honestly, I thought it could be a way to bring in some extra revenue (which currently feels like another unrealistic goal amongst a lifetime of unrealistic goals).
In the name of staying topical and building up content for the then-infant site, I took advantage of one of the perks of my then-job of bartending at a movie theater and saw all the new movies for free so I could review them. I kept up as best as I could, but it soon became exhausting seeing and writing about every movie that came out. It, once again, turned something I loved into frustrating work. I again found myself in a position that I didn’t want to be in and, as usual, no one was putting me there but myself. After months of writing about every new movie I could see, I came to a conclusion about myself as a critic: it’s far easier to write a bad review than it is a good one, but it’s far more motivating to write about a movie about which I’m passionate. Bad reviews are fun to write but they’re also rather guilt-inducing when you know firsthand about all the effort and pain it takes to complete a movie. I’ve ripped apart plenty of titles (and had fun doing so) but I always feel better about the ones I celebrate.
Besides, Brie Larson has a point. Does the world really need another forty-year-old white guy shoving his opinion down your throat on the latest that cinema has to offer? If I have a place in film criticism, it’s in shedding light on the select, often obscure films that I fall in love with. It’s not in seeing and reviewing every movie in existence. Critics don’t get to be choosy about what they write about, especially if they’re trying to get paid. To put it simply, writing about everything I could made me lose focus on why I was doing it. There are far too many movies being made today to keep up with and trying to do so only flattens the experience of the great ones. To quote Danny Glover in Silverado, “that ain’t right.”
So, here we are. I’ve reviewed hundreds of movies, I’m still poor and in Ohio and, though I still write screenplays, I have currently given up on making my own films. Time will tell if that ever changes. Writing about other people’s movies has kept my passion for film simmering and given me back my creative juju. For both those things, I am forever grateful.
From now on, I want to write about the movies that I want to see. I want to see fewer movies so I can give the ones I care about the time, repeat viewings, and observation they deserve. As much as I love writing about them, I need to get my head out of my cinema-overdosed ass and stop viewing the world through the lens of other people’s movies. To better myself as a person and as a writer, I need to start paying attention to the world outside of movies. I want to read books, travel, talk to people, and see things I haven’t seen on a movie or television screen. Eventually, I’d like to think that maybe I can live a life with my own thoughts in my head, where quotes or scenes from other people’s movies don’t constantly surface to overcome the reality that’s trying to take place right in front of my eyes.
So, with that, I take a deep breath, look into the camera, and slowly exhale while peacefully saying the following: “I want to live a real life.”*
*Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky. Great movie, guys! See it if you haven’t!
