I’ve contributed so much for Blu-ray.com over the years.
They took me on as a pure news editor/writer, and then I graduated to writing features, interviewing filmmakers, and cataloguing weekly sales trends.
It’s a lot. No BD.
Feel free to call me a hero.
I'm most proud of these, my weekly "This Week on Blu-ray" columns. Initially just a round-up of the week's biggest hits, I've managed to turn this promotional tool into genuine film criticism. Any given week is an opportunity to thematically or subtextually link a number of new releases. And I started a trend: only after I set this standard did I notice the good folks at the New York Times and RogerEbert.com start expanding their home-video sections into more detailed commentary.
The Blu-ray.com news archive is a little hard to navigate, but I was able to isolate all 322 of my columns in one (seventeen-part) search result HERE.
The best interview experience I ever had. Landis was a challenge - he doesn’t suffer fools well, and he initially didn’t cotton to my trying to pivot away from Three Amigos into even more underrated corners of his corner (I perpetually stan Into the Night) - but I loved the prickly back and forth between us. When I mentioned his great reference book Monsters in the Movies, the whole interview shifted; Landis lit up, and he went ten minutes over our scheduled time as we happily discussed monster makeup of yesteryear.
You can read the full piece HERE.
If John Landis was my most challenging interview, filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich was the most sheerly pleasurable. Bogdanovich remains a living font of film history (for better and worse: dig Vulture’s alternatively fascinating/horrifying recent profile HERE), and you need to do very little to get him spinning yarns.
We were scheduled for fifteen minutes; we ended up talking for thirty-five minutes.
Check out the full piece HERE.
I’m deeply ambivalent about junket tours. The studio will fly you out to some fabulous location at huge expense to themselves, put you up in a four-star hotel with a healthy per diem…and then expect you to submit some overly adulatory write-up where Everything Is Good and Nothing Is Bad.
As such, it’s hard to generate content that doesn’t read as staged or forced, but I’m proud of my Pixar Canada reporting HERE for the following reasons:
1) The technical information is genuinely interesting, particularly when I’m grilling animation veteran Rob Gibbs about the ins and outs of short-film production.
2) I stumbled into some actual journalism when then-Vice President & General Manager Amir Nasrabadi admitted Pixar mainly started this Vancouver satellite to take advantage of tax credits; I still vividly recall how then-Chief Technology Officer Darwyn Peachey immediately launched into spin so as to mitigate Nasrabadi’s remarks.
3) Pixar Canada is no longer with us, a fact which makes this whole high-priced endeavor seem all the more foolhardy, and thus more interesting; they were willing to break the bank on something that wouldn’t exist less than a decade later.
4) The best part of the junket, though? When I returned to the hotel, I met Jackie Brown’s Robert Forster in the bar. He was shooting some movie, and I bought him a drink. We talked for much longer than I would have ever expected about cinema and his career - he couldn’t have been more gracious and lovely.