That’s the part that really sucks to admit. I’m kept on a few PR e-mail lists and get a BCC every so often with pre-release screenings for editorial consideration, so I can go pitch people or ask around if someone needs something reviewed.
While at Current, I tried my hand at running the (now defunct) current_movies blog. It’s a fucking bitch, man.
I know, “how hard is it to blog?" Well, first you need to have a set number of posts. Three doesn’t sound like a lot, does it? But what if you want to get actual traffic instead of just rewriting a story from Variety? What if you want to make a list or a timely editorial? Blogging well is incredibly difficult, especially if you’re the de-facto “editor" and trying to convince other people who are working on other projects to give you 20 minutes of their time to make something worth posting.
And it’s never five minutes or 30 seconds—it always takes a while.
So when you get a press release about something, it’s an instant post. Maybe you can link back to an old post and churn that hit count up to inflate your SEO. But here comes the suckiest part of being a movie blogger: you have to know what you’re doing.
Yes, you can be catty and a sarcastic asshole, but what if you don’t know about the history of Herzog and Kinski? What if you didn’t attend Sundances ‘90 through ‘04 and need to write about how historic Sundance 2010 is? Did you not see White Dog before? What’s a Criterion?
Roughly 60 percent of the people who blog commercially on film don’t know shit about it. They make it up, they bow to studios and they slobber like rabid fucking animals for an early peek at Scott Pilgrim. They will turn on their friends and they forget their squabbles if it means a false sense of solidarity.
I watched this happen twice. First after I wrote a list about another writer and second at Sundance earlier this year when I gave away a scene from some generic sci-fi horror film on Twitter. I stayed up to work on a few things in my hotel room and found certain movie bloggers bashing my “professionalism" for “giving away the entire film" in one tweet. Trust me, I didn’t even mention the worst of the film.
But for the next two days in Park CIty I dealt with people who would refuse to talk to me because they questioned my “professionalism" and—according to a second-hand source—tried to get my credentials revoked for 2010 and for the future. It got so annoying I refused to wear my credentials while walking around and would talk to people about other breakout films there—Lovers of Hate, Restrepo, Enter the Void, Catfish—and when asked if I knew about “the asshole who ruined Splice" I’d say I didn’t.
"Oh," a guy in a hotel bar said, “he apparently gave away the entire film. Just went on twitter and spoiled every scene in the movie. And then he kept doing it! I hope he gets fired for whoever he works for. I think he writes for…I don’t know. Someone said he was a New York guy."
Suffice to say, weeks later these same people went back to normal as if I was just another guy. Nothing changed. But it reflects this weird sense of pack mentality the “movie blogger" elite has when “something is bad."
I mean, fuck, most of the guys undersigned on the letter at The Wrap? They blackmailed the shit out of studios in the old days. Nothing’s new here.
Also, the pay is shit and the coffee is old.